Internet Technologies

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'?

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.