Blog

Hong Kong.


The next presenter at The Internet Turning 40 is Charles Steinfield, whose focus is on social capital in social networking sites. Social networking sites now rival search engines as the most visited sites on the Web; Facebook now has close to half a billion users. The key features of such sites are user-constructed public or semi-public profiles, a set of connections to other users on the system, and the ability to view and follow one's own connections as well as the connections of others.

Research into social networking has examined impression management and friendship performance, networks and network structure, bridging and online networks, privacy, and how users derive benefits from social networking. Such benefit can be framed especially as social capital: the accumulated resources derived from relationships among people in a specific social context of network.

Hong Kong.


The afternoon session at The Internet Turning 40 starts with a paper by Zizi Papacharissi on identity performance in social networking. She begins by noting the common question of whether social networking makes its users more or less social, and suggests that ultimately social networking is simply integrated into the social lives of its users; a better question may be what media and what online spaces are more or less social, and what online sociability actually means.

Zizi and her colleagues conducted a number of studies to explore those questions, and found a different kind of sociability on Facebook, for example - characterised for some users by a somewhat more passive sociability conducted from the home, but also by a greater flexibility, mobility, and convergence of social behaviours which are linked across Facebook and other spaces. The public privacy of social ties was also notable - users recognised the privacy risks and showed a complex, reflexive understanding of privacy.

Hong Kong.


The final speaker in this opening session of The Internet Turning 40 is my CCI colleague John Hartley, who argues for a shift towards new understanding of archives: in the modern time, they were characterised by galleries and museums as archives of essence, collected and curated by professional experts - of actual things. In postmodernity, broadcast TV systems provided a mediated archive through time-based, intangible objects; today,we have probability archives containing digital and virtual objects online, co-curated by users and containing objects whose status and existence is undetermined.

Hong Kong.


The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Frank Webster, who shifts our focus from taking stock of existing research areas to exploring the future; his interest is in the future of the public sphere in the age of the Internet. He notes the existence of a Social Democratic consensus (certainly in Europe) that it is necessary for state agencies to intervene in the informational realm, because the market alone cannot be trusted to provide for an informed citizenry and is complicated by the growth of PR and corporate lobbying. So, state intervention aims to provide adequate information to the public, to ensure that democracy works effectively. This is legitimated by the concept of the public sphere, which is served by public service institutions.

Hong Kong.


The next speaker in this opening session of The Internet Turning 40 is Clement So, who mapped the development of Internet research (especially in the communication field) over the past 20 years using the ISI Web of Science article database. Such studies have been done for communication in general, but not with a specific focus on Internet research. The relevant journal databases in ISI Web of Science cover some 10,000 journals (though they are biased towards English-language journals and the social sciences rather than humanities).

Hong Kong.


It's Thursday, so this must be Hong Kong - and I'm at the "Internet Turning 40" conference celebrating the 45th anniversary of the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University Hong Kong, and maping out future directions for new media research. We start with Ronald Rice, who maps out the development of social science approaches to studying the Internet over the past decade.

Some 20 years ago, the term 'Internet' appeared in social science-based communications research articles - especially also from libary and information research fields; the 'World Wide Web' as a distinct theme appeared around ten years ago. Areas like privacy, sharing research information, social isolation, work uses, citizen networks, and country-specific research appeared around that time. Occurrences in abstracts almost tripled between 2001 and 2004, in particular. More recently, such terms may have been replaced by more specific terms - 'blogs', 'wikis', and now 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' are becoming more prominent instead.

Krems.


The final speakers in this EDEM 2010 session are Noella Edelmann and Peter Parycek, who begin by highlighting the importance of open access journals, and the mindshift amongst users who now expect to have open access to information.

Open access has caused a stir in the academic community by providing a different model for publication; it is still poorly understood, however: it does not necessarily change peer review processes, for example, though some open access projects do substantially change the approach to scholarly publication. It operationalises the advantages of publishing online by minimising costs and maximising distribution; in doing so, it also creates substantial benefits especially for disavantaged scholars (e.g. from developing countries).

Krems.


The second speaker in this EDEM 2010 session is Evgeniya Boklage, whose interest is in the impact of the political blogosphere on communicative transparency. Transparency is crucial for interpersonal communication; it is an existential prerequisite for deliberative processes, too. If we consider the public sphere as a communicative system, the key functions are transparency (input), validation (throughput), and orientation (output), and Evgeniya focusses on the first of these here.

Krems.


We're now starting the post-lunch session on this last day of EDEM 2010, and the first speaker is Alexander Balthasar. His fundamental question is what citizenship of the European Union may mean, following the recent treaty process. This is highlighted especially by the instrument of the European Citizens' Initiative, which has been positioned by European bodies as a kind of petition process, but could also become a much more powerful or flexible instrument rivaling proposals by the EU Council or Parliament. The obvious difference is that in order to launch an ECI, 'only' one million signatures are required, whereas Council or Parliament have a more clearly legitimated mandate to act.