Milwaukee.


The final speaker of this final session at AoIR 2009 is Raquel Recuero, who shifts our focus to Brazil and its adoption of Twitter and Plurk (another micromessaging tool, but one which has a horizontal rather than vertical logic and enables replies within the message - Google Wave-style, it seems). How is the appropriation of these different social network sites influenced by the conversations that these platforms enable; how do the conversations reveal different types of social networks?

Raquel's study examined the conversational structures in these sites using social network analysis, but also engaged in content analysis and ethnographic research. Of the two sites, Plurk makes it easier to track continuing conversations, but there is less multimodality; there are often more participants to conversations and more recurrent participants (at an average of nine), conversations are more coherent and synchronous, and extend over more conversational turns (at an average of 15). On Twitter, the process is more disruptive - it is difficult to keep track of conversations, and they are less synchronous; conversations have an average of only two turns, and indeed there are fewer conversations in the first place, with fewer participants (at an average of two).

Milwaukee.


The final keynote of AoIR 2009 is by Megan Boler, editor of Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. She begins by noting the shared sense of aporia at the conference. What do we do as we face the rapidly changing environments of social media - do we feel let down by the Internet, do we daily have to renegotiate the changing visage of the Internet? Megan is particularly interested in exploring this in the context of war, and especially the war on terror - so much especially of the material produced from critical perspectives is dismissed as noise here, so how do we make what we feel is important audible and visible? (To illustrate this, Megan shows a video compiling the repetitive use of certain keywords - September 11, Saddam Hussein, war on terror, terrorism - by US leaders.)

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is David Bello, whose focus is on Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. This is a form of crowdsourcing, which itself combines the outsourcing of labour to an external provider with community-provided open source labour; crowdsourcing thus exhibits an open quality where users are not employed or hired, but simply choose to perform the tasks that they are interested in. In crowdsourcing, the requesting body solicits the general public to join the labouring community.

In the Amazon case, the company provides the platform which mediates the labour process; using this platform, a requesting body can provide tasks which are then performed by the labouring community. Community members are remunerated according to their provision of HITs (human intelligence tasks), which address problems that cannot be done by computers (semantic and cultural understanding, or sensory translation).

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Michele White, who shifts our interest to eBay and its eBay Live! convention culture. This is an interesting translation of the asynchronous online trading model to a face-to-face venue for expressions of community, and through them comsumers are incorporated into and work for the community and brand. These people are consumer-fans who invest time and money into building an identity for the brand - this is for the most part no critical reinterpretation of eBay's brand message, but rather an enthusiastic dissemination.