Seattle.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Kate O’Riordan. Her interest is in the biodigital sequencing of the human genome and its representation in digital culture. Genomes are ‘born-digital’ artefacts, and have become a widespread trope in digital culture; a substantial number of Websites provide information on human genomics through databases, browsers, sequences, scans, wikis, and blogs; genome stories told by emerging celebrities in the field are coming to increasing prominence.

Genome sequences are generated through very abstract computational processes; how is such information made meaningful, and by whom? This is a story of the construction of a specific technocratic elite, offering a promise that everybody might some time soon be equally empowered; it’s a story of genetics and behaviour. Genomic research is now also shifting towards the analysis of multiple genomes, and celebrity (auto)biographies are attached to this shift.

Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 speaker is Aristea Fotopoulou, whose interest is in digital networks. She focusses on the Feminism conference in London in 2009, using both ethnographic and Webcrawling methods. The conference is connected with the wider London Feminist Network, which not least engages with recent political changes in the UK. The network reframes views on violence against women, prostitution and pornography, but Aristea’s ethnographic work was able to trace a range of different versions of feminist identity.

Older divisions are reinvoked in networked conditions, and an imaginary perspective of feminism as a movement is evoked in the process; a continuing anxiety about catching up with digital technologies underpins some of these activities, too. In digital environments, doing network politics is being remediated through these imaginaries.

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 starts with Caroline Bassett. Her focus is on Harvey Matusow and the Anti-Computing League (in the 1950s), as an example of political activism. How were groups turned on or off from nascent media technologies; how did they come to see potential uses of such technology?

The Anti-Computing League emerged at a time when personal computers didn’t yet exist; computers weren’t yet viewed as media, and counterculture was driven by Oz Magazine which presented print with television aesthetics. The ACL in England had some 5000 members in the late 1960s (roughly matching the number of computers in the country at the time), and envisaged a war against computing and data processing (e.g. by poking extra holes in their punchcards); it had a certain surrealist element, and aimed to disrupt computers.

Cardiff.
The final session here at Future of Journalism is a roundtable on the News of the World scandal; as a panel session, it will be hard to blog, but I’ll try my best. Bob Franklin starts us off by highlighting the wide reach of the scandal, and notes that while journalism overall has been tarred with the abuses committed by News International, there also has been some excellent journalistic coverage of the scandal.

The first panellist is Labour Party MP Chris Bryant, shadow minister for political and constitutional reform. He says that it feels as if public debate in the UK has been changed massively by the scandal; it feels like being released from prison, he says. In fact, in his Welsh constituency, the only way to get digital TV is to subscribe to (the partly Murdoch-owned) BSkyB; and Murdoch has been using his newspapers’s political influence to protect BSkyB as a cash cow.

Chris’s own phone was hacked, and he knows that this has enabled News papers to find a great number of his contacts, who could then be contacted for any potential dirt they may have. The same happened in the Milly Dowler case, of course, and here Glenn Mulcaire even delete messages, which is ‘playing god with the family’s emotions’, Chris says.

Cardiff.
Day two of the Future of Journalism conference starts with a keynote from Robert McChesney. He begins by acknowledging yesterday’s keynote, but also notes that he has a somewhat different view on matters; pointing to The Guardian as a special case, endowed by a trust, and publicly funded media in Britain in general, he notes that there aren’t all that many such news organisations left – and these and new initiatives may not be enough in their own right to sustain the future of journalism. More and other approaches are needed.

The world is filled with young people who want to be journalists, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so. There’s no lack of talent or enthusiasm, but a lack of resources and institutions that enable this – this is a political problem first and foremost; the labour market for journalists in the U.S. is now the worst it has ever been – worse even than in the Great Depression –, and this will not change unless major changes are made. And things may get even worse in the coming years.

Reykjavík.
The final speaker in this session at ECPR 2011 is Thomas Roessing, who focusses on Wikipedia. His interest is in the politics of Wikipedia’s community of participants, which engages both at a meta level (on Wikipedia as such) and the discussion level (discussing the content of individual articles). Those two levels also interact, of course, and also influence the level of the articles themselves. Researchers can examine these processes by studying the records of online discussion for each article, which Wikipedia also keeps.

Reykjavík.
The next speakers at ECPR 2011 are Jean-Marc Francony and Françoise Papa, who take an information science approach. They begin by noting that their research encountered a number of major methodological difficulties – challenging problems to learn from for further research.

The Web has become more important for the communication of politics in France. TV and traditional mass media still remained the first channels of communication for political parties, and as a tool for politicians to present themselves, and Websites of political parties mainly pursued a top-down communication model in the 2007 presidential campaign, but this is slowly changing. The Web is now established as an additional channel for information; can this new media context change political communication?

Our paper was next at ECPR 2011 – and we presented our thoughts on the role of Twitter hashtags in providing a space for ad hoc online publics. This also builds on some of the work we’ve done during our week-long workshop at the University of Münster last week. I’ll add audio shortly Audio included below, PDF available here:

Reykjavík.
The next session at ECPR 2011 is the one our paper is in, too – but we start with Darren Lilleker, whose focus is on the online communication strategies of Members of the European Parliament. One idea of this study was to examine the role which their various domestic political and media systems played in determining their communication strategies – but there was no obvious correlation at all. (Part of this might be due to the fact that all MEPs receive equal resourcing.)

So, the question becomes: what audiences are these MEPs targetting, and how? Darren and his team pursued this by examining the elements variously targetting general users, journalists, issue activists, and partisan supporters. They found that there is a sense of sophistication in using Web-based information sites; a quarter of MEPs have blogs embedded into their sites, for example, and a fair few allow comments as well (but they don’t tend to get many). Overall, the sites present a very professional picture, with very limited personal information.