Internet Technologies

Hong Kong.
The final session for this first day of The Internet Turning 40 starts with a paper by Louisa Ha on the use of multiplatform TV by students. Video is now consumed using TVs, computers, iPods, DVRs, DVD players, and mobile phones, but what are the patterns of such consumption and how does the usage of one affect usage of others? How is this related to different personal factors (gender, etc.), especially for user-generated videos? And how satisfied are the users of these different platforms?

Louisa undertook a national survey in 2008 of some 210 (US) college students in six public universities, 91% of whom watch online video (22% watch TV for more than16 hours per week). 47% were early adopters, having watched online video for more than three years at that point; they mostly came across such videos through surfing or (in 25% of cases) through peer influence. Online, 48% watched user-generated videos exclusively; 34% both user-generated and repurposed videos. Key sources here were YouTube (nearly 100%), Facebook, and MySpace, and mainly comedy and music entertainment videos.

Hong Kong.
The final speaker in this opening session of The Internet Turning 40 is my CCI colleague John Hartley, who argues for a shift towards new understanding of archives: in the modern time, they were characterised by galleries and museums as archives of essence, collected and curated by professional experts - of actual things. In postmodernity, broadcast TV systems provided a mediated archive through time-based, intangible objects; today,we have probability archives containing digital and virtual objects online, co-curated by users and containing objects whose status and existence is undetermined.

Hong Kong.
The next speaker in this opening session of The Internet Turning 40 is Clement So, who mapped the development of Internet research (especially in the communication field) over the past 20 years using the ISI Web of Science article database. Such studies have been done for communication in general, but not with a specific focus on Internet research. The relevant journal databases in ISI Web of Science cover some 10,000 journals (though they are biased towards English-language journals and the social sciences rather than humanities).

Hong Kong.
It's Thursday, so this must be Hong Kong - and I'm at the "Internet Turning 40" conference celebrating the 45th anniversary of the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University Hong Kong, and maping out future directions for new media research. We start with Ronald Rice, who maps out the development of social science approaches to studying the Internet over the past decade.

Some 20 years ago, the term 'Internet' appeared in social science-based communications research articles - especially also from libary and information research fields; the 'World Wide Web' as a distinct theme appeared around ten years ago. Areas like privacy, sharing research information, social isolation, work uses, citizen networks, and country-specific research appeared around that time. Occurrences in abstracts almost tripled between 2001 and 2004, in particular. More recently, such terms may have been replaced by more specific terms - 'blogs', 'wikis', and now 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' are becoming more prominent instead.

I'm afraid I've been a very slack blogger over the summer - a range of existing and emerging research projects, and various other have got in the way. More on many of these soon; for now, I wanted to point to the latest report released by the Pew Internet research centre, "The Future of the Internet IV". In this series of reports, Pew presents the responses of high-profile experts from industry and academia to a series of controversial questions about the future of the Net. To stimulate responses on each question, Pew offered two relatively extreme scenarios of what the future may look like.

There's coverage of the report in a number of leading technology and culture publications, including ReadWriteWeb and Fast Company. For the latest edition, I was asked to contribute my thoughts, and I'm happy for some of those responses to have made their way into the report itself. For completeness's sake (and perhaps to see in ten years' time how far off the mark I was), here are my answers in full:

Will Google make us smart or stupid?

By 2020, people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google).

By 2020, people's use of the internet has not enhanced human intelligence and it could even be lowering the IQs of most people who use it a lot. Nicholas Carr was right: Google makes us stupid.

For a goverment which on its election made so much noise about making 'evidence-based' policy decisions (as opposed to the naked ideology of the previous mob, particularly in its declining years), Senator Conroy's decision to impose his 'cleanfeed' filter on the Australian Internet is a deeply disturbing sign. There's much that must - and will - be said about this pointless, futile, and undemocratic filter over the coming weeks and months, no doubt, and Catharine Lumby's piece in The Punch and Google Australia's statement today are a very good start.

Rather than adding my own expression of dismay and outrage at the sheer stupidity which Senator Conroy's decision represents, though, I'll simply point to the work of my colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Authored by three of Australia's most eminent media and communication researchers, here's some actual evidence which provides a much better basis for policy-making than whatever misconceptions and flawed assumptions have led the Australian government to believe that Internet censorship should be a policy priority in a country whose communications policies have suffered more than a decade of complete neglect and incompetence under the previous government.

Please tweet, embed, bookmark, link, and otherwise share this document (available at Scribd) widely.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker of this final session at AoIR 2009 is Raquel Recuero, who shifts our focus to Brazil and its adoption of Twitter and Plurk (another micromessaging tool, but one which has a horizontal rather than vertical logic and enables replies within the message - Google Wave-style, it seems). How is the appropriation of these different social network sites influenced by the conversations that these platforms enable; how do the conversations reveal different types of social networks?

Raquel's study examined the conversational structures in these sites using social network analysis, but also engaged in content analysis and ethnographic research. Of the two sites, Plurk makes it easier to track continuing conversations, but there is less multimodality; there are often more participants to conversations and more recurrent participants (at an average of nine), conversations are more coherent and synchronous, and extend over more conversational turns (at an average of 15). On Twitter, the process is more disruptive - it is difficult to keep track of conversations, and they are less synchronous; conversations have an average of only two turns, and indeed there are fewer conversations in the first place, with fewer participants (at an average of two).

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Briana Fox, whose interest is in how gender and race shape family email networks. Are there perceivable differences in how families email amongst themselves that can be explained through such factors, and in the perception of such networks by families from different backgrounds? There is a perception that email in general serves to distance families, that there are no good social relationships which can be conducted through it, or that by contrast the multiple media now available for communication strengthen family ties. Further, gender-based studies show that women email more and rekindle old friendships and relationships; they are also more responsible in general for managing family relationships. Finally, there is very little information on the impact of race on online communication patterns, beyond observations of a general digital divide (at least still in the early 2000s) which makes white users more likely to be online.

Milwaukee.
The first speaker in this final session at AoIR 2009 is Taina Bucher. She argues for an understanding of Twitter as a technology of immediacy - in this case, of immediacy in time, enabling users to cease the time and take action. Our being in time is characterised by the scarcity of time in the 24h society; Twitter reacts to that by encouraging short messages and resourceful communication that give shape to concise messaging.

What does such a communication tool indicate about the society of which it is a part? It claims to be a service that enables users to share and discover what is happening anywhere in the world; this is a technology of immediacy for mediating the momentary and immediate. This can be explored in the context of the status update box: a box for writing, for filling in and creating moments.

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Kylie Jarrett, who moves on to problematising Google and its 'don't be evil' motto. There is a sense of disquiet about the absolute symbolic power enjoyed by the company at this point, but there are also many defensive responses as so many people are very attached to it. What is the source of this belief in Google?

Symbolic power needs to be legitimated, and Google attempts this by outlining its core principles on its site: focus on the user and all else will follow, do one thing really well, fast is better than slow, democracy on the Web works, people don't need to be at their desk to need an answer, it's possible to make money without being evil, there's always more information out there, great isn't good enough, etc.