Blog

Seattle.
The Wednesday keynote at AoIR 2011 is by the abundantly energetic Tom Boellstorff, whose provocation to us is to rethink the digital. This is about both online and offline, and is interested in exploring emergent research areas. After all, what do we mean by digital: just the things we plug in, or the things which are online – or is there more to it? Part of the point here is also to reconnect the digital to indexicality – to return to the roots of the term ‘digit’.

Tom’s early work has been focussing on research into gay and lesbian …

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Annette Vee, who positions the Wisconsin protests in a wider context of protest movements in recent years. How do social movements travel across transnational networks? What role do digitally-shared social media play in this context?

Annette suggests that synchronous online digital communication platforms are globalising our imagined communities, so that we identify not with our fellow citizens, but with those around the world who share our ideologies. There are some similarities between the revolt against the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and the protests against Governor Walker’s draconian unionbusting laws in Wisconsin; they …

Seattle.
OK, sadly I missed part of the Wisconsin protests AoIR 2011 panel, but I’m here at least to cover Matt Gaydos’s presentation. The history of Wisconsin’s protest and activist movements is strong, and the recent grassroots movement against the virtual outlawing of unions is an important new step in this; Matt recounts the story of himself and his fellow students becoming outraged enough to be persuaded to act.

Some of the organising took place through community-organised Defend Wisconsin Websites and Twitter accounts; these were useful, but only to people who were involved right from the start – they didn’t …

Seattle.
The final presenter in our panel at AoIR 2011 is Anders Larsson, who shifts our focus to Sweden. Twitter was used by the national Swedish train operator during the extreme winter of 2010/11 to address the disruptions to train services. There is a strong impetus for major businesses and organisations to be on Twitter, of course; SJ (which used to be the state-owned monopoly train company in Sweden) has been online as @SJ_AB for some time now – but only on weekdays between 9:00 and 16:00 (even though their phone service is online for longer hours).

The last …

Seattle.
My own paper (with Jean), on the Twitter response to the second Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 through the #eqnz hashtag, was next at AoIR 2011. Here are the slides – audio soon, hopefully now also added.

Seattle.
The next speaker in our AoIR 2011 panel is Frances Shaw, who focusses our attention on the December/January 2010 Queensland floods crisis; the peak period in southeast Queensland followed 9 January 2010. The floods washed down from Toowoomba through the Lockyer Valley (were a significant number of lives were lost) and into Ipswich and Brisbane. On Twitter, discussion of the floods was coordinated through the #qldfloods hashtag, and the Queensland Police Service Media Unit account @QPSMedia emerged as a leading actor.

Frances worked through the #qldfloods dataset as well as through tweets sent by and directed at the …

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 is our own, fabulous panel on crisis communication. We begin with an overview paper by my CCI colleagues Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford, who introduce the idea of acute events. Kate begins by outlining the idea of media ecologies involving a wide range of different media platforms, and their specific performance during acute events (such as crises, but also a range of similar events).

Jean follows on by defining acute events as significant real-world events which are associated with intense bursts in media activity – from political elections to royal weddings, from celebrity …

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Anita Blanchard, whose interest is in entitativity on Facebook: the feeling of the ‘groupiness’ of specific groups. Such entitativity emerges from the presence of clear group boundaries, internal homogeneity between members, social interaction in the group, a clear group structure, and shared common goals held by all members. Such entitativity is a necessary precursor to key group processes and outcomes, such as a common group identity.

So, what is the level of entitativity on Facebook? How groupy can it be? There are a range of obvious groupings …

Seattle.
Kathleen Kuehn is the next speaker at AoIR 2011; her paper is inspired by protest events against the apparently racist attitudes of the operators a local swimming pool which were conducted with the help of the local services consumer review site Yelp. Yelp provides a space for user-created reviews ; how is such consumer-reviewing perceived by users?

This work uses Alvin Toffler’s prosumption concept; consumer reviewing of local products and services can be described as a form of prosumption (and echoing the alternative explanation of ‘prosumption’, participating users may also be thought of as professional consumers). Ideas …

Seattle.
The second presenter in this AoIR 2011 session is Mario Orefice, whose focus is on the political uses of Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. There is a growing mistrust of political institutions and actors in western countries, due to a gradual loss of their representative and democratic mission, increased disruptive influence exerted by lobbyists, and the disappearance of traditional forms of identification and effective systems of representation between citizens and parties. This has led to a shift from dutiful citizenship (imposed by the state) to self-actualising citizenship (determined by personal goals).

Mario’s project examined the top ten most-liked …