Krems.
My own keynote was next at CeDEM 2011, and flowed on very nicely from Caroline’s presentation. Here are the slides, and the full paper – audio to follow soon also online now, as usual…

Krems.
The second round of keynotes at CeDEM 2011 starts with Caroline Haythornthwaite, whose focus is on making sense of online community structures. She begins from a social network analysis perspective, which understands social networks as constituted of relations between actors. Such social networks transcend online social networks, of course; rather, we now need to take a whole-of-system perspective in which social networking takes place across a range of networks, including online networks.

What’s especially important here, too, is a focus on new forms of collaborating and organising; with the shift towards Web 2.0, but also with many other concurrent shifts, there’s been a transition in attitudes and practices towards collaboration. Indeed, Caroline suggests that we’ve entered a Web 2+ period now. Alongside this are shifts towards user-driven practices, the perpetual beta where things are constantly in flux, and where data and information are mashed up and remixed all the time.

Krems.
The final speaker in this CeDEM 2011 session is Kostas Zafiropoulos, whose interest is in political blogging in Greece. He describes Greek blogs as a self-organising community, and begins by showing the well-known image from Adamic & Glance’s study of the US political blogosphere around the 2004 election (which, analysing the patterns of interlinking between blogs, showed a highly polarised environment at the time).

Kostas’s project undertook a similar study for Greece. They began by using Technorati to find Greek political blogs (with “some” authority, according to Technorati’s measures), and tagged them according to their political orientation. During May 2009, they identified some 101 blogs through this process.

Krems.
The next speaker at CeDEM 2011 is Jakob Svensson, who shifts our attention towards the individual in political participation. He does this against the background of the 2010 Swedish elections, which for the first time used social media in a significant way. Jakob focussed on Nina Larsson, a politician of the conservative Liberal’s Party, who used two blogs during her campaign.

Jakob notes the different forms of rationalities (deliberative, but especially also expressive) which are on display in such uses; beyond this, there is also a more instrumental use of social media to influence election outcomes, of course (at worst, this simply refers to naked political spin). All of this needs to be considered in a wider theoretical context of digital late modernity and networked individualism, of course. The process of individualisation opens up other spheres for participation, too – life politics, for example. Blogs and other social networking sites are sometimes seen as saviours for this, but there are strong critiques of such perspectives, too.

Krems.
The next CeDEM 2011 session starts with a presentation by Peter Mambrey, whose focus is on the potential role of Twitter in e-participation. He begins by noting the expansion of the media ecology and the take-up of new media forms by specific groups in society; this creates new opportunities for political participation and self-empowerment, but also challenges for local administration and government.

There is a rising expectation of service quality, growing demands for local service delivery and expertise, competition between cities for citizens and enterprises, demographic change (with a marked population decline in some areas in Germany, for example), and financial problems in the wake of the global financial crisis. General questions include transparency and input-legitimacy, dialogue and output-legitimacy, collaboration and participation, identity management and public relations, and an erosion of the representative system (also through lobbying).

Krems.
I’ve made it to Austria for the third year running, to attend the Conference on e-Democracy. We begin the day with a keynote by Douglas Schuler – and my own keynote will come later today, too. The proceedings from the conference will appear soon on Google Books, by the way – in line with the open access philosophy espoused by many e-democracy initiatives. The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #cedem11, by the way.

Doug begins his talk with the premise that current trends aren’t adequate for the challenges we face – can we intelligently readjust our activities? What’s necessary here are interdisciplinary approaches, aiming for research that makes a real difference. Doug’s focus is on deliberation: we are in desperate need of good decisions and actions, which help fix our current problems. Such decisions don’t necessarily happen through conventional mechanisms (including the free market); we won’t luck into better solutions, but need clear and effective mechanisms for better deliberation to reach them.

Sorry: it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. Largely, that’s because I’ve been so busy with our work on the Mapping Online Publics project – see the project blog for all the latest information. Following the various natural disasters we’ve endured – in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, to begin with –, that work has focussed for the moment especially on the use of social media for crisis communication, with plenty of outcomes already. In particular, this includes our two most recent presentations:

• “Social Media Use in the Queensland Floods”, at the Eidos symposium in Brisbane on 4 April 2011
• “Tracking Crises on Twitter: Analysing #qldfloods and #eqnz”, at the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra on 12 April 2011

Slides and audio from both presentations are now online here – just follow the links above.