Politics

Brisbane.
Over the next few days I'll be blogging from the ANZCA 2009 conference - one which I didn't have to travel very far for, as it's held right here on the QUT Creative Industries Precinct down from my office. We begin with a keynote by Barbie Zelitzer, President of the International Communication Association, whose focus is on the visual depiction of death in the news. Such images require the viewer to imagine what we cannot see, but then, news is supposed to tell us what is there. The moment of death is one of the most powerful images in the news, and raises (amongst others) a wide range of ethical issues. Key recent examples include images related to the 'war on terror', from the 11 September attacks to the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Agüeras Gäng from Politik-Digital.de , a new online platform which has recently focussed especially on a Dutch policy programme to support digital pioneers. He begins with a statement by Ariana Huffington, saying that journalism will not only survive, but flourish: users surf and use search engines to identify, and collate quality content which is updated on an ongoing basis. This new model is based on the networking and interlinkage of content.

Copenhagen.
The third speaker in this session at COST298 is Funda Başaran Özdemir. Her interest is in the use of alternative news Websites in Turkey - in particular, of the labour movement site Sendika.org. Traditionally, monopolies of knowledge have determined what qualifies as knowledge and how it it disseminated; they derive their power from mastery of complexity, the control of raw media materials, and their performativity, speed, and the ability to afford high costs. Opposed to such strategic interests are tactical initiatives which insert themselves into the cracks and exploit temporary opportunities.

Athens.
From here we move on to Panayotis Pantos as the final WebSci '09 speaker on online politics. He begins by posing the fundamental question 'what is politics'? Do we understand by the term only elections and campaign, political parties, unions and other political organisations, and lobby groups, or is politics the process by which groups make collective decisions?

Online communication addresses the tensions between private and collective, participation and mediation, and physical distance and the increase of communication - we are no longer merely receivers, but also producers of information; our existence online abolishes some long-held understandings of how the communicatory and political process is supposed to work (but of course it does not eradicate all differences or enables all of us to participate in the same way).

Athens.
The next speaker in this politics session at WebSci '09, A. Priftis, switches back to Greek. He begins by noting his own online presence in a variety of online environments, but says that what he does is nothing special. The Obama campaign, by contrast, very actively placed itself directly in the paths of people as they moved about online, and prepared its supporters with material that could be used to argue the Obama case in any such environments. This was very successful on a number of levels - for example in engendering the support of American youths (some of whom even changed their middle name to 'Obama').

Athens.
The politics session at WebSci '09 continues with Elias Athanasiadis. Following Dan Gillmor, he notes the promise of new media for (political communication), and describes this as a transition from a top-down broadcasting model which has engendered politica apathy, mistrust, and citizen disengagement - or what he describes as 'skin-deep politics' - to a bottom-up netcasting in which interactivity, interconnectedness, the compression of time and space, and the disintermediation through phenomena such as citizen journalism creates the potential for citizen empowerment and (re)engagement.

Athens.
The final full session here at WebSci '09 is on (Greek) politics online, so of course I'm here. It's another session with live interpretation from Greek to English - hopefully she's done chewing gum now! We start with G. Alexias, who introduces us to the performance of Greek political parties online (and he does so in English, actually). Does the online presence of Greek political actors lead to the formation of online political communities? His study examined this in the wake of the 2004 parliamentary elections, and performed both a quantitative analysis of social software features of these sites and a qualitative analysis of the sites' characteristics.

Athens.
The final speaker in this session at WebSci '09 is Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose interest is in what influences people's decision to act collectively (or not). Is it the extent to which others are participating? Related to this is the question of whether use of the Internet makes a difference to such collective action decisions - since it is now possible to know, in real time, how many other people are participating. We can now measure information effects, perhaps for the first time, but what are the appropriate methods for doing so?

Athens.
The next session at WebSci '09 focusses on the impact of the Web on government processes and policies. We begin with a paper by Albert Batlle, who notes that e-government studies so far have rarely been interdisciplinary, continue to lack a theoretical basis, still only speculate about the benefits of e-government, conduct studies which focus only on what online elements are available (they are focussing only on the supply side of e-goverment, not the demand side), and may even be guilty of technological determinism.

Albert's own study used instead an interdisciplinary approach, examined new interaction mechanisms and back office processes and their dynamics, studied uses of both explicit and implicit information, and operated on an empirical basis by studying citizen attention services in Quebec, Catalunya, and (the Brazilian federal state) Sao Paulo. The focus, then, is on information flows within public administrations, and examined their implications at Fountain's three levels of institutionalised government processes, public organisations and interorganisational networks, and ongoing social relations in social network interactions. If information flows change at one level, the hypothesis predicts, this will also occasion change at the other levels. What is of greatest interest here is organisational change in government structures.

Athens.
Finally for this first day at WebSci '09, we move to the poster session, which includes our poster on the Australian political blogosphere mapping project; the A1 poster itself is available here, and there's also a brief article to provide further background detail. From the post slideshow that's playing at the moment, there's quite a bit of really interesting stuff here - and all of the posters are also available online.