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 …
