For those in the Brisbane area: I'll be on a panel at the Straight Out of Brisbane festival (SOOB) this Saturday afternoon, discussing "Media Futures". Below is the blurb for the event - see more details on the SOOB Website. My session also follows directly from the launch of radio station 4ZZZ's Convergent Community Newsroom, which involves my colleague Barry Saunders. Should be interesting!

Media Futures
Sat 19 Aug 1:00pm - 2:30pm :: SOOB Festival Club, 610 Ann St, Valley
Free

Tartu
Finally today we're in a summary plenary which brings together all the CATaC 2006 sessions we've seen. I'm not completely sure whether this is particularly bloggable, but I'll give it a go. Lelia Green notes that her session was focussing on the relationship of knowledge and the Net - knowledge and bird flu; knowledge of how to attack Websites in the course of information warfare; knowledge of health practices in specific communities, but shared online; and knowledge of how to repair cars as it is shared locally and successfully in Burundi as opposed to knowledge introduced by welfare agencies without a full consideration of all implications.

Dresden
The next panel is on the 2006 Football World Cup - it's a high density panel, so there will be some very short and fast presentations. Cornel Sandvoss notes that more nations partipated in the World Cup qualifiers than are members of the United Nations - clearly this is a highly international, global event which also evokes a good deal of national enthusiasm: even in the normally flag-shy Germany we do see small flags on people's cars at the moment. Behind modern, association football and its formation was the rise of industrialism which turned it from an unregulated village contest to an organised inter-city game, thereby also giving rise to professional football, of course. More recently, there was also the emergence of important international competitions.

Dresden
The next session is kicked off by George Barnett. He begins by noting the move from an industrial to an information economy which has now occurred in developed nations, and the simultaneous trend towards globalisation on a number of levels. There are a number of models for globalisation: a universal model which points to homogenisation or modernisation, in a diffusion model of knowledge and culture from Europe to other regions; a clustered model with the rise of regional clusters based upon economic, political and cultural similarities; and a hegemonic model with a concentration of economic, political and cultural power in few countries competing at the top of a hierarchy (this is based on work by Hargittai and Centeno). It is also possible to analyse patterns of competition which may occur in triadic or bipolar models, or to present a view by which hegemony competition is lacking because of a new American imperialism.

Dresden
We're now moving on to the second ICA2006 conference keynote, by veteran media scholar Jürgen Habermas. Unsurprisingly, the conference plenary is packed to the rafters for this - and the presentation should also be online on the ICA site soon. In fact, I'm going to refrain from blogging this - Habermas's English and elocution isn't the best, making this presentation very difficult to follow and blog at the same time. I did take a few photos of the major slides, though, and I'll upload those as soon as I can.

Dresden
It always surprises me that even brand-new convention centres are so poorly set up for the obvious, basic needs: power supply for delegates' laptops. Luckily I've been able to burrow into the underbelly of the conference hall floor, and found a socket - so the last couple sessions won't go unblogged.

This next session deals with the question of the network society and the theories surrounding it - still a somewhat underresearched area deserving further attention. 'Network research' is likened here to 'lunch' - a broad, perhaps overly broad area which needs to be better and more narrowly defined in order to be effectively studied. Network theory and network society theory need to be further and more effectively interconnected. Jan van Dijk starts off by outlining the claims of network theory and analysis about contemporary society: there is the observation that we are moving towards a network society (where according to Castells networks are already the basic units of society - and van Dijk suggests that perhaps individuals still remain the basic units but are increasingly linked by networks). So, in a network society the social relations are gaining influence as compared to the social units they are linking. Despite their articulation all social relations remain inextricably bound up with units.

Dresden
Finally for today I'm in a session on convergence and networking which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a strong representation of Korean and Japanese researchers. The first paper is by Euchiul Jung and is presented in absentia - it is motivated by the increasing flow of people, culture and information beyond national boundaries, and looks at ethnicity-based public spheres at local levels. Diasporic identity is a reconstructed and transformed cultural identity - a hybrid identity.

The paper found that new media technologies were helpful in keeping the members of such communities in touch with their cultures of origin, and increased the close connection between them and their home culture. Key media here were both the Internet, which allowed more access to information and culture from the culture of origin, and the mobile phone, which allowed for more mobility and flexibility. Both increased the intra-cultural communication within the diasporic community. This also led to a growth in the cultural politics of distinction, recognition, and identification, and allowed for the emergence of mediated, ethnicity-based public spheres and communication networks. The result was a transformed, hybridised cultural identity.

I'm going to be conference chair of the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September 2006 - and we've just posted the call for papers. Please consider submitting a paper proposal!

CALL FOR PAPERS

IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES

International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers

Brisbane, Australia

28-30 September 2006
Pre-Conference Workshops: 27 September 2006

My colleagues at the Smart Internet CRC at Swinburne University have just released a major report forecasting Internet developments over the next half decade or so - not an easy task, as in Internet years even 2010 still seems an eternity from now. Looks very interesting - and I'm especially intrigued by the four 'Schools of Thought' for what the Net will be which they've identified in their research:

1. Adaptive User Environment
   (the Net of 2010 will be highly adaptive to human needs)
2. Not The Smart Internet
   (functional and low-cost solutions will lead the way)
3. Rich Media
   (rich, mobile media and media platforms will be the key drivers)
4. Chaos Rules
   (a continual state of decay and worsening disorder)

But of course this brief outline doesn't do the whole 170-page report justice. I look forward to reading the whole thing - and so can you (PDFs):

Backtracking a bit to cover some events from the last couple of weeks. That Ten News story I taped finally ran on Friday 24 June, but with all the delays and amidst other (and perhaps more urgent and timely) news stories it didn't turn out quite as well as it might have - in the end they used only a short soundbite from what had been probably five minutes' worth of material in the interview. That's the nature of these 'soft' news stories, I guess - they're ready to be chopped and changed as required when more important stories come to hand. What we had thought it would be was a more substantial piece to be promoted throughout the week, but in the end they ran only one promo for it on Thursday night. Ah well.