Blog

Brisbane.


The last ANZCA 2009 session for today begins with a paper by Fiona Martin (and my laptop seems to be dying, so I'm not sure whether I'll capture all three papers successfully...). She notes the role which identity definition plays especially for teenagers, and is part of a Prix Jeunesse research project investigating how young people are using research tools to represent themselves visually, how this can be understood in terms of diversity, and how this can be related to educational television.

This has been prompted to some extent by TV producers' interest in social media, partly because they are concerned that social media will steal their audiences (even though there is no clear evidence for this). TV producers also need more information on what users are doing in social media in order to develop effective cross-media strategies, especially for educational television.

Brisbane.


The final speaker for this ANZCA 2009 session is Alison Henderson, who focusses on the organisational use of social networking sites. Such sites (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace) provide a space for the communication of 'friendship' through the creation of online profiles and friendship networks, as well as for the sharing of information, audiovisual materials, and other personal material. They provide a space for networking and for creating connections. (There is a slight difference here between social network - representing and maintaining friendship - and social networking - making new friends - in some of the literature, too.)

Brisbane.


The next speaker here at ANZCA 2009 is Sal Humphreys, presenting on the knitting Website Ravelry as a social network market. Discussions of intellectual property, distributed participation, and user-generated content have struggled to keep up with these developments: social economy is intertwined and interconnected with commercial economy, and there are serious questions about when participation becomes exploitation.

Social network markets characterise these ideas as emergent, and provide a useful basis for their theorisation. Mass media theory also fails to align effectively with these new interactive environments. HOw is power distributed, who has agency, what is the role and impact of institutions in relation to these environments?

Brisbane.


The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Matt Allen, reflecting on the concept of Web presence, not least in the context of teaching and learning. (I'm afraid I missed out on Jack Qiu's keynote as I was talking to colleagues from the ABC's Pool project.) Web presence is operating as an organising device for Matt's students in Internet Studies at Curtin University, and he has an Australian Learning and Teaching Council project on authentic assessment using Internet tools. Finally, learning is a form of knowledge work, and the more knowledge becomes networked, so must learning - so, knowledge networkers must ensure they have a Web presence that is both centred and decentred.

Brisbane.


The third speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Tim Highfield, who works on a comparative study of political blogs in Australia and France (and is one of my PhD students). He focusses here on the Australian side and its reaction to the inauguration of Barack Obama. The project tracks some 245 blogs and news Websites in Australia, and extracts from these each post (and its links) as they become available online. These data are then quantitatively analysed for keyword and link patterns.

The Obama inauguration was a major political event, of course, and provided a useful case study for this work; other such samples could be the swine flu epidemic or the 'utegate' controversy storm in a teacup. Interestingly, only about 50 blogs in the population published a post or more during the two weeks surrounding the inauguration (possibly due to the fact that January is a major holiday month in Australia). There was no major spike on inauguration day itself, either.

Brisbane.


The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Orit Ben-Harush, whose interest is in communication in social networks, and she begins by introducing the idea of 'friendworks': that is, a specific group of people (considered as friends) within one's entire social network. Her study traced such networks in a small Australian seachange community in New South Wales, and also especially focussed on the use of mobile phones by this community.

Social network as a term is too broad for this sort of analysis - and while friends and friendship are rather vague terms in this context, they are nonetheless highly productive. Social networks overall include family, friendworks, work-related networks, location-based connections, and online relationships, and there are overlaps between these network components, of course.

Brisbane.


The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Lelia Green, presenting on the practices of a small affinity group (a LAN clan) of year 11-12 students in suburban Perth. None of these young men could quantify what amount of time they spent online each day; they used the Net extensively during their non-school time, at any rate. The study focussed especially on the use of Bittorrent, which was invented in 2002 and has been especially used for sharing movie and television content. Bittorrent use becomes more effective the more users are sharing the same file, of course, and there were some 4 million users online at any one point by 2006. By February 2009, some 160 million users had downloaded Bittorrent softwares.

Brisbane.


We begin the morning of the second day at ANZCA 2009 with a keynote by Nick Couldry, whose focus is on the question of voice, especially in the context of neoliberalism. There are two schools of neoliberalism here, though - orthodox, scholarly informed economic neoliberalism as well as a broader neoliberal doctrine which has been applied to much larger areas of society, and especially to culture.

Neoliberalism works with a simplifying force: it uses hegemonic terms such as markets to convince us to treat very different areas as similar - local detail and difference is erased in the process. The response to this is to treat the term neoliberalism similarly, and point out its limitations, in order to be able to think beyond it. We may return to an older idea of the market as a reference point, and ask the economy how its freedom can have a state-creating function. In this, markets provide an organisational function.

Brisbane.


The final speaker at ANZCA 2009 today is Ian Ward, whose focus is on political lobbying - for which new regulations have been introduced by the Rudd government recently. Lobbying is integral to Australian politics, but remains understudied; it is an increasingly professionalised area of politics in Australia. And interestingly, on the new register of lobbyists in Australia, there is also a substantial number of public relations firms - lobbying is no longer driven by old boys' networks, but by professional communicators.

Brisbane.


The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Gwilyn Croucher, who focusses on the citizen-consumer and researches this in the context of the pension debacle in the UK. There was a major push under the Blair government to give citizens more choice in public services, and during the 1980s and 1990s the UK government privatised pension schemes, but it is now required to compensate citizens for the loss of pension entitlements due to the systematic provision of incorrect information by the Department of Work and Pensions as part of the privatisation scheme. This information incorrectly implied a government guarantee for pension schemes, many of which subsequently collapsed.