Internet Technologies

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Han Woo Park, who shifts our focus beyond blogs, and towards the Web more generally. He begins by highlighting the importance of diachronic studies, and his project undertakes such a study against the backdrop of a growing globalisation of communication networks, balanced by an increasing diversification of communication flows.

The project examined this by taking a longitudinal approach that examines changes in network patterns over time - applied here to global cyberspace overall through a comparison of observations in 2003 and 2009. It used search engines AltaVista (2003) and Yahoo! (2009; it had acquired AltaVista in the meantime) to identify levels of incoming and outgoing links between country-code top-level domains. (For the US, .edu, .gov., .mil, and .us were counted as its ccTLDs, given that .com, .org, and .net are far from US-specific.)

Singapore.
The final presenters in this session at ICA 2010 are Mark Deuze and Peter Blank, introducing the idea of media life - a way of living through the media; a point of view. Mark begins by showing images from weekly protests in Bil'in, a Palestinian town against the wall being built in Israel - in February this year, protesters dressed as the Na'vi from Avatar, for example, recently, they dressed as the Palestinian football team; and during protest marches, on their banners they carry photos of previous protest marches. (Avatar director Jim Cameron has become involved in a few other protest actions, in fact.)

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Espen Ytreberg, whose interest is in active audiences; does convergence and digitalisation empower users and make them more active and independent? The term itself certainly has spread far beyond academia, although interpretations may vary between different users of it. Espen's focus is on the attitudes at the management level in Norwegian media.

One working notion is characterised by statements such as 'the audience want to be active', and if it is held by media workers it has consequences for the future shape of media products regardless of whether it is true. It has become an institutional discourse - it is language doing work and creating new media models. Espen explored these processes through 45 interviews with managers in Norwegian TV, radio, and press who were decisionmakers on media products.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Sunny Kim, whose interest is in non-work-related social media use during work time. This is most often seen as a loss of productivity and a waste of resources, though it can also be understood as an important moment of brief rest during the working day.

A wide range of terms for such 'cyberslacking' are found in the relevant literature, and the present study created a taxonomy of eight of the most common concepts and tested their relevance - e.g. 'personal Web use', 'cyberloafing', 'problematic Internet use', etc. This conceptual framework was then tested in a specific population of college students, who were asked for their perception of these terms (including perceived external and internal causes).

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Matthew Weber, who shifts our focus to online news and begins by noting the gradual decline of the traditional print news community and the rise of online news usage. Newspaper organisations - the news industry - form a community made up of individual populations of professionals, which compete with one another for users; within this, in turn, there are individual news organisations pursuing specific corporate strategies.

What effect does such strategy have over time? Strategic change can increase the likelihood of survival during periods of disruption; interorganisational linkages can provide economic and reputational benefits, and increase legitimacy; hyperlinks between organisations can be instrumental in this. News organisations make strategic choices on how to link and whom to link to; at times of change, this is a question especially of how to deal with new entrants.

Singapore.
The next session I'm attending at ICA 2010 starts with Jieyoung Kong, whose focus is on US megachurches online - how are these 'faith brands' building online brand communities? Megachurches are a trend of the last decade, well beyond the US; they are defined as protestant religious organisations with more than 2000 members each which conduct weekly services and engage in significant strategic communication activities. The marketing of megachurches involves storytelling that constructs and maintains the brand.

Singapore.
We're now in the opening plenary session here at ICA 2010 - with a relatively low turnout, though; perhaps people haven't realised it's on today, after all the pre-conferences? Overall, some 1,700 delegates have registered for the conference, we're told... Anyway, the speaker tonight is Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, who begins by noting the challenge of communication - it is the central concept (the organon) of our historical period; it explains everything, and everything turns into communication. Therefore, seeing communication from the outside, studying it, is a particular challenge; all we can say about the world is already communication.

Singapore.
The next speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Debashis Aikat, whose interest is in how popular communication is transformed in the digital age, with a specific view towards India. India and a number of other countries, like China, continue to be areas of significant growth in Internet access, while there is saturation uptake in the US and a number of European countries already.

Aligned with this is the explosion in Web 2.0 sites and platforms, some of which last only a very short time, while others develop into major market leaders. In light of this, how are emerging technologies reshaping concepts and theories of communication and technology? How does this communication revolution play out? How does it affect us? Debashis runs through a number of ways to conceptualise this - categorising the range of Web 2.0 activities, and outlining the changing value chains from mass media to mass social media.

Singapore.
The next presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is CarrieLynn Reinhard, whose interest is in human sensemaking when engaging in virtual worlds. Lab-based experimental approaches to this are sometimes criticised for stressing internal over external validity, and for being unable to prove causality without the black box of the experimental setup - they rely on holding a number of variables constant in order to observe the effects of a predetermined, measurable variable in order to determine causality.

Singapore.
The next presenters at this ICA 2010 pre-conference are Lothar Mikos and Ilona Ammann, who begin by highlighting the idea of convergence (a dangerous word, according to Roger Silverstone in the mid-90s). Convergence means the flow of content across multiple media platforms, connected to the cooperation between multiple media industries and the movement of users across platforms - so it exists on various levels: on the level of texts and the media (in transmedia storytelling, hybrid forms, and global and national brands) and on the level of audiences (in transcultural audiences, audience engagement, and audiences as producers.