Politics

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is also on mapping the blogosphere. What is its structure, as part of the wider public sphere; where are the borders of its community, and how communal is it -how are its interlinkages distributed?

Studies of the public sphere and online media tend to focus on specific 'noteworthy' forms of public communication and deliberation, but we need a wider definition of public communication than just 'political debate'. Blogs can be organised along a continuum spanned by the three axes of content (from internal to topical), directional (from monological to dialogical) and style (from intimate to objective); public sphere research tends to focus mainly on one point in that continuum, and we need to move beyond this.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, who also notes the differences between different types of hyperlinks. Links on politicians' sites in Japan, for example, may connect to the politicians' constituencies, show their political affiliations, or facilitate the use of new media for supporter mobilisation. There is also a question of where links are located (on a separate links page or on the politicians' sites' front pages), of course, which points to their different level of impact.

Singapore.
The next speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Se Jung Park, whose focus is on the use of the Korean social networking site Cyworld by politicians. South Korea is a leading country for Internet access, of course, but sites like Facebook and Twitter are not very popular; YouTube, in fact, is partially censored. So, Cyworld is the main space for social networking - including for politicians.

The present study examined the comments left on the Cyworld 'mini-hompys' of Korean politicians during April 2008 and June 2009; from the total number, some 200 comments from each politician's space were randomly selected, and a semantic sentiment analysis was then conducted. There were obvious spikes in commenting during the recent mass protests against the reintroduction of US beef imports.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is James Danowski, who zooms in on online networking patterns across Arab countries especially. One suggestion here is that Internet network development is a precursor to the development of civil societies - and from 2004 to 2010 there's been a tenfold increase in the number of Internet hosts in Arab countries (with a doubling in the last two years alone). So has the lag between network and civil society development remained the same; is it different between English and Arabic spaces online; can we compare this to the development patterns in telephony networks? Can this be tracked through appearances of key Islamic terms like 'sharia' or 'jihad'?

Singapore.
The Friday at ICA 2010 starts with the first of two panels on online network mapping (I'll be presenting in the second one, later today). My brilliant PhD student Tim Highfield is the first presenter. His interest is in topical discussion networks in the French political blogosphere: such topical networks comprise sites commenting on specific events or issues, and the links between them. This observation comes out of a larger dataset collected over a longer period of time.

Singapore.
Finally we move on to Tom Bakker in his ICA 2010 session, who has undertaken a content analysis of political blogs by citizens. Tom notes that there are a variety of terms to describe this citizen journalism, and that political Weblogs still tend to be seen as an archetype for this field; hence the focus on Weblogs. Who are the people who start such blogs, and what are they doing? Is it really 'everybody', as Clay Shirky has said?

In the first place, though: how do we find them? Tom began by using five blog search engines (Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Blogpulse, Icerocket, and Truthlaidbear) to find active Dutch blogs authored by citizens; these were narrowed down to political blogs by examining how the blogger or blog described themselves, and by checking whether at least two of the last five posts dealt with political topics. For the Netherlands, this ultimately resulted in a list of some 163 blogs - so, hardly 'everybody', but actually a fairly small group.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is C.W. Anderson, whose interest is in debates over the US shield law for journalists. Can we see a process of professional boundary maintenance in this (protecting definitions of who is and isn't a journalist)? The shield law debate emerged from questions about what legal protections were available to journalists who were suppoenaed to release information gathered from confidential sources; the law would protect journalists and their sources and grant them immunity from particular forms of prosecution.

Singapore.
The next paper in this ICA 2010 session is by Aaron Veenstra, whose interest is in the cognitive processing of blog-based information. He begins by raising the problem with the term 'new media' - an idea which remains in flux, to which new communication tools are constantly added. There remain significant gaps in the blog literature, too - we still have only a general definition of what blogs are, indeed.

The readers of blogs, Aaron suggests from previous work, are more susceptible to framing effects than other media users; there is a constraint of attitudes and a set of responses to media content which is not found in users of other media. The focus here is on political blogs, whose technical definitions are workable but remain dynamic, and which are difficult to define from an informational perspective. Especially at the popular end, there are significant inconsistencies between blog formats and styles; at the bottom end, there is a similar fuzziness.

Singapore.
The next session at ICA 2010 starts with Sandra Hsu, whose interest is in the distinctions between active and passive blog use. What are the relationships between these uses? What is the impact of blogging, especially of political participation? How do users select the media they use? What is the role of interactivity, and how does blog-based discussion unfold?

The core hypothesis of this research was that active blog use will predict online and offline political participation, while passive use will not. This was tested using a Web-based survey with some 1,100 respondents. Participants were categorised for their online and offline participation, their level of discussion with people connected by weak ties, their reasoning strategies (backing up argumentswith facts) and their level of engagement with non-like-minded participants.

Singapore.
The final speaker on this panel at ICA 2010 is James Hay, who questions the assumption that the move from broadcast to networked media results in a greater potential for grassroots activism and alternative media practice. Grassroots activism is now also often seen as astroturfing - a kind of genetically modified grassroots - and we have seen a resurgence of populism as well.

Such tendencies are predicated often on new media practices, and there is a legacy of the popular in cultural studies which is now being trumped by a focus on grassroots; the media economy, too, is increasingly organised around the management of populations (not least also aiming to know more about the life of population). New forms of populism from the US Tea Party movement on the right to its counterparts on the left still need to be explored more energetically by the people who research user-generated content.