Internet Technologies

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is José Simões, whose interest is in examining the different media uses of Portuguese families. The key interest here is to understand the conditions and tendencies of access to digital media (as well as other media), and the findings will be compared with similar research being conducted in Texas. This will influence education, industry, policy-makers, and social agents, as well as contribute to public debate in this area.

This starts from questions of digital exclusion and participation, of course; exclusion, in fact, is not just about access, but also about other factors, including resources, skills, choices, and representations of technology. Part of this exclusion may be unwanted or unavoidable, then, but in part, people also may not wish to be included in the first place, because of the choices they’ve made and the attitudes they have. Such constraints and choices may be explained by a range of contextual factors.

Hamburg.
The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2010 starts with Arne Hintz, whose focus is on policy agendas for participatory media – which here means a wide range of media forms from radio to online.

Community radio, for example, has traditionally been quite strongly regulated, along with the overall broadcast sector; there is a dual non-commercial/commercial media system, and in some countries also still a strong pirate radio tradition. Gradually, a three-tier broadcast system (community, public service, commercial) has emerged in many countries, and some pirate stations have been given licences.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Des Freedman, who shifts our focus to Net neutrality; he suggests that debates over Net neutrality have become overly legalistic and abstract, and discussions of democracy have largely disappeared from them. The overall debate is now about openness: an open Internet. The principles which underlie arguments for an open Internet are now about consumer entitlements rather than democracy.

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 starts with Ben Peters, who begins by noting the work of Paul Lazarsfeld as a pioneer of media research methods. Ben’s work focusses on the critical, historical, and international dimensions of networks, and he notes the importance of sharing datasets to the project of building a field of global network studies.

Ben’s research is on studying the failed Soviet attempts to build a domestic Internet-style network around the same time that the US developed ARPANET – while there was substantial expertise available, where the US succeeded through a collaborative approach, the Soviet Union failed because of strong competition between bureaucrats. Researching this topic encounters a number of obstacles – a particularist/structuralist divide, the positioning of the researcher, and the researcher’s own skills and preoccupations.

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Julie Freeman, whose interest is in impediments to local e-government development. She suggests that there needs to be further education about ICTs of policy makers; one of the councillors of the city of Casey, in the south-east of Melbourne, whom she interviewed asked whether email was considered to be Internet use, for example.

The current population of Casey is around 256,000 residents (on 400 square kilometres), and continues to grow; some 89% are under 60. There are 11 councillors representing residents in the city council. The city has an extensive and sophisticated Website (with multilingual information and mobile versions), and its Twitter account (@CityOfCasey) has some 500 followers; there are significant visitor numbers (over 700,000 in 2008/9), while call centre calls are slowly declining. There is also a civic networking site, and the overall e-government costs are around $10,000 per annum.

Canberra.
The next paper at ANZCA 2010 is by Jocelyn Williams, who shifts our interest to the question of opinion leaders online. This is in the context of a qualitative study of free Internet access for low-income school-based families, which also pointed to other difficulties and barriers for Internet uptake by low-income families; what can account for differences in uptake even between different case studies in this research project?

One likely explanation is the role played by key individuals who had influence on their peers and may have acted as role models in taking up Internet usage. What needs to be considered as a framework here is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information - society plays a central role in the knowledge formation process. Knowledge is socially constructed by people in relation to one another, within specific contexts; research therefore also needs to consider multiple realities, stakeholders, and angles on the research problem.

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Kerry Green, who presents on the Northern Adelaide Research Archive, an archive which aims to connect a range of previously isolated information on Northern Adelaide. Northern Adelaide has tended to be represented as backward and crime-ridden in the media, and this has been a cause of some concern; prominent people from the area, including singer Jimmy Barnes, have spoken out against this and pushed for a change in media attitudes.

In part, this was facilitated through the organisation of the Northern Summit, developing a number of ideas for change - for example, mapping and coordinating the positive activities happening in the area; developing life transition programmes based on these maps, linked with TAFEs and universities; and improving publicity and access to information for those who can benefit from it. Web 2.0 technology is seen as an important element in this.

Canberra.
The second speaker in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Marilyn Mitchell, whose interest is in visual communication; here, she focusses especially on the design of information 'dashboards' providing key performance indicators to managers in a visual format (one example Marilyn shows is for schools administrators, showing e.g. the percentage of buses running on time and a gauge of ethnic diversity in the student population).

Are such dashboards actually appropriate for providing an overview of such information? Are they cluttered with 'junk' information graphs? Some critics (e.g. Tufte) have suggested that the entire 'dashboard' metaphor is 'lame', others are actively promoting the idea, and at any rate these dashboards have become something of an industry standard, with many managers demanding them and an industry of dashboard providers now emerging.

Canberra,
The next session at ANZCA 2010 starts with Sally Burford, whose focus is on Web information architecture - the process and outcome of defining the online information environment so it enables people to find the information they seek. This is informed by prior practices of information organisation (in libraries and archives, for example), but certainly still has a long way to go - while there is a good theoretical basis for such Web information architecture now, it is not yet being applied consistently in practice so far.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 closing plenary is Josephine Ho, who suggests that there is a developing new social sensibility, a low tolerance sensibility, that aims to create a morally induced responsiveness towards devious content. This goes beyond religious use, but generally turns censorship into a justfied and desired action.

Online, anonymity can release hostility and repression, Josephine suggests, and the ease of photo and video sharing makes a greater range of images shareable. The split between private and public behaviour has been blurred, and more and more private moments are being shared; these originate from private desired and distinctive tastes and tap into the immense diversity of feelings and values that lie beyond state-sanctioned content.