Internet Technologies

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The last presentation here at ICE 3 is a group act by Bruce Ingraham, Gráinne Conole, Chris Jones, and George Roberts, who have also set up a group blog in preparation for this talk, which some of us have already contributed to. Their focus is especially on scholarly communication through new media environments - and they begin by noting that unfortunately few ICErs did respond to their original blog-based challenge, which in itself provides some insight on the extent to which scholarly discourses have changed so far. Why is this so - are the topics available too dull; is there too little time available to participate in such environments; or are emerging new media not suited to scholarly discourse (which could also mean that scholarly discourse is unsuited to the modern world, however). If we are not professing our disciplines to one another using such new media environments, however, how can we enocurage our students to do so? If we do not do so, then who will - the people formerly known as students?

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Up next here at ICE 3 are Debbie Holley and Martin Oliver. They begin by highlighting the notion of the digital divide, which appears to be based on a notion that media access is inherently a good thing: if the digital divide problem is solved by providing access for all, then society will be better off. This question of access is positioned as the basic issue, but is ultimately only a superficial one - behond this, there are also divides in relation to people's skills and literacies, to their levels of motivation to exercise their skills (they may have skills, but choose not to use tem), and further, there is a divide between what are seen as 'normal' high technology uses on the one hand, and disruptive effects of complex technologies on the other.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Cate Thomas is the next presenter here at ICE 3. She begins by describing the online world as an uncanny space where there is a ghost in the machine; the academy as it moves further online then also becomes a haunted university where radical uncertainty persists. How are academic staff constituted in this digital university, then?

Cate suggests that academics are already in crisis today; their traditional authority has been undermined, much as the crisis of the author in the postmodern environment has also undermined authorship. Additionally, there is a tendency towards disembodiment of the academic subject, which means that their electronic self increasingly begins to constitute the day-to-day presence of the contemporary academic. Their real-life presence, in turn, comes to be reconstituted by the electronic persona; the online world rewrites real life in that sense.

Leeds.
The past few days have been nothing but productive, even if I've taken some time off my research for the book. Instead, I've completed and/or revised a number of conference papers and other articles that are due over the next few months - clearing the decks, or indeed the desk, before I fully descend into book mode.

2007 is going to be a very productive year for me, as far as papers, articles, and other publications are concerned. I've managed to combine my stays here at Leeds University and later on at MIT in Boston with a few conferences in the UK and the U.S., respectively, and there are a number of further conferences in Australia and elsewhere as well. There's also a couple of book chapters and at least another journal article, but most those I can't say that much about yet. I have now posted some of the completed conference papers on this Website, though, so please feel free to have a look (and to comment, of course!).

I've been meaning to post this for a while - a call for papers for the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy that's related to the Association of Internet Researchers conference I organised in September. For those who weren't able to make it to AoIR 2006, there's still some time to submit additional articles...

The International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Association of Internet Researchers is pleased to announce a call for further papers for a special issue on Internet regulation linked to the IR7 Conference ('Internet Convergences'). The selection committee - composed of the editorial board of the IJCLP and Matthew Allen (Curtin University of Technology), Fay Sudweeks (Murdoch University) and Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology) - will review and consider all submissions for publication. We have already received several papers from the conference, which are in the process of being reviewed, and would now encourage experts from all disciplines and nationalities to submit further papers for publication by 1 December 2006. Acceptance will be notified by the end of the year for publication in 2007 following strict double-blind peer review.

The last keynote at ATOM2006 is by Andrew Urban, editor of Urban Cinefile, and previously the creator and host of SBS's Front Up programme. He begins by noting the importance of media teachers for the future development of society; further, he also notes the increasing question of information accuracy in an ever more highly mediatised environment - in Jerry Bruckheimer's words, 'the media are a mile wide and an inch deep'.

Journalism is today still posited as a noble profession, standing for honesty, objectivity, and truth - and Andrew shows an excerpt from Edward R. Murrow's famous 1958 speech (as seen recently in Good Night, and Good Luck) accusing the television industry of its failings - deluding, amusing, and insulating us. Broadcasting - and the media more broadly - today are as crucial as then, but their basis has shifted, now taking in also a broad range of new participants, all the way through to individual produsers.

Geoff Leland from the University of Waikato is the next speaker in this session at ATOM2006. His research is into the media worlds of young teenagers in New Zealand - how do they perceive their own worlds? This work has taken place through the 1999-2005 period with some 2000 children in Hamilton and Christchurch, and Geoff argues that because of the fast pace of technological research such research needs to be continuous - findings even from only a few years ago are already outdated. Another reason for tracking changes is also that the New Zealand population profile is changing markedly through immigration and its accepting of humanitarian refugees (in stark contrast to Australia's inhumane asylum policy practices which ignore and breach international humanitarian conventions) - one school Geoff has worked with has some 18% Somali refugee children, for example.

Next up is Pam Hu from the Media Development Authority in Singapore - which is one of the best-connected nations in the world, of course (next to some countries in Scandinavia, as well as South Korea, and Japan - indeed, the entire country is a wireless hotspot...). The MDA is similar to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Singapore is looking to position itself as an East-West Media Gateway, involving media financing, production, aggregation, and distribution; this is done in part also through the Asia Media Festival (29 Nov. to 3 Dec. 2006), including film, television, and animation components, and Broadcast Asia (in June 2007). Singapore is also increasingly placing itself in international media projects to develop global awareness of what it has to offer. The Media Development Authority was established on 1 January 2003; it is charged with developing the Singaporean media industry and acts as a facilitator, promoter, and catalyst.

Well, the AoIR 2006 conference in Brisbane is over, and I'm slowly recovering... If I've been slow in updates to this blog in recent weeks, it's been simply because conference preparations had taken over my life - between running around to get things organised, dealing with last-minute registrations, changes, and other issues, and actually being there to make sure everything happened on the days as we'd planned it, there was very little time left for anything else (including luxuries like, say, sleep). Overall I'm very pleased with how it went, though, and we've had some great feedback on the conference - most importantly, I think we've proved that there is plenty of life outside of the North American and European conference circuits, and I hope that AoIR will continue its drive to engage with international communities of scholars. Asia, Latin America, South Africa - let's go!

As conference chair, of course I didn't get to see anything of the conference beyond my own panels, and the two keynotes. Slowly the reports from the conference are emerging, though, so I get to see a little more of it at last. My thanks especially to Kevin Lim, who not only blogged and photographed extensively at the conference, but also conducted a number of impromptu interviews at the closing reception - the video and some further discussion are over on Kevin's blog, but I've taken the liberty of also posting the video here...

I was interviewed for an ABC Online science story the other day, about an article published by a number of physicists recently. Not the most likely story to comment on for an Internet researcher, you might think (even if, as it turns out, my first degree was in physics) - but what's happened here is that the researchers in question have applied complex network theory to the musicians' database of the All Music Guide (AMG), which both tracks collaborations between musicians and provides recommendations of musical similarity made by its panel of expert contributors. What's come out of this are two datasets, one indicating the network of collaborations across the 30,000-odd musicians tracked by AMG, and one showing the similarities between these artists as AMG's pundits see them.