Gothenburg.
And Mathieu Simonson is back for a second presentation in this AoIR 2010 session, examining how the editorial choices and sourcing practices of major French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro compare with those of participatory political blogging / citizen journalism platforms Agora Vox and Rue 89. The case study here is their coverage of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (COP15). This involved some 214 articles across the four platforms.

Traditional platforms focussed on negotiations (35%), education and sensibilisation (22%), and demonstrations, protests and militants (14%); participatory platforms similarly focussed on negotiations (30%), climate science (22%), and …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is my brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield, whose interest is in what contribution blogging (by a wide variety of bloggers concerned with politics, the news, current events, and the reflection of such topics in specific fields of interest) makes to the overall mediasphere. Such bloggers may have a variety of points of focus, and while the ‘informing’ role of blogs has been stressed in the literature, this may not be their only function.

There is also an underlying question of how bloggers and journalists interrelate with one another – whether they are …

Gothenburg.
Oops, got into the next AoIR 2010 session a little late (why are the coffee breaks so short?), and Mathieu Simonson is already in full flight. This is a paper on motivations for blogging, which engaged in interviews with journalist-bloggers to examine why they were blogging.

Key motivations identified here were personal autonomy: escaping professional routines and professional limitations, e.g. by publishing niche journalism or posting more politically biased commentary; self-development: learning and innovation – though notably not engaging in first-hand field research; self-promotion: personal branding, differentiation, and marketing, which also draws on the next activity; community interaction: discussion …

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 session I’m in is a panel on sustainable entertainment, which involves Wenche Nag from the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor, Mia Consalvo, Jean Burgess, Patrick Wikström, and Martin Thörnkvist. Patrick begins by noting the transformations in the music industry, for example, where the largest company now no longer is a record label but a live music company. iTunes and similar models are also making a significant impact, of course. Much of this is now based on artist/audience relationships that are based on passion and substantial emotional investment – which works for some entertainment industries, of course …

Gothenburg.
The final speaker at AoIR 2010 is Sebastian Deterding, who is interested in reframing Web 2.0 as a public service right to communicate. One example of the debates around this is the French HADOPI three-strikes law around filesharing, which would remove Net access from offending users; others have framed Google or Facebook as universal public services, and describe broadband access as just as important as water or electricity.

The Internet is now a core communicative backbone for various communication networks, then – but how might we think about the Net as a public service in a more systematic, technology-neutral …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose interest is in how citizenship is transforming in the online age – with a special focus on personal media, including social networking services, in Denmark. Denmark has a high Internet penetration, with a comparatively well-educated public, and the outcomes of this survey can be compared effectively with similar studies in the US and UK.

Citizenship has changed from civil through political to social citizenship over the past few centuries; we are now also seeing the emergence of cultural citizenship, where patterns of cultural activity, lifestyle, and consumption are …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is David Kurt Herold, who shifts our focus to China. ‘Online China’ represents a very large population now (at more than 400 million users), but is connected with the rest of the world through only 27 major connections. The Chinese Internet remains government-owned, too – China owns the network backbone, and government control over the Net is therefore the default setting. There is also substantially less content creation on the Chinese Net; Internet use is consumption-oriented, and operates largely through fairly old-fashioned major portals and BBSes. It is also a very violent place …

Gothenburg.
AoIR 2010 has started, and we’re beginning with Fabio Giglietto, on how networked publics are reconfiguring themselves these days. There is a shift in how we understand publics, as well as in how we understand civicness – from dutiful citizenship to self-actualising citizenship, where there is a lesser sense of obligation to government participation, and a more self-determined form of participation in civic matters. This is also wrapped up in participatory culture, and participatory politics as a subset of this.

Political engagement today exists at the intersection of political knowledge (information and communication based) and political participation, then. Fabio …

Hamburg.
The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2010 is Beata Klimkiewicz, whose interest is in media system change in central and eastern Europe (CEE), focussing especially on structural processes. That said, the boundaries that define CEE are highly elusive – national boundaries in this area have shifted more than elsewhere in Europe, not least in recent decades, which means that there are various overlapping and conflicting criteria for defining geographic, regional, ethnic, and other boundaries. Additionally, the boundary changes which happened in 1989 provided a distinguishing generational experience for scholars in this field, which is not necessarily shared with the …

Hamburg.
We’re now in the final plenary session at ECREA 2010, which starts with a keynote by Ruth Wodak. Her interest is in a multi-level, qualitative, and longitudinal analysis of the European public sphere (EPS), which necessitates a multidisciplinary approach. She begins by taking us back to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which started the process of European unification – at a virtually all-male, all-elderly meeting of (western) European heads of state.

Compare this, for example, with the original Website of the European Union, as a very different public space – constructed at some great effort, but …