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Singapore.


And we're back for another day of ICA 2010. I'm afraid I may not see much of today, through, both as I'm still backing up from the football last night and as I still have to finish our slides for tomorrow. The first session I'm seeing, then, starts with Scott Rodgers, whose interest is in the relationship between the newspaper and the city. He highlights the series The Wire as a useful fictional study of the sociology of city journalism; its underlying message is that the hollowing out of the local newspaper has serious implications for the city.

Singapore.


The second paper in this ICA 2010 session is by Wolfgang Donsbach, who begins by outlining three broad traditions of journalism: the subjective tradition (pursuing individual goals), the public service tradition, and the commercial tradition. Each can be characterised along a number of criteria (goals, dominant relationships, prototypes, dominant values, dominant content, and the journalist's role).

In his view, the public service tradition - selecting relevant and verified information - is the crucial one for journalism, but it is now under threat: from within the media, through the tabloidisation of content (increasing levels of pop politics, personalisation, scandalisation and sensationalism, negativity) and the attendant changes in format (growing emotionalisation, fragmentation and sound bites, a race to maximise audience reach, and bottom line pressures on journalists). Journalists increasingly complain about bottom line pressures and about how frequently their content is changed by others after filing, for example.

Singapore.


I'm afraid in the battle between lunch and the second plenary, lunch won out, so I'm skipping Ien Ang's keynote at ICA 2010, and jumping right to the first of the post-lunch sessions. I may miss some of those as well as I've got a few meetings in the afternoon, but we'll see how we go. We start the afternoon with a paper by Wiebke Loosen from the fabulous Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, whose interest is in the relationship between journalism and its audiences. One of the key issues here is the change in the sender/receiver relationship - always a complicated and paradoxical relationship (journalism provides a service and needs an audience, but that audience plays a subordinate role - journalists are often oriented more towards their colleagues than towards audiences).

Singapore.


The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Sunny Kim, whose interest is in non-work-related social media use during work time. This is most often seen as a loss of productivity and a waste of resources, though it can also be understood as an important moment of brief rest during the working day.

A wide range of terms for such 'cyberslacking' are found in the relevant literature, and the present study created a taxonomy of eight of the most common concepts and tested their relevance - e.g. 'personal Web use', 'cyberloafing', 'problematic Internet use', etc. This conceptual framework was then tested in a specific population of college students, who were asked for their perception of these terms (including perceived external and internal causes).

Singapore.


The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Matthew Weber, who shifts our focus to online news and begins by noting the gradual decline of the traditional print news community and the rise of online news usage. Newspaper organisations - the news industry - form a community made up of individual populations of professionals, which compete with one another for users; within this, in turn, there are individual news organisations pursuing specific corporate strategies.

What effect does such strategy have over time? Strategic change can increase the likelihood of survival during periods of disruption; interorganisational linkages can provide economic and reputational benefits, and increase legitimacy; hyperlinks between organisations can be instrumental in this. News organisations make strategic choices on how to link and whom to link to; at times of change, this is a question especially of how to deal with new entrants.

Singapore.


The next session I'm attending at ICA 2010 starts with Jieyoung Kong, whose focus is on US megachurches online - how are these 'faith brands' building online brand communities? Megachurches are a trend of the last decade, well beyond the US; they are defined as protestant religious organisations with more than 2000 members each which conduct weekly services and engage in significant strategic communication activities. The marketing of megachurches involves storytelling that constructs and maintains the brand.

Singapore.


The final speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Marc Verboord, who shifts our focus to the book market. Traditionally, book reviews in the conventional media had paramount authority; today, there are a number of alternative, peer-produced sources online - customer ratings and recommendations on Amazon, for example, as well as recommendations through social networking sites. So, is this part of a decline of cultural authorities? Does it democratise the market, from the grassroots up? Does it lead to (or result from) a larger, long-tail market for a wider range of books?

Singapore.


The next presenter at ICA 2010 is Aymar Christian, who continues our focus on YouTube: his interest is on music videos on the site, and he argues that music video remakes shared on YouTube are almost always fair use. User-generated music videos (riffing on official videos) are amongst the most popular genres on YouTube, following in a long tradition (also incorporating professional work, such as the Weird Al videos); music videos and their remakes stand in a postmodernist tradition that may critique representation and reject standard Hollywood narrative (not least also characterised by the emergenceof MTV.

Singapore.


The next presenter at ICA 2010 is Limor Shifman, who shifts our focus to YouTube and notes the rapid increase in the number of videos shared on the site (some 2000 more by the time this presentation is finished). There's a massive amount of people spending a massive amount of time on creating such videos - many of whom draw on existing videos by imitating and replicating them. YouTube videos which are taken up in this way are memes.

Memes are understood as similar to genes, reproduced by copying and imitation and undergoing subtle mutations in the process. The Net has further multiplied and accelerated memes; it is a paradise for memes (and for people who research them). Some such memes spread with no significant variation (Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent performance is one such example), while some serve as the basis for extensive user-generated parody and derivation.

Singapore.


For the second round of ICA 2010 papers this morning, I'm in a popular communication session, and Matt Stahl is the first presenter. He notes the ongoing turbulence in the recording industry, dating back to the late 1970s which led it to embrace a blockbuster model for which Thriller is the best example; there was an intensification of rigidity in labour relations as a result (with a focus on high-earning artists in both industry employment and product marketing), but also a flexibility in the exploration of new business models to support this and identify new artists.