OK, after the end of AoIR 2004 I'm back in Brighton now. I couldn't get access with my laptop at the University of Sussex at all for the last few days, so I'm now about to post my backlog of blog entries (my backblog?) from the last few days.
The next (and last for this conference) session is about to begin, titled simply 'resistance?' Still a good turnout for the session even though people are now starting to leave the University of Sussex to catch their various planes. Andrew Ó Baoill starts this session with a study of MoveOn.org, a political group which started in 1998 around the Clinton impeachment campaign and enables participation in political action by members of the public.
Back after lunch now, and we're in the next session on blogs and related media forms. Karen Gustafson makes the start, speaking on blogs and the creation of community, especially on political blog sites. She has selected four high-ranking political blogs to study, including Instapundit and others. They have a range of ideological positions and are themselves influential amongst blogs. However, this is of course a very narrow subset of all blogs.
Common discourses around blogs include the idea of an emergence of public spheres, but also a conceptualisation of blogs as symptoms of fragmentation. They are an important addition …
On to the next session - I got here late because the session was moved, but the current paper by Michael Nentwich is about the virtualisation of research and academic exchange. He discusses first the suitability of email for academic communication. Asynchronicity, speed, the written character, and the permanence are mentioned as useful characteristics in this context.
Five functions of traditional academic seminars, workshops and conferences: they contribute to quality control, the transmission of knowledge, serving as a node in the scientific network, social management, and ideas generation. In a virtual setting, these might continue to exist: this is certainly true for quality control, but the transmission of knowledge or the placement of nodes in scientific networks might work better face-to-face. Social management could work, but not in the same way as it does in offline contexts, and the same might be true for ideas generation.
A good discussion about blogging and the lack of wireless support over lunch; including some very good ideas for what to do better next time around. Lilia has now set up a site on TopicExchange to combine most of us AoIR bloggers, and I'll post more details about this as soon as I can actually post something… We've now moved on to the next session on Internet governance.
Finally had an opportunity to do some basic networking in the break. I really don't seem to have much success with technology at the moment, though - now even my mobile phone seems to be acting up! I came in late on Mattia Miani's presentation on electronic democracy in cooperative enterprises, so I'm not sure how much sense I'll be able to make of the rest of this talk.
Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this.
University of Sussex LibraryAnd we're off … the first sessions at AoIR 2004 (about 8 running simultaneously) have started now. I'm in one on mobile phones and wireless access. Kakuko Miyata starts this session, speaking of Internet use through mobile phones in Japan. She has three research questions: who uses mobiles to access the Net, how do people use these media, and does the use of the Net increase their social capital?
