Internet Technologies

Singapore.
The next speaker in this closing plenary at ICA 2010 is Joseph Chan, who focusses on the China and Hong Kong perspective. He notes that freedom of speech, press freedom, and freedom of assembly are guaranteed by many national constitutions around the world - but they are often only partically practiced; especially so in China and Hong Kong. China censors traditional media as well as new media: it persists and remain very effective.

For new media, the censorship system is based on that for traditional media, and orchestrated through state directives as well as direct intervention (mainly through phone calls to avoid leaving a paper trail). China has a government department for social stability which oversees these efforts, addressing any potentially damaging accusations against the central government; local governments make their own efforts as well. Online, there is more room for deviance or dissent, and this is significant.

Singapore.
And we're in the closing plenary of ICA 2010, which (appropriately for a conference in Singapore, perhaps) deals with the impact of new media on censorship. Censorship approaches and technologies in the Asia-Pacific region vary widely, of course, as plenary chair Cherian George notes (from brute force to sophisticated social sanctioning).

Ang Peng Hwa is the first of the plenary speakers, and he begins by stating that the rise of Internet censorship in Asia was inevitable. Contrary to previous claims, the Internet can be censored - for example, by blocking particular IP addresses; further, the control of authoritative root services online is in the hands of ICANN, and ICANN itself is far from independent from government influence, but instead is subject to substantial US government control. As one example, Peng Hwa notes the arrest of the then holders of the .iq country-code top-level domain in December 2002, some months before the US operation Iraqi Freedom, leading to a change of control over .iq - hence, there is an urgent need to look more closely at Internet governance.

Singapore.
The final presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is Homero Gil de Zúñiga, whose interest is in civic engagement. How is this related to interpersonal and computer-mediated networks, and how does this play out differently for weak and strong ties in the networks? Is the effect of interpersonal and computer-mediated networks mediated by access to weak ties? Which setting is more predictive of civic engagement?

Past research in this area has shown connections between demographics and civic engagement; social orientations and civic engagement; and media use and civic engagement; the presence of citizen communication networks also has a positive effect. Finally, there are differences between strong and weak ties: being exposed to a wider range of connections through weak ties can variously have positive and negative effects - providing a greater diversity of information that may spark civic action, for example.

Singapore.
The next ICA 2010 speaker is Mihye Seo, whose interest is in political consumerism. She notes the threatened collapse of participatory democracy through declining political engagement - but perhaps our definition of political engagement is too narrow. Political consumerism, for example, may be a new trend especially amongst younger people, who don't believe that institutional power will address the issues they care about; rather, they become more involved in other types of political engagement.

Singapore.
The next ICA 2010 speaker is Seungahn Nah, who highlights how community structures constrain individuals' communications and participatory behaviours. We need to develop an integrated theoretical model of civic engagement at the micro-macro linkage.

The degree of specialisation and differentiation in the community has been described as community structural pluralism - indicators for this are population, education, income, and employment, for example. Additionally, communication mediates between demographic and community contexts and civic engagement. At the community level, community structural pluralism is connected to civic engagement, political discussion, and media use; at the individual level, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics connect with the individual's media use to determine levels of political discussion and civic engagement. How do the community and individual levels intersect, though?

Singapore.
Finally in this ICA 2010 session we move to Yvette Wohn, talking about how people tweet about TV. When TV was first introduced, it was seen as a social medium, as families gathered around it to watch; later, it was seen as creating a social gap, as enabling people to disengage from reality, as increasing individualism, and (when multiple TVs in the same home became more commonplace) as fragmenting families.

Today, people watch more TV than ever - now also online, on mobiles, and on timeshift devices. At the same time, TV use may be becoming more social again - echoing some of the early commercial attempts to introduce greater immediate social dimensions for television by adding a (telephone, online, ...) social backchannel to the television set or media device: today, it is social media that are adding that backchannel.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Chih-Hui Lai, whose focus is on the Facebook newsfeed, the Twitter feed, and similar feeds as social awareness streams (SAS) - consisting of messages which are public or semi-public, short and consumed in streams, and transmitted through articulated networks that structure communication. Twitter is a typical example for this, and his is what the study focussed on.

Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are quite similar in style, in fact - both offer a kind of phatic communion, a communicative means of opening communication and maintaining relationships. This is also shown in the inclusion of emoticons and other elements. At the same time, the strength of SAS also lies in their use for quick information sharing - and while most research focusses on the use of such SAS for special events (crises, political developments, etc.), the phatic elements are just as important.

Singapore.
The final presentation in this ICA 2010 session is by James Katz, who describes the various theories outlined here as lenses for understanding reality; he adds to this the contribution of cognitive sciences as a useful set of tools. He also notes the Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and developed (WEIRD) nations focus of much research - which does not translate well to the study of the use of mobile telephony in developing nations, for example. There is also a mentalist and positivist orientation here which attempts to work out what takes place in people's brains, and to find a 'scientific' statistical breakdown of factors influencing people's behaviours.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Emil Bakke, whose interest is especially in the mobile uses of Facebook in a post-convergence environment. What drives convergence, presumably, are the users, not just the techological possibilities, but what are the processes here? Emil notes that people operate in clusters of technology, and this depends also on the context of use.

Technology clusters, especially, really matter: users and non-users operate in a multiple media environment (accessing services through various devices, but not necessarily with great awareness of the features of the various technologies and media features available to them); any single communication technology will have diminished importance because of a user-driven environment; and technological affordances and user preferences intersect in various ways.

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'?