Blogs

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Karine Barzilai-Nahon, who shifts our interest to network gatekeeping theory. Online, users can become gatekeepers, and are no longer simply being gatekept for - so gatekeeping power has shifted to some extent; additionally, gatekeeping is no longer a solid state, but is becoming a much more dynamic phenomenon where we're sometimes gatekeeping ourselves, sometimes receiving the results of gatekeeping processes.

Gatekeeping theory was developed by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s, observing food habits in families (and seeing housewives as gatekeepers at that time); this was later applied in a major way to the editors in news publications, who control what information is selected for publication from all the daily events. Other applications are the management of technology (what new technologies reach a larger range of users) and information science (already starting to look at the role of communities as gatekeepers).

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is László Ropolyi. He begins by conceptualising the idea of crisis: this is a kind of transformation in which an established system loses its integrity and gets disorganised, from which a new system emerges - a process of disorganisation followed by reorganisation. In a society without crisis, in other words, there is a usual order of events, a universal and dominant organising principle expressed in a commonly held ideology, style, or paradigm. In case of crisis, these usual organising principles lose their power and are invalidated.

Milwaukee.
OK, I'm in the next session at AoIR 2009, and Michael Blanchard makes a start by introducing Foucault's idea of governmentality. He believes that Deleuze's statement that we now live in societies of control is problematic - the societies of discipline that Foucault has introduced have been replaced with societies of control, but there was never an idea that there was a clear succession from sovereignty to discipline to control; these three were always a triangle.

Digital media amplify disciplinary power; the use of digital media carves out the individual as a more identifiable reality, as is evident when we consider the use of databases. Governmentality, by contrast, pertains to a mode of power that produces populations, the body which it works over is more virtual. There is still a political anatomy of detail (which is what discipline is described as), but governing produces from this a very different body with a more virtual presence.

Milwaukee.
The second keynote here at AoIR 2009 is by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. She begins by noting the theme of this conference, Internet: Critical, which she says brilliantly captures the trajectory of the Internet thus far. If television is intimately linked to catastrophe, then the Net finds its justification, temporality, and crisis in crisis itself, in the critical - it is a crisis / critical machine. But the Net has not ended theory, or the need for theory, if we see theory as a way to resolve crisis, but spread theory everywhere. It has made ubiquitous (and thus banal) networks, which themselves depend on how they are imagined.

Milwaukee.
The next presentation at AoIR 2009 is by Hallvard Moe, who begins by noting that the public sphere is still a useful concept It exposes us to expressions, opinions, and perspective we would not otherwise have chosen in advance, and provides a range of common experiences for citizens. But how do online media impinge on this - do they segment and polarise the public sphere (as suggested by people like Cass Sunstein), or provide more connections between and access to different ideas (as per Yochai Benkler's networked public sphere)?

Milwaukee.
The final speaker this morning at AoIR 2009 is my PhD student Tim Highfield, who focusses on the French blogosphere and uses much the same methodology as in our joint paper. His work focusses on a dataset of French blog and mainstream news media posts from some 450 sites throughout 2009, and out of this identifies what events and topics are driving discussion. Sites in his sample were identified through searches on relevant search engines as well as on specialist blog aggregators such as the French Linkfluence.

Overall, this particular study, which focusses on blogs, now takes in some 23000 posts from 148 active blogs over 221 days, out of some 165,000 posts when you also include the mainstream news media. Because the French political environment is multi-party, these blogs cluster into a number of groupings, rather than just a broad 'left' and 'right' category.

Milwaukee.
OK, I'm up next at AoIR 2009, as part of a blog concept mapping double-header with my brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield. Here's the Powerpoint - hope the audio recording works out, too... and the audio is attached now, too.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Australia, Utegate, blogs, bushfires, mapping, politics
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, Australia, Utegate, blogs, bushfires, mapping, politics

Milwaukee.
The next speakers in the blogging session at AoIR 2009 are Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Priscilla Ringrose, whose focus is on war blogging. Such blogging addresses the exceptional communication demands during war situations, and war bloggers in warzones can meet these needs speedily and with authority. This also reflects a continuing shift in the media overall. The focus of this paper is on the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, where western media profiled (English-language) Israeli and Lebanese blogs.

So, the bloggers here belonged to two oppossing, warring nations,and espoused different ideological positions; how were they chosen and what positions do they reflect? What demographics, structural features, thematic, regional, and political positioning do they exhibit? According to which parameters were they selected? The study analysed all posts from 40 blogs (20 Israeli, 20 Lebanese) during the 34-day war in June and August 2006, which were found using search engines, media outlets, and blogs. Blogs had to be based in Lebanon or Israel, had to have at least five posts during the 34 days, had to be in English, had to have at least one hit in the global media, and had to be single- or group-authored rather than blog fora.

Milwaukee.
Relief: my stomach seems to be the right way up again, and the horrible headache from yesterday is gone, too. Just in time for the second day at AoIR 2009, which begins with the blogs session that has both my paper (with Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai) and Tim's paper in it. More on those soon, but we begin the morning with Anders Larsson, who provides a review of current research on blogs and blogging. Technorati has now indexed some 133 million blogs since 2002, and there has been wide research interest in blogs as well - from a focus on politics in blogs to communication processes among individuals and more recently an interest in the organisational and professional uses of blogs.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker for this session at AoIR 2009 is Michael Dick, who focusses on the idea of Web science as political economy. This builds on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of Web Science, which applies especially computer science approaches to the study of the Web's evolution, design, and operation, with an aim of understanding and 'managing' the Web. The majority of these ideas, however, are the Semantic Web in disguise, Michael says.

This assumes a continual evolution of the Web, from a Web of documents to the interactive Web 2.0 and on to the 'deep Web' which further mines the vast amount of data generated through Web 2.0 services. The next steps from here are the Semantic Web and the Web of data, which describe and utilise this material using universal ontology languages. Essentially, this converts loose Web 2.0 folksonomies to manageable taxonomies.