Dresden My next session again involves Mark Latonero, speaking on remix culture. (I missed the session's previous presentation, on the World Trade Organisation.) Mark describes the delegitimising force of traditional copyright industries, but notes the rise of alternative modes which involve the active production of content by non-traditional producers operating outside the status quo production processes, in a user-based, bottom-up, and grassroots mode. Remixing embodies a set of social practices that are indicative of digital technologies imbued with an ideology of freedom. Are remixers aiming to transcend the constraints of space and time? What are their cultural characteristics and personal identities?
Dresden The next session is on creative commons-related issues; Mark Latonero is the first speaker. He notes that Tim Berners-Lee suggests that the whole added value of the Internet is serendipitous re-use. The creative commons represents an emerging technological and legal mechanism for this re-use, and a significant challenge to the traditional copyright industries. It is a legitimising tool for cultural technologies on the Internet. Mark adminstered a questionnaire to the winners of the recent Wired creative commons remix contest.
Dresden We're starting the second day at ICA2006 with a session on mobile technologies. Cara Wallis is the first presenter. She frames the arrival of new communication technologies by discussing the standard metaphors of community and connectivity, but also alienation, which are often attached to them, and focusses here especially on privacy and impersonality. This happened with the telephone as much as with more recent technologies - for example, there were significant eavesdropping concerns when the phone was first introduced. At the same time, the phone also offered more privacy, for example for business transactions. The case is similar for the mobile phone - and the process of coming to terms with mobile phone privacy issues is still being negotiated at present. Children, for example, gain a good deal of new privacy using mobile phones (especially also by using cryptic text messaging, of course) - but at the same time there are issues around surveillance and data mining, including also the geographic tracking of phones. Another issues is impersonality: the reduction to a phone number and a voice on the line has long been held as an impersonalising trait of mobile phones - and for mobile phones, there is the emergence of a kind of telecocoon which mobile phones offer: mobile users detach themselves from their immediate surroundings by entering a different communicative sphere.
Dresden It always surprises me that even brand-new convention centres are so poorly set up for the obvious, basic needs: power supply for delegates' laptops. Luckily I've been able to burrow into the underbelly of the conference hall floor, and found a socket - so the last couple sessions won't go unblogged.
This next session deals with the question of the network society and the theories surrounding it - still a somewhat underresearched area deserving further attention. 'Network research' is likened here to 'lunch' - a broad, perhaps overly broad area which needs to be better and more narrowly defined in order to be effectively studied. Network theory and network society theory need to be further and more effectively interconnected. Jan van Dijk starts off by outlining the claims of network theory and analysis about contemporary society: there is the observation that we are moving towards a network society (where according to Castells networks are already the basic units of society - and van Dijk suggests that perhaps individuals still remain the basic units but are increasingly linked by networks). So, in a network society the social relations are gaining influence as compared to the social units they are linking. Despite their articulation all social relations remain inextricably bound up with units.
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 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.
