Blogs

Tonight I'm at UQ yet again, for the second CCCS public lecture by visiting scholar Georgina Born (and you've got to admire my restraint in not titling this blog entry "Born Again"). This talk looks like it's going to be more generally about the lessons to be learnt from the BBC's history and present. She begins by noting the distance between executive rhetoric and the reality of work in public service broadcasters (PSB), but of course such contradictions characterise any complex organisation.

I'm spending the afternoon at a public lecture by Georgina Born from Cambridge University, at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland (who, as it turns out, for some time was also the cellist and bassist in British Prog icons Henry Cow). She begins with a nod towards Habermas's public sphere concept, which in relation to broadcasting has been seen as having been imperfectly realised (e.g. through the universalism of service, reach, and programming of the BBC in Britain). In these media debates, the specifically literary and cultural dimensions of the original conception of the public sphere appear to have been ignored, however, and there is also a gender issue here which privileges 'hard' content (e.g. news) over 'soft' content such as drama.

No, I'm not leaving QUT - but today is the first day of the new semester, and it's the first time in five years that I'm not acting as unit coordinator for KKB018 Creative Industries, one of the Creative Industries Faculty's undergraduate core units. KKB018 was the unit that I was originally employed to develop - and as far as I know, it was the first mainstream undergraduate unit (course, subject - choose whatever terminology applies in your neck of the woods) world-wide to introduce students to the creative industries. I've now finally passed on responsibility for the unit to my esteemed colleague John Banks - with my role as conference chair for AoIR 2006 and my involvement in various major research projects it simply was no longer feasible to coordinate such a large unit as well. So, today I say goodbye, with a quiet sigh of relief after what's been a long and occasionally rocky road.

As I arrived back in Brisbane, there was good news relating to my research work waiting for me here. Some time ago, we'd put in a proposal for a Linkage grant project to the Australian Research Council - and after a considerable waiting period, Linkage outcomes were finally announced a couple of weeks ago. So, I'm happy to report that our participatory news project has finally received the go-ahead (and the $380,000 of funding over four years attached to it) from the ARC. This is a project for which I'll be a co-Chief Investigator with my QUT colleagues Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham - and our industry partners are SBS, National Forum, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. I'm particularly looking forward to working with SBS on this, who (in addition to being the Australian home of football) are also one of the most innovative and responsible broadcast organisations in Australia.

I'm very happy to report that an update of my paper from last year's AolR conference, "Wikinews: The Next Generation of Online News?", has now been published as the lead article in Scan Journal. I was able to find some more recent statistics, which unfortunately confirm the trends I'd already seen at the end of 2005: Wikinews is stagnating, both in terms of new contributors and as far as content creation is concerned. In my opinion, this is due to a misinterpretation of the Neutral Point of View doctrine, which here leads to a counterproductive aversion to any kind of discussion of news and current events. (And let me be absolutely clear: I'm not arguing against NPOV as such here - Wikipedia's current events section does very good work covering the news, for example, so it can work very well in a news context.) Anyway - read the article in Scan Journal! Here's the issue announcement by editors Chris Atton and Graham Meikle:

Brisbane
So, I'm back in Brisbane and I've finally had a chance to post those remaining blog entries from ICA and CATaC. I've also uploaded my photos from the trip to Flickr, and I'll add them and some other materials to blog posts soon. Unfortunately, while I was away there were some problems with my Web and mailserver, so if anyone's emails to me bounced over the last couple of weeks, please resend them.

As I understand it now, the problem may have been caused by the Windows w3wp.exe service, which is part of the Internet Information Services (IIS) suite. This service handles Web server requests and can max out the CPU if too many requests come in at the same time (and at peak time, we sometimes get up to 1000 spam trackbacks per hour - none of which you see because they're usually all caught by the spam filter on the Website). I've now tweaked IIS by setting the 'worker process recycling' values to far lower limits - this means that the server will consume less system memory and CPU time before it starts to clean out old server processes. Hopefully this fixes the problem - and if anyone has useful suggestions for how to set the server limits, please let me know.

Frankfurt
Well, this European journey is almost at an end. We spent the last few days visiting my mum on Ibiza, taking in some summer sun and sampling the local food (we bypassed the plethora of dance clubs advertised everywhere, though). And in what's likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime moment, Ann and I got to hold the real Oscar awarded to Casablanca as best picture of 1943, which now lives in the El Palacio hotel alongside a range of other movie memorabilia. It's about as heavy as you'd expect!

Tartu
Well, we're basically done - this is the third daily sum-up session, on this last day of CATaC 2006. Whatever 'it' is, Charles Ess says, it seems to have worked (and I would endorse this from my own perspective) - this has been an interdisciplinary conference which has embraced a wide range of perspectives. Culture isn't culture any more, and there has been a very broad range of theoretical backgrounds which people have employed.

Tartu
In this post-lunch session on the final day at CATaC 2006 we're focussing on mobile technologies, and Andra Siibak is the first presenter. She notes the increased scale and magnitude of social interaction through computer-mediated interaction; this also involves youngsters forming their identities and creating favourable impressions of themselves. Despite the wide range of identity portrayals available to them, women still appear to present themselves in what are thought to be the most favourable formats, as Andra found for the Estonian social networking site Rate (and we're focussing here especially on the site's dating aspects) - here people are able to view photos of others and rate them.

Tartu
The next session is kicked off by Eileen Luebcke, who outlines a research project on intercultural communication in virtual teams. This is a very underresearched area so far, she suggests. CMC research has a variety of weaknesses here: research tends to focus on culturally homogeneous groups even where they are compared with one another, and often takes place in a laboratory environment - and results from student groups are sometimes posited as being representative for general work groups.

There is a need for diversity research, then, which has already taken place in non-CMC contexts. Here, heterogeneous teams appear to produce a greater number of alternative solutions to problems, but can also be a source of conflict; unfortunately, active use of diversity is often backgrounded in favour of an organisational bias towards male Western employees (this may be institutionalised for example through a focus on oral presentations or Western-style brainstorming sessions). Dichotomies between individualistic and collectivistic cultural orientations have various impacts here - communication for expressing own points of view clashes with communication for maintaining group harmony, for example - and individualistic communication patterns tend to dominate in many group interactions, as they enable individuals to place themselves in central positions.