Gothenburg.
The next session at AoIR 2010 starts with Rachel McLean, whose interest is how technology configures the home, especially in relationship to the placement of shared entertainment technology. How is the family living room set up, and who controls the technology there, for example? This was examined for families in the northwest of England.

Social practices around the television have changed over the decades. Once, families would gather around the television in the corner of the living room like they did around the hearth; with digital technology, this gradually fragmented, though something of a digital hearth perhaps still exists …

Gothenburg.
Today’s keynote at AoIR 2010 looks like it’s actually taking place, after the withdrawal of Jon Bing due to illness yesterday. Peter Arnfalk is the speaker, and his topic is ‘green IT’: a significant buzzword at the moment, which is nonetheless poorly defined so far. There is a substantial potential for CO2 emission reductions through IT – for greening through IT: it has been calculated that the EU’s CO2 emissions could be reduced by some 15% through IT by 2020, for example. This could be done through reductions in the transport sector, the electricity grid, and in building emissions …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Theo Plothe, whose interest is in the use of Twitter by NFL players in the US. The NFL is the most popular league in the US, and players are increasingly participating in it – presumably also encouraged by their employers. NBA player Charlie Villanueva, in fact, was reprimanded for tweeting during a basketball game. NFL players have also been fined, suspended, and fired for tweeting inappropriate comments – and in fact, player Ocho Cinco even orchestrated a post-touchdown celebration with fans via Twitter.

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 speaker is David Houghton, whose interest is also in Twitter. He starts by pointing to a range of tweets of varying degrees of mundaneness and secrecy, and is interested in examining linguistic differences in them. What threats to personal privacy result from the spread of gossip? How can levels of self-disclosure be measured – in breadth or depth, for example – in order to alert users to when they might be compromising themselves by oversharing?

How do we enable users to go about sharing while protecting their concerns and informing them about potential harms …

Gothenburg.
I must admit I missed the 8.20 a.m. sessions this morning – just couldn’t cope with the cold. So, we’re jumping right into the next session at AoIR 2010, which starts with Axel Maireder. He begins by noting the function of Twitter as a medium for public discourse; tweets can reach large audiences especially if retweeted widely (an average of 1000 users for each retweet).

Twitter is used for debate on public issues, of course – and Axel’s study has identified a number of typical themes (education and professional, spare time, everyday life, social relations, mottos and aphorisms …

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2010 session is Bjarki Valtysson, whose interest is in the politics of access to exchange-oriented processes of mass self-communication – which build on a different arrangement of production, distribution, and consumption processes than we used to have. This is a clash between the politics of access (read/write) and the politics of permission (read-only culture), and there’s a question about how this plays out in digital public spheres.

This can be examined in the context of a number of projects. The Europeana content archive has been hampered by complex polemics regarding online accessibility, the …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is TL Taylor, whose interest is in game culture – an area where transnational connections are now also prevalent. Where games consoles used to be strongly region-controlled, this has loosened considerably – games bought abroad will now often also play in a different geographical region, even if the same is not necessarily true yet for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. But in accessing and downloading games, for example, users are often still required to identify their location (or geolocated by their IP address).

Games companies themselves are also reinscribing regional specificity into the gameplay …

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 speaker is Irina Shklovski, whose interest is in transnationalism – defined as either migrant practices that establish or maintain links between the two countries or origin and destination, or as cosmopolitanism or a broadly defined non-culturally specific world identity. But what is the value and meaning of such long-distance ties as they are primarily maintained through online communication?

More specifically, what forms of transnational belonging may exist here: what does investing energy into maintaining such relationships mean for the people engaged in it, can such transnational contact open new horizons beyond the scope of daily …

Gothenburg.
The final AoIR 2010 panel for today starts with Lisbeth Klastrup, who’s presenting on a study of how Danes participate in Facebook. While the overall Facebook community now numbers some 500 million users, how localised and fragmented is that community, for example along national and local lines? Examining the Danish Facebook community might provide some useful answers to this question. Some of this is also related to overall cultural patterns, of course – the importance of local and family ties to a national culture, for example; a ‘national intimacy’ which is relatively strong in Denmark. Contrasted with this …