Blogs

Dresden
The first session of the 56th annual International Communication Association conference has started now - and as always I'll do my best to report what I see. There may be some delays in getting this out, though - surprisingly, it looks as if the only Internet access made available here to conference delegates is by way of a handful of machines in the Cybercafe. No wireless - a very disappointing start to this event... I should also note that of course there's a plethora of papers being presented here - so what I cover may not at all be representative for the conference as such.

Dresden
The next session is a panel facilitated by Nick Coundry, which presents findings from a comparative study of media consumption practices and their effects on public connection. If voter turnout at national elections is low and in decline, and if simultaneously citizen and participatory media rises, does this lead to a greater fragmentation of media audiences and the overall citizenry? What does it feel like to be a citizen-consumer in this media environment?

First off, there still is a sense of 'public connection', an orientation of citizens towards public issues - but at the same time, this is severely altered by the changing, convergent media environment. What, indeed, constitutes the public/private distinction - it surely still exists, but in what form, and where? The UK side of this project worked with written and taped diaries, interviews, and focus groups across the UK - from this, various patterns emerged: there is a range from media world connectors to public world connectors - for the former: the sense of being a member of the media audience is the key factor, while for the letter there is a sense of connection with the public beyond the media alone. The former is not necessarily a lack, however, as there may still remain a strong family connection or other factors.

Dresden, Germany
For the next few weeks I'll be travelling Europe - attending the International Communication Association conference in Dresden and CATaC (Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication) in Tartu, Estonia, as well as taking the opportunity to visit some old friends and family. The first leg of the journey is now finally complete - after 30 hours flight and four hours on the train we've arrived in Dresden. This is my first time in Germany in six years, and only the second time I'm back here since I left for Australia in 2006, so I'm interested to see how the place has changed - and of course the World Cup is on as well so there's plenty else happening right now.

Dresden
Finally for today I'm in a session on convergence and networking which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a strong representation of Korean and Japanese researchers. The first paper is by Euchiul Jung and is presented in absentia - it is motivated by the increasing flow of people, culture and information beyond national boundaries, and looks at ethnicity-based public spheres at local levels. Diasporic identity is a reconstructed and transformed cultural identity - a hybrid identity.

The paper found that new media technologies were helpful in keeping the members of such communities in touch with their cultures of origin, and increased the close connection between them and their home culture. Key media here were both the Internet, which allowed more access to information and culture from the culture of origin, and the mobile phone, which allowed for more mobility and flexibility. Both increased the intra-cultural communication within the diasporic community. This also led to a growth in the cultural politics of distinction, recognition, and identification, and allowed for the emergence of mediated, ethnicity-based public spheres and communication networks. The result was a transformed, hybridised cultural identity.

I realise I haven't posted here for a while - but that doesn't mean that things haven't been busy on this site. I spent some time upgrading the site to the latest version of Drupal recently, and that's meant some fairly tricky code fixes because some of the Drupal modules I'm running here haven't been fully upgraded to version 4.7.x yet - but at least trackback.module is now out in a new version which incorporates some of my contributions. Good to contribute to an open source project for once, instead of just doing research on them... The new version of Drupal has also switched to a new templating system, so while the look of this site may not have changed much overall, I've had to do some fairly serious reworking of the code underneath. Anyway, that's the reason for the four days' gap in the site statistics which you can see on the front page (and happily the changeover over those days also wiped out four days of trackback spam...).

Well, it's always nice if things have good timing. The other day I found two letters from my publisher Peter Lang in the mail: one, from the Switzerland office, was a royalty cheque for Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production - we've sold over a quarter of the first print run already, even though reviews are only just starting to appear. I was tempted to have it framed - but then, it is an actual cheque... The other was a letter from the New York office, with the contract for the next book, which currently has the working title Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Due in mid-2007, it continues my work on Produsers and Produsage, and provides a guide to the landscape of produsage across a wide variety of domains.

I presented a paper reviewing the first year of Wikinews at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Chicago in 2005, and this paper has also been accepted for publication in Scan Journal in June 2006. Today I've finally posted the audio from that presentation.

I also spent part of today revising the paper with more recent figures on the development of Wikinews for publication in Scan - in the conference paper I had argued that some of the systemic problems within Wikinews had stunted its growth through the furst year, and I'm sorry to day that (but for a brief spike in the aftermath of the London bombings and hurricanes Katrina and Rita) this trend appears to have continued to date.

Last week I had the great pleasure to publish the 'collaborate' issue of M/C Journal, which I edited with my great friend and colleague Donna Lee Brien from the University of New England. I'm very happy with how it's turned out, with a very interesting mix of general theory and practitioner reports from academia, arts, and the media, and a great feature article by Suw Charman from the Open Rights Group. Here's the announcement:

A little while ago Trebor Scholz suggested that I should respond to a post of his on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing-list, about using wikis and blogs in teaching. I finally got around to this yesterday, and thought I might post it up here as well. This also refers back to the interview Trebor did with me last year, and to the Large Teaching & Learning Grant project which I co-direct at QUT (see Blogs and Wikis in Teaching at QUT for some more information). Any comments welcome!

(Um, that's Uses of Blogs in the news - not uses of blogs in newsmaking...)

Heh. Uses of Blogs is already making headlines. Good timing, too - we've just heard from the publisher that the book should be hitting stores in about two months... Alternatively, of course, you could already pre-order it from Amazon.com.