Politics

Milwaukee.
The final keynote of AoIR 2009 is by Megan Boler, editor of Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. She begins by noting the shared sense of aporia at the conference. What do we do as we face the rapidly changing environments of social media - do we feel let down by the Internet, do we daily have to renegotiate the changing visage of the Internet? Megan is particularly interested in exploring this in the context of war, and especially the war on terror - so much especially of the material produced from critical perspectives is dismissed as noise here, so how do we make what we feel is important audible and visible? (To illustrate this, Megan shows a video compiling the repetitive use of certain keywords - September 11, Saddam Hussein, war on terror, terrorism - by US leaders.)

Milwaukee.
The next session at AoIR 2009 starts with Andrew Herman, who introduces the idea of 'Blackberry capitalism'. He notes the shift towards wireless Internet use in recent years; most US Internet users now access the Net wirelessly, for example, and trends are similar in many other countries. There is no distinction in much of the data between wireless and mobile uses, however; mobile Internet use entails some very different practices from mere wifi access. Mobile communication has similarly changed away from mere mobile telephony, of course; the possibilities of mobile communication have extended well beyond talking and texting, but don't simply converge with wireless Internet usage practices.

Milwaukee.
Daisy Pignetti is the next speaker at AoIR 2009, and focusses on the post-Hurricane Katrina blogosphere. She calls this Disaster 2.0, with events such as the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York as Disaster 1.0 (a time when many users had substantial difficulty accessing the Internet, and had to employ smart, lateral strategies in order to work out what was going on). In the aftermath, citizens of the US came together online to share their stories and perceptions of the event, and this led to substantial change.

During Katrina, television coverage was substantially hindered by the catastrophe itself - journalists couldn't get to the scene of the event itself, due to the flooding, and at times said that they 'just didn't know' what was happening; the Net, by contrast, performed much better in covering the event and helping with emergency relief. For the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the paper's blog actually became the paper as the printed paper couldn't be delivered, of course; the site Katrina.com became an information centre for disaster relief, and many other such sites emerged as well. One site that was developed mapped the flooding depth onto Google Maps, in fact.

Milwaukee.
Wow, it's the last day of AoIR 2009 already... This morning I'm in the session on blogospheres, which begins with Carmel Vaisman. Her interest is in how bloggers influence political contexts, beyond the conventional and somewhat clichéd framing of bloggers as citizen journalists or political activists - what she wants to do, then, is to track blogging practices in order to understand what political impact they may have. This is in the context of the Israeli blogosphere in this case (and Carmel is a political blogger herself in Israel, and in that role has been in contact with political organisations who are building connections to the political blogosphere).

Milwaukee.
The next presentation at AoIR 2009 is by Hallvard Moe, who begins by noting that the public sphere is still a useful concept It exposes us to expressions, opinions, and perspective we would not otherwise have chosen in advance, and provides a range of common experiences for citizens. But how do online media impinge on this - do they segment and polarise the public sphere (as suggested by people like Cass Sunstein), or provide more connections between and access to different ideas (as per Yochai Benkler's networked public sphere)?

Milwaukee.
The final speaker this morning at AoIR 2009 is my PhD student Tim Highfield, who focusses on the French blogosphere and uses much the same methodology as in our joint paper. His work focusses on a dataset of French blog and mainstream news media posts from some 450 sites throughout 2009, and out of this identifies what events and topics are driving discussion. Sites in his sample were identified through searches on relevant search engines as well as on specialist blog aggregators such as the French Linkfluence.

Overall, this particular study, which focusses on blogs, now takes in some 23000 posts from 148 active blogs over 221 days, out of some 165,000 posts when you also include the mainstream news media. Because the French political environment is multi-party, these blogs cluster into a number of groupings, rather than just a broad 'left' and 'right' category.

Milwaukee.
The next speakers in the blogging session at AoIR 2009 are Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Priscilla Ringrose, whose focus is on war blogging. Such blogging addresses the exceptional communication demands during war situations, and war bloggers in warzones can meet these needs speedily and with authority. This also reflects a continuing shift in the media overall. The focus of this paper is on the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, where western media profiled (English-language) Israeli and Lebanese blogs.

So, the bloggers here belonged to two oppossing, warring nations,and espoused different ideological positions; how were they chosen and what positions do they reflect? What demographics, structural features, thematic, regional, and political positioning do they exhibit? According to which parameters were they selected? The study analysed all posts from 40 blogs (20 Israeli, 20 Lebanese) during the 34-day war in June and August 2006, which were found using search engines, media outlets, and blogs. Blogs had to be based in Lebanon or Israel, had to have at least five posts during the 34 days, had to be in English, had to have at least one hit in the global media, and had to be single- or group-authored rather than blog fora.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this first session at AoIR 2009 is Carol Soon, who shifts our focus to Singaporean political bloggers. Political blogging and related forms challenge conventional top-down communication flows, of course, and in doing so also undermines established entities' authority in information dissemination. What follows is a diversification of political participation in the networked public sphere - and in the Singaporean context, then, who are the key players here?

The networked public sphere can be seen as an autopoietic system,in which flows of communication and relationships are self-organising, move from the bottom up, freely within clusters and in a self-determined fashion. This challenges systems which traditionally hold more powerful positions - and hyperlink analysis can be utilised to examine the flows of information in this changing environment. Such flows may involve conventional political parties, but also civil society groups (which in Singapore particularly challenges the established system).

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Uta Russmann, whose focus is on Web campaigning in Austria during the 2008 national elections, which for the first time saw a substantial use of online media for campaiging. There had been a use of Web-based information in previous elections, of course, but so far this remained quite simple and unsophisticated - mainly just various forms of shovelware.

Uta's study examined the use of the Web during the 2008 campaign, focusing on information provision, interaction with voters, and mobilisation of voters for campaigning, as well as broader connection and networking functions between parties and the media. This also takes into account the lessons from the 2007/8 US campaigns, which pointed to the Net becoming a key source of political information and participation especially for younger voters, as well as similar observations in recent campaigns in Germany, Italy, and France.

Milwaukee.
I've made it to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in windy Milwaukee, and promptly managed to seriously upset my stomach - so let's see how we go today. The first speaker in my first session at AoIR 2009 is Aaron S. Veenstra, whose focus is on political blogging during the 2008 US elections. He notes the emergence of what he calls 'new' new media - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter - and these have affected the way we think about political blogging, too.

Overall, too, blogging itself is increasingly difficult to define as technical definitions are dynamic and blogging genres are inconsistent at the top end and incredibly varied at the bottom end. The top tier of blogs may now be separating from the field, and liberal and conservative blogs (in the US) are growing apart; additionally, it is also important to distinguish between community and individual functions.