Seattle.
The second presenter in this AoIR 2011 session is Mario Orefice, whose focus is on the political uses of Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. There is a growing mistrust of political institutions and actors in western countries, due to a gradual loss of their representative and democratic mission, increased disruptive influence exerted by lobbyists, and the disappearance of traditional forms of identification and effective systems of representation between citizens and parties. This has led to a shift from dutiful citizenship (imposed by the state) to self-actualising citizenship (determined by personal goals).

Mario’s project examined the top ten most-liked Facebook pages of Italian politicians (with likes seen as an indicator of popularity); the content of these pages was analysed using Discovertext between 25 June and 26 September this year. Coding categories for this content were support, action, organisation, and representation.

Seattle.
OK, I walked in a little late to the first AoIR 2011 presentation this morning, by Michele Willson, whose focus is on information filtering. There are different approaches to such filtering: at the user or at the service end, initiated by users or by the system, cognitive or social filtering, and based on knowledge about the user’s interests which may be acquired through a range of different mechanisms.

Different stakeholders in the process, and in developing these processes, will have a range of different agendas and interests – developers have specific algorithms they may wish to explore, funding bodies and sources have specific commercial or other imperatives, users and their friends are interested in particular forms of online activity (content sharing, phatic communication, etc.), and the social network providers overall are interested in increasing participant numbers and boost the stickiness of the platform.

Seattle.
After a brief visit to Taipei (more on that on Mapping Online Publics soon), I’ve now made it to Seattle for the 2011 Association of Internet Researchers conference. We start with the Ignite session of very short and fast papers:

Nick Proferes, whose talk is in Dr. Seuss style, examines the origins of research ethics; he studied the content of the AoIR mailing-list to examine qualitative trends in conversations on ethics (and considered the ethics of doing so as well, of course); email traffic peaked around 2006/2007, and ethics, IRBs, and permissions were amongst the key terms, especially in the context of email and Facebook, and increasingly Twitter; questions of public and private were especially knotty. Most discussions on the AoIR list began with students asking for guidance from the community, and analogies with the analogue world still prevail.

Alex Leavitt talks about a failed research attempt: his interest is in digital subcultures, and he examined Encyclopedia Dramatica (which he describes as a satirical ‘devil’s dictionary’). How does it reflect Internet subculture? Alex’s project scraped the ED wiki, but the assumption in such work is that sites always stay where they are – ED, however, suddenly disappeared when its administrator deleted it in order to start the Oh Internet site; Alex, however, still had the archive of scraped texts (albeit without edit history), and worked with the community to restore the content – the changed his role, of course. How, generally, should researchers deal with ephemerality, then, and with the more or less explicit wishes of original authors for their content to have a limited lifespan…

Vienna.
The final speaker in this session at Challenge Social Innovation is Ricard Ruiz de Querol, who begins by noting the major social challenges we currently face; in addition, we also have some very major social media platforms – his interest is in the overlap and connection between them. A third element is the realm of social innovation, which intersects both areas.

Social media is an umbrella term for a wide range of possible tools, platforms, and practices; even individual platforms like Twitter sustain a universe of applications and practices. Where do we start? How can and do developments – social innovations, even – in one corner of that universe gain speed and scale? How can social entrepreneurship gain a Microsoft or Google to support it (without the negative consequences that may come with such an embrace)?