Blog

Well, I can't say New York City exactly put its best face forward for me - it's been alternately drizzly, rainy, windy, or just plain miserable here at least as far as the weather was concerned. With the talks on Tuesday and the Boston/Providence and Philadelphia trips on Wednesday and Friday, Thursday was my only 'off' day here, but it wasn't exactly great for sightseeing. In fact, around mid-day it rained so hard that I had to buy a pair of jeans because my other trousers were soaking wet... (Well, the other reason was that on the flight to the U.S. my old jeans developed what here they'd probably call a 'wardrobe malfunction', putting me in danger of mooning people each time I bent over.)

Well, after a long day's travelling I've now made it back to rainy New York City again. It's been a great day - very good debate at the panel at Northeastern University in Boston, great to catch up again with David Marshall at NEU, and a nice evening lecture at Brown University. I managed to record both events and will post up some audio once I've had a chance to edit it. My thanks to everyone who's helped set up these events, and particularly also to Mark Tribe who was my host at Brown (and accompanied me back to NYC on the train). A quick T train trip in Boston also reminded me that this city has far and away some of the best subway station names in the world. I mean, wouldn't you want to get on the subway to 'Alewife'? 'Wonderland'? 'Braintree'? Or my favourite, NEU's local station 'Ruggles'?

Right now I'm on an Amtrak train to Boston (currently stopping in a town called Mystic), where I'll take part in a panel on "Public/Private Intersections in New Media" with David Marshall and others. David has asked the panellists to prepare some brief points to address a set of questions we will be discussing - here are mine:

0. What do I think about new media?

Well, the New School talk on produsers and produsage went pretty well, I think - my thanks again to my hosts here, and to Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity for setting it up. Unfortunately, once again I forgot to record the talk, but I guess I have another couple of chances to do so when I present it at Brown and at Temple. Afterwards, I also caught up with Shekhar Deshpande from Arcadia University to discuss what's happening in Creative Industries at QUT at the moment, and Shekhar was nice enough to show me through a little bit of East Village as well. Currently I'm enjoying the free wireless Internet access available at the New School, and then it's on to The Thing for the next talk - hope my voice holds up...

Well, after various delays getting out of Chicago I finally made it to New York City this afternoon. Haven't had a chance to do much more than have a wander around and organise my trip to Boston and Providence on Wednesday. I'm staying at the Wolcott in central Manhattan, just a couple of blocks down from the Empire State Building which never quite emerged from the clouds this afternoon. Other than the great location and a history stretching over more than a century, the Wolcott's most distinguishing feature is a ridiculously ornamental foyer - I'll try and take a few photos tomorrow morning... Also tomorrow are my talks at the New School (10 a.m.) and The Thing (6 p.m.) - look forward to seeing people there!

Well, that's it - this year's Association of Internet Researchers conference is over. It's been a great and varied (in a good way) event - always good to see a broad range of papers from many disciplinary backgrounds, as well of course to catch up with friends and colleagues I hadn't seen for a year. (As always, by the way, all errors in the blog transcripts of sessions are mine and not the presenters'.) I was surprised that so few Australians and (I think) no New Zealanders made their way to Chicago this year - from what I could tell, new AoIR president Matt Allen, Denise Rall from Southern Cross University, and I were the only ones currently based down under, with Amanda Spink soon to be joining us at QUT. Next year, when the conference is held in Brisbane, this should change significantly, of course - hopefully without losing too many of our European and North American colleagues in the process.

There is only one set of sessions at AoIR 2005 this Sunday morning, almost as something of an afterthought (and a few people have already left for the airport, also having to negotiate the traffic disruptions caused by the Chicago Marathon this morning). Which is a bit of a shame, seeing that the session I'm attending now contains this year's winners of the Carl J. Couch Center Internet Research Award, that is, the three best student papers submitted for the conference.

Ericka Menchen Trevino: What Motivates Bloggers?

Ericka Menchen Trevino from the University of Illinois at Chicago, this year's first-placed entrant, is the first speaker. Her study investigates the motivations of bloggers, and she begins by noting that some of the things being said about blogging now were said less than a decade ago about plain old homepages as well. However, blogs of course are updated relatively regularly, which means that there is a certain level of commitment to them even if hosted blogs have made it very easy to create a blog.

The first of the afternoon sessions this Saturday at the 2005 AoIR conference is on 'New Research and Learning Models'. The first paper is by Trena Paulus from the University of Tennessee and Vanessa Dennen from Florida State University.

Trena Paulus and Vanessa Dennen: New Approaches to Analysing Asynchronous Interaction

Their main interest is in asynchronous discussion environments in higher education. There still is a lack of definition of what learning actually means - there is a need to look at the group processes involved, which are very dynamic, rich, and almost mysterious in an online context. Learning is a collaborative knowledge building activity, and it is about becoming a member of a discourse community. Current studies show limited attention to context, as well as to the ebb and flow of the dialogue, however; current measures of participation give points for posts, which rewards presence but emphasises quantity over quality and the individual over the group.

I came a little late to this next session at AoIR 2005 - we've already started a presentation on photoblogging by Eric Meyer, Howard Rosenbaum, and Noriko Hara from Indiana University.

Eric Meyer, Howard Rosenbaum, and Noriko Hara: Trends across Photoblogging Sites

The purists' definition of photoblogging is as chronological blogging using photos; photoblogs.org distinguishes clearly between photoblogs and galleries, but in practice that division isn't as clear: various approaches to Flickr use, for example, blur the line. Some people do use Flickr as a kind of photoblogging, which also enables tagging and commenting on photos, for example.

The keynote speaker at the 2005 Association of Internet Researchers conference today is Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics, speaking on emerging children's and young people's literacy of the Internet. What's new about young people's Internet use? To begin with, of course some very old moral concerns have followed from old to new media - the same moral panics which emerged around comic books or television now follow the Internet. This also demonstrates that the new media supplement rather than displace older media; familiar social norms reassert themselves in the way that the Internet is used in everyday life. The same context frames are applied in the way that new media are understood.