The final speaker at this AoIR 2012 session is Zeena Feldman, whose focus is on the Couchsurfing Website. She begins by suggesting that the Net has always been a space of competing discourses, a hybrid space, and the same is true for social media as well. Social media have been seen as technologies of resistance as well as of repression, and the case of Couchsurfing illustrates this.
The site is a social network for travellers which operates as a platform for exchanging stays in private homes; it frames non-commercial hospitality exchange as a means of fostering cultural understanding and exchange …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Constance Kampf, whose interest is in online activism. There are a number of different forms and levels of activism, of course – from a general expression of support for specific causes to radical and potentially dangerous interventions. Much online activism has been driven by issues of transparency, but that term is ill-defined: does it just mean the openness and availability of information about known phenomena, or also an absence of unknowns?
Another key issue in this is the role of knowledge as a cultural resource: transparency can become a socio-technical construct …
The next speaker at this AoIR 2012 session is Dan Mercea, whose work stems from an interest in the Occupy movement in the Netherlands. Activity peaked in October 2011 with a series of marches and the establishment of Occupy camps, but gradually dwindled thereafter; social media played a prominent role in the initial organisation of these activities, reaching politically unaffiliated (potential) participants.
Social media may play two roles in this context: bridging and bonding participants. Twitter is primarily useful for creating bridges between a variety of participants, for example, while Facebook seems more conducive to both bridging and bonding; this …
After that extraordinary AoIR 2012 plenary session, the first of the parallel sessions I'll be attending starts with a presentation by Gordon Fletcher on Internet humour memes in UK universities. The genesis for this was a line in The Guardian which asked where memes were the new site of class struggle; Gordon then began to gather up university-related memes pages on Facebook, and identified their popularity.
Most of these pages were single pages related to one university, created by students, and named in a way which clearly spoke to insiders (using popular abbreviations and slang, for example). The majority …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 plenary is Terri Senft, who argues for a department of Shameless Studies. Is anyone actually shameless? We all constantly negotiate our shame, for all sorts of reasons; we are in solidarity with one another where we share a specific form of shame.
Similarly, we gather online around shared topics; an early example of such gathering was the early Web's Camgirl movement, and so often the people engaging in these topics were also considered to be too much, too shameless, even though what happened here is to ease one's shame, to empower oneself.
Up next at AoIR 2012 is Zizi Papacharissi, whose focus is on structures of affect and their connection to political engagement. What is the texture of feeling here – for example in the expression of sentiment on Twitter? In her talk here, Zizi will focus on the #egypt hashtag.
Twitter is a form of news storytelling here, presenting collectively prodused newsfeeds which interact with the wider news economy; it can be an alternative or a primary channel for information. As a news reporting mechanism, Twitter can also offer premediation for news events which have not yet happened, or act …
The next plenary session at AoIR 2012 starts with Daniel Miller, who describes enthnography as often grand in its ambitions, but sometimes a little parochial in its work – how do you go about developing some of the wider theory about technology and what it means to be human, for example? What needs to happen here is a move between the broad and the specific.
Anthropologists see the substance of being human in social relations; how can technology, as an external factor, be related to this? Work on the use of communication technologies by disabled people points towards possible directions …
The post-lunch keynote at AoIR 2012 is by Liesbet van Zoonen, who begins with a recap of cultural theories of identity. These assume both individual and collective identities to be multiple rather than single, dynamic rather than static. Identity is something we do, not something we are. Research has been informed by these ideas, and we have a good understanding of how different groups use media to perform their identities. This has also been reflected in an understanding of diversity as a desirable goal for social policy.
There has been less attention on recent forces that work against the multiplicity …
The final plenary speaker in this opening session at AoIR 2012 is Susanna Paasonen, who highlights the question of what the object of Internet research really is. This has often been described in terms of loss – loss of material aspects of research objects – as well as gain – the benefits of disembodiment.
Materiality in Internet studies involves the materials of Internet technology, but also the material conditions of global labour, money, commodity, and resource flows. Here, a focus can be on the conflicting aims of different actors. Second, much recent research has been focussed on the practices of …
