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Vienna.


The third speaker in this opening session at EDEM 2009 is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose theme is the demise of electronic government (hmm, that didn't take long...). He suggests that e-government as a concept has come to the end of its lifespan; the promises of higher public sector efficiency, and of resulting economic growth and greater trust in government, and of deeper citizen participation in public matters have not been fulfilled. The reality of electronic government is far less promising; the economic gains remain unclear, and have yet to be measured accurately - there are no robust frameworks for such measurement at this point. We measure not what we should, but what we can measure: avoidance. That's not helpful.

Vienna.


The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is Hans-Eberhard Urbaniak, the federal commissioner for the social insurance elections in Germany (and yes, I hope he explains to us what this may mean). In Germany, some 46 million are eligible to vote in the social insurance elections (including especially health and pensions insurance), and if I understand this right, the delegates elected through this process shape the social insurance services provided to the public; this is a matter of self-determination for the voters, and through the process, the overall range of social insurance services is determined. The overall budget for social insurance is some €420 billion, incidentally.

Vienna.


From Transforming Audiences in London I've now made my way to a surprisingly sunny Vienna, where the 2009 Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM) is about to begin. We begin with an opening speech by Roland Traunmüller, outlining the challenges ahead for e-Governance, and he notes that IT and governance concepts have changed substantially over the past few decades. There has been some academic interest in e-governance of some form or another for the past three decades or so, ever since computer technology became more mainstream, ad the International Federaton of Computer Societies has been examining the opportunities since 1990.

London.


The final speaker at the Transforming Audiences conference is Dumisani Moyo, whose interest is in citizen journalism in the age of digital pavement radio in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, of course, has experienced a series of crises in recent years, which can be traced back to the democratic deficits inherited from its colonial history.

The shrinkage of communicative space in Zimbabwe has been widely documented in recent years; this was driven by legislative and other means. How have ordinary Zimbabweans adjusted and reacted to this? Media remain seen as important elements in the country's political discourse, and were noted as such in the agreement that led to the establishment of the current unity government. There has also been a rise of various forms of citizen journalism, which supported the political shifts in recent years and continues to push for further change; even here, however, professional journalists have objected to the idea of citizen journalism and see the concept as undermining their own professional roles.

London.

The penultimate speaker at Transforming Audiences is Emiliana de Blasio, who shifts our attention to Italy and begins by questioning the optimistic rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0. Political participation using social media depends on three steps: access, interaction, and participation. In this, access 1.0 is simply access to information, access 1.1 is access to relatively open mass media; and only access 2.0 is an opportunity to have one's own produced content published or broadcast. This requires the skills to receive content and provide feedback, and takes place in the context of a networked individualism which replaces other types of social formations.

London.


Next at Transforming Audiences is Nicola Kaye, who focusses on developing communicative spaces through her creative practice. This is in line with the idea that the role of the artist is now to construct the social spaces and constraints for the audience to co-construct the work, and builds on the increasing availability of digital, social, creative tools such as Flickr or YouTube while highlighting the as yet undecided power structures within such spaces. Creativity has an important role to play in examining the potential uses for such spaces.

London.


The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Lisa Farrance, whose interest is in alternative media practices; she distinguishes between a range of uses from the simple (publicity, organisation within and between social movements, and uncensored and counter-information) through to greater ambitions of giving a voice to the voiceless and achieving democratic and political renewal.

Theory, in this context, can aid practice: it should position itself as the growing point of practice. Useful theory may include a study of political eonomic contexts and constraints, and a return to early Marxism in pursuit of a new materialism. Lisa now takes us through a number of key concepts in this context.

London.


The next presenter at Transforming Audiences is Stine Lomborg, examining blogging as a form of collaborative produsage. She focussed on three personal Danish blogs, and examined six months' worth of posts and comments for this study, as well as interviewing the authors. The produsage angle of this study examines blog-based communication as an ongoing collaborative development of a shared text; this is combined with socio-cognitive reception theory in which genre is seen as a socially distributed cognitive architecture. The texts themselves were studied using conversation analysis.

London.


The penultimate session at Transforming Audiences starts with a paper by Andrea Medrado, whose interest is in 'lamp post radio' in Brazilian favelas: speakers which are attached to lamp posts and broadcast local radio programming. Such radio - a form of community radio - needs to be understood within the wider sonic landscape of the favela environment.

Most work on community radio as such tends to be overly celebratory and usually does not focus much on the audiences for such radio programming; listening is assumed to be an isolated, individual practice, which is clearly at odds with the public nature of lamp post radio. Andrea approached her research through media ethnography; this was complicated by perceptions of Andrea as a higher-class outsider entering the lower-class social environment of the favela, and this had to be carefully negotiated in order to gain the necessary access to the local community.

London.


The second speaker in this double-barrelled keynote session at Transforming Audiences is Christine Hine. Her interest is in digital media practice in daily life, which she has approached in the past through virtual ethnography. More recently, she has used such approaches also to investigate the use of information and communication technologies by a group of biologists.

More broadly, then, media ethnography brings and attention to cultural difference, a commitment to close observation and recording, a focus on dense descriptive detail which reveals contexts that give meaning to actions for a community - which implies that that context is not known a priori.