Blogs

Hong Kong.
The second day of The Internet Turning 40 at Chinese University Hong Kong is upon us, and we're starting with a paper by William Dutton. He begins by noting a current story of mobile phones and online communication being used to mobilise workers in China in protest against working conditions - and he says that this illustrates the potential of new media as a fifth estate. The original three estates (clergy, nobility, commoners) were a feudal concept, of course, with journalists added later as a fourth estate, tasked with keeping the other three honest.

Hong Kong.
The final presenter at The Internet Turning 40 today is Iris Chyi, whose focus is on users' emotional attachment to online news. In the US, newspapers currently appear to be in crisis: print circulation is declining, and online usage has not translated into significant revenue. Paid content is positioned as a potential solution, but may remain an impossible dream - and that debate, too, has gone on for a decade already.

Media usage does not always correspond to the attitudinal factors that drive the media selection process - online news users' response to online news is not necessarily enthusiastic, and may be an inferior good. In the past, media choices were made between scarce goods, and the only alternative to using specific media was not to use the media at all; today, choice has increased, and media use follows a preceding process of media selection - and that process is driven by user perceptions of the various media options available to them. Attitudinal factor deserve more attention, then.

Hong Kong.
The second presenter in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Huang Sheng-min, who will present in Chinese with a translator; his focus is on the developing Chinese media and telecommunication industry, with a growing integration of telecommunication and television networks.

There have been significant struggles around this over the past ten years in China: both the broadcasting and telecommunication industries in China are still immature, and both were affected by a directive which required both networks to merge into one to avoid the construction of duplicate physical networks - this was suspended, however, and both industries pursued their own developments, separately. Over the past year, then, the broadcasting industry pursued a digitalisation programme, while the telecommunications industry moved from 2G to 3G. In 2010, however the integration idea was put back on the table.

Hong Kong.
The final session for this first day of The Internet Turning 40 starts with a paper by Louisa Ha on the use of multiplatform TV by students. Video is now consumed using TVs, computers, iPods, DVRs, DVD players, and mobile phones, but what are the patterns of such consumption and how does the usage of one affect usage of others? How is this related to different personal factors (gender, etc.), especially for user-generated videos? And how satisfied are the users of these different platforms?

Louisa undertook a national survey in 2008 of some 210 (US) college students in six public universities, 91% of whom watch online video (22% watch TV for more than16 hours per week). 47% were early adopters, having watched online video for more than three years at that point; they mostly came across such videos through surfing or (in 25% of cases) through peer influence. Online, 48% watched user-generated videos exclusively; 34% both user-generated and repurposed videos. Key sources here were YouTube (nearly 100%), Facebook, and MySpace, and mainly comedy and music entertainment videos.

Hong Kong.
The final presenter in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Louis Leung. He begins by pointing to previous study examining the impacts of preferences for online use for offline interaction, and in his own work focusses especially on adolescents - a time which is characterised as a time of transition, challenge,and turbulence, a developmental time of identity formation, increased independence, and of having to deal with the challenges connected to this.

Past studies show, for example, that over half of 9- to 18-year-olds have pretended to be someone else online; many have posted material about themselves online and thereby expressed and experimented with their identity; some may also have expressed otherwise suppressed elements of their own identity. Heavy Internet users also use the Net more strongly for identity formation and relationship formation, unsurprisingly. There is a difference here between the 'now self' and the 'possible self' in such activities, and an individual's identity combines the two.

Hong Kong.
The third paper in this post-lunch session at The Internet Turning 40 is Ran Wei, and examines third-person effects on support for restrictions of Internet pornography amongst college students in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Shanghai has some 19 million residents, some 11 million of whom are Internet users; their Internet use is governed by Chinese government prohibitions of undesirable content. By contrast, Hong Kong with its seven million inhabitants has greater press freedoms, and online pornography is readily available.

Hong Kong.
The next presenter at The Internet Turning 40 is Charles Steinfield, whose focus is on social capital in social networking sites. Social networking sites now rival search engines as the most visited sites on the Web; Facebook now has close to half a billion users. The key features of such sites are user-constructed public or semi-public profiles, a set of connections to other users on the system, and the ability to view and follow one's own connections as well as the connections of others.

Research into social networking has examined impression management and friendship performance, networks and network structure, bridging and online networks, privacy, and how users derive benefits from social networking. Such benefit can be framed especially as social capital: the accumulated resources derived from relationships among people in a specific social context of network.

Hong Kong.
The afternoon session at The Internet Turning 40 starts with a paper by Zizi Papacharissi on identity performance in social networking. She begins by noting the common question of whether social networking makes its users more or less social, and suggests that ultimately social networking is simply integrated into the social lives of its users; a better question may be what media and what online spaces are more or less social, and what online sociability actually means.

Zizi and her colleagues conducted a number of studies to explore those questions, and found a different kind of sociability on Facebook, for example - characterised for some users by a somewhat more passive sociability conducted from the home, but also by a greater flexibility, mobility, and convergence of social behaviours which are linked across Facebook and other spaces. The public privacy of social ties was also notable - users recognised the privacy risks and showed a complex, reflexive understanding of privacy.

Hong Kong.
The final speaker in this opening session of The Internet Turning 40 is my CCI colleague John Hartley, who argues for a shift towards new understanding of archives: in the modern time, they were characterised by galleries and museums as archives of essence, collected and curated by professional experts - of actual things. In postmodernity, broadcast TV systems provided a mediated archive through time-based, intangible objects; today,we have probability archives containing digital and virtual objects online, co-curated by users and containing objects whose status and existence is undetermined.

Hong Kong.
The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Frank Webster, who shifts our focus from taking stock of existing research areas to exploring the future; his interest is in the future of the public sphere in the age of the Internet. He notes the existence of a Social Democratic consensus (certainly in Europe) that it is necessary for state agencies to intervene in the informational realm, because the market alone cannot be trusted to provide for an informed citizenry and is complicated by the growth of PR and corporate lobbying. So, state intervention aims to provide adequate information to the public, to ensure that democracy works effectively. This is legitimated by the concept of the public sphere, which is served by public service institutions.