Blogs

Hong Kong.
We're starting the last day of The Internet Turning 40 with the session that I'm in as well - but the first speaker is José van Dijck, who introduces the idea of 'interpretive flexibility' - an approach for examining technologies that remain in flux. Why and how do technologies become dominant over time; how can we trace this process while it is happening; and why is it important to do so? She is applying this specifically to Twitter (and microblogging in general) here.

There are four factors here: technologies and services, mediated social practices, cultural form and content, and business models. All of these are important when examining emerging platforms, of course. Microblogging, José says, is both a tool and a service - and its versatility is crucial to its success. When it was launched, it was unclear what it would become; by 2007, it was adopted and integrated by a large number of other social media platform, and in the process adapted its interface and technological specificities to their needs (but this took place the other way around, too). Since then, there has been an 'appliancisation' of Twitter, turning it into a closed, applied platform, and reducing its versatility and openness.

Hong Kong.
Finally, we move on to Francis Lee as the last speaker on this second day of The Internet Turning 40. He notes that a few weeks ago, some 150,000 people commemorated the Tian An Men massacre in Hong Kong, and other public rallies are now also becoming commonplace - more and more people are now prepared to participate in such demonstrations. Mainstream media, interpersonal connections, and online media are combining to enable such activities; Hong Kong is becoming 'a proper society'.

What role does the Internet play in this, then? The Internet is used as a means of coordination and mobilisation, as a means of facilitating the formation of movement networks, as a platform for collective or individualised protest actions, and as a channel for persuasive messages and information. For social movements in the online information environment, the Net can be considered as an alternative medium, enabling them to bypass the mass media and transmit oppositional views; also, compared to conventional media, people are less likely to be exposed to discordant views and messages, and a form of self-reinforcing groupthink can develop, particularly with the move towards Web 2.0. This facilitates a heightened audience selectivity.

Hong Kong.
We move on to Hu Yong as the next speaker at The Internet Turning 40, who highlights the anti-Green Dam movement in China which opposes Internet censorship. In June 2009, the Chinese government introduced regulation that from 1 July that year, it required each new computer to have the 'Green Dam Youth Escort' filtering software pre-installed, which would filter specific 'unhealthy' - pornographic - Websites and information (previously it had been thought that this software was only required for school computers).

Hong Kong.
The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Yuqiong Zhou, whose interest is in how rumours are transmitted on the Internet - in this case, through the Chinese messaging service QQ. Rumour transmission is driven by personal anxiety and social disorder, and propelled by people's belief in the rumours; this transmission, in turn, further deepens their belief in rumours. Rumours are unverified but broadly circulated information items which yield from people's discussion and constitute a kind of abnormal public opinion.

Hong Kong.
The first speaker in the post-lunch session this second day of The Internet Turning 40 is Cherian George, who begins with the story of a Singaporean dissident, the former lawyer Gopalan Nair, who has been a staunch (even rabid, Cherian says) critic of Lee Kuan Yew and his - or now, his son's - government. In a blog post, Nair has openly acknowledged the fact that he has defamed Lee, gave his full address and contact details, and dared the police to arrest him - which they did. He was quite literally asking for trouble.

Hong Kong.
The final speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Jack Qiu, who highlights the impact of the current financial crisis (in a study focussing on China and South Korea) and begins by playing a melody originally created to commemorate the Kwangju massacre in Korea which has now been repurposed as a kind of pan-Asian "Internationale" (and was performed in this version by the New Labour Art Troupe, a migrant workers orchestra in China which has released three CDs so far and also published its music online under a Creative Commons licence).

Hong Kong.
The second speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Sharon Strover, who also highlights the amount of personal information which is being shared as a matter of course by many Internet users - at its extreme, by 'life streamers' who deliberately enmesh the virtual and the real and publicise as much of their everyday activities as is humanly and technologically possible.

She suggests that in our understanding of the Internet, techno-centric approaches continue to dominate, even in spite of the push to understand technologies as socially shaped - and she suggests a new metaphor, the slipstream, in which one object is travelling in the wake of another, expending relatively little energy (and indeed, in doing so reduces the aerodynamic drag on the leading object, allowing it, too, to move faster). The Internet slipstream underscores the possibility of a seamless communicative self, located simultaneously in multiple communication environments - it highlights the nimbleness of multiple communicative activities.

Hong Kong.
The next session at The Internet Turning 40 starts with a presentation by David Lyon, on surveillance technologies. He begins by noting a recent Simpsons episode that addressed surveillance (usually a sure sign that this is now an issue of popular discussion) and portrayed subversive resistance against such technologies. Surveillance has been concerned traditionally with visual observation, but this is now only the tip of the iceberg; additionally, today it is no longer only government institutions which engage in surveillance, and this is reducing the amount of physical or informational space which still remains surveillance-free.

Hong Kong.
The final speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Alice Lee, who continues the focus on online news. She says that online news sites in a Web 2.0 operate like a digital marketplace where people get together and exchange news, and explores how Web 2.0 has affected these sites. The format of online media is particularly important, in other words - the breaking of previously existing boundaries which has occurred with Web 2.0 has upset the previous equilibrium and led to significant changes.

Hong Kong.
The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Stuart Allan, who focusses our attention on the history of journalism on the Internet. He highlights the continuing questions of what counts as news, and who can be described as a journalist, in this changing environment, and notes that we have gradually shifted from journalism on the Internet to journalism of the Internet.

But to understand this shift better, it is useful to step back to consider the historical trajectory of journalism both online and in other media - by way of illustration, Stuart notes how over time, TV news bulletins have settled into a format that is now near-universal around the world, and which seems natural to us from life-long exposure, but is far from the only possible approach. Early TV newscasts were strongly influenced by newspaper journalism, of course, and replicated its conventions to some extent; another influence was radio journalism, which was better placed to do current, close to real-time reporting; yet another was newsreel journalism which had the expertise for presenting news stories in visual formats. Today, these have coalesced into a globally near-uniform format, with very few exceptions.