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Singapore.


The next session in this ICA 2010 pre-conference starts with Andy Ruddock, who begins by focussing on George Galloway as a successful Labour candidate in Britain who appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. He describes this as an interesting new approach to political communication that shows the change in media and communication practices in the new media environment.

Galloway's appearance on Big Brother was a point of controversy; it was described as furthering his ego rather than doing proper political work. However, his counterargument was that this reached a different audience - so how do we read and research this from a communication studies perspective? We need new methods that provide new analyses of randomly occurring data and allow for the indeterminate outcomes of media practices across various domains.

Singapore.


The next presenters at this ICA 2010 pre-conference are Lothar Mikos and Ilona Ammann, who begin by highlighting the idea of convergence (a dangerous word, according to Roger Silverstone in the mid-90s). Convergence means the flow of content across multiple media platforms, connected to the cooperation between multiple media industries and the movement of users across platforms - so it exists on various levels: on the level of texts and the media (in transmedia storytelling, hybrid forms, and global and national brands) and on the level of audiences (in transcultural audiences, audience engagement, and audiences as producers.

Singapore.


The next speaker at this ICA 2010 preconference is Ranjana Das, who also notes the changing nature of audiencing and the move towards user-led content creation. Audiences and users, she says, can now be placed in a continuum of sorts, and to grasp this requires methodological advances. There are a number of shared interests in audience and in user studies, and both move beyond a mere individualistic focus on motivations and take a strongly interdisciplinary approach.

There is an increasing conceptual challenge here, however: the visual is becoming more important; it does not simply replace the verbal; hypertextual formats offer new modes of engagement; and so a new communicative order us upon us. In the process, reception, interpretation, text and genre are becoming more and more difficult to define. Divergence and diversity in interpreting texts is highly important, too.

Singapore.


From steamy Hong Kong I've now travelled to humid Singapore, where the 2010 conference of the International Communication Association is about to get underway. This Tuesday we're starting with a pre-conference on methodological questions in popular communication reearch. Pre-conference organiser Cornel Sandvoss begins by highlighting the significant intertextuality of media texts - and there is a quantitative increase in media content and use. Additionally, narratives are increasingly moving transmedia, and lines between the producers and users of content are blurring.

Hong Kong.

The final speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Donna Chu, who highlights the different forms of content creation which are emerging in Web 2.0 environments as the nature of production and consumption is shifting. Does this mean that users are empowered or exploited in this environment? What forms of civic participation are possible here?

Some of these questions are not new, but continue similar discussions in the area of fandom - fans have been creating content for a very long time, and have now simply moved online to share that content. Fans mobilise in support for discontinued TV shows, create petitions to save characters which are to be dumped from TV shows, etc. TV fans who participate in this way, though, are also contributing free labour to these TV shows, and could be seen as being exploited.

Hong Kong.


The next speaker in this session of The Internet Turning 40 is Chien Chou, whose interest is in exploring the use of the Net by Taiwanese students. Students start working with computers in school from the age of 9, and 100% of schools have Internet access, 78% of homes do, as well. But what uses do they see for the Net? She introduces a sixfold distinction: tool, toy, telephone, territory (e.g. presenting their personal identity in a blog, and joining communities), trade, and treasure of information.

Hong Kong.


My paper is the second in this session at The Internet Turning 40, and I'm posting the Powerpoint below - it presents a rather different story from José's. Unfortunately, the recording didn't work - you'll have to read the paper...

Technorati : Internet Turning 40, Pro-Am, business, collaboration, community, produsage

Del.icio.us : Internet Turning 40, Pro-Am, business, collaboration, community, produsage

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).