Blogs

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Chih-Hui Lai, whose focus is on the Facebook newsfeed, the Twitter feed, and similar feeds as social awareness streams (SAS) - consisting of messages which are public or semi-public, short and consumed in streams, and transmitted through articulated networks that structure communication. Twitter is a typical example for this, and his is what the study focussed on.

Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are quite similar in style, in fact - both offer a kind of phatic communion, a communicative means of opening communication and maintaining relationships. This is also shown in the inclusion of emoticons and other elements. At the same time, the strength of SAS also lies in their use for quick information sharing - and while most research focusses on the use of such SAS for special events (crises, political developments, etc.), the phatic elements are just as important.

Singapore.
The next ICA 2010 speakers are Deanna and Timothy Sellnow, whose focus is on the use of social media in crisis events - here, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Such events are cosmology episodes, where understanding is lost, and people ask where am I, what happened, and who can help me understand what happened. They need to rebuild understanding through the process of sensemaking - and this moment of cosmology must be dissected to reduce uncertainty. Social media - especially Facebook - had a prominent role in this.

Singapore.
Wahey - we're in the last day of ICA 2010, which starts with a session on Web 2.0. Chien-leng Hsu is the first presenter, focussing on social link networks especially on Twitter. There are suggestions that offline and online relationships may be co-constructed; in Korea, in particular, many politicians are also using online media to communicate with their constituencies. Others suggests that online media are a fragmenting influence - but Twitter is also seen as an important tool for information dissemination.

Singapore.
The day at ICA 2010 ends with the ICA Presidential Address by Barbie Zelitzer, who will focus on journalism studies as a component of the overall discipline of communication research, at a time when both journalism and the discipline face significant challenges. Journalism's centrality to communication is embedded in communication's historical narratives - while parts of communication date back to rhetoric and other fields, there is a strong affinity between journalism and communication. Both were projects born in and of modernity; journalism pursues truth and offers criticism and rationality as key elements, champions reason and free choice, and is committed to progress, democracy, and individuality.

Singapore.
The final speaker in this ICA 2010 session is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is also on mapping the blogosphere. What is its structure, as part of the wider public sphere; where are the borders of its community, and how communal is it -how are its interlinkages distributed?

Studies of the public sphere and online media tend to focus on specific 'noteworthy' forms of public communication and deliberation, but we need a wider definition of public communication than just 'political debate'. Blogs can be organised along a continuum spanned by the three axes of content (from internal to topical), directional (from monological to dialogical) and style (from intimate to objective); public sphere research tends to focus mainly on one point in that continuum, and we need to move beyond this.

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, who also notes the differences between different types of hyperlinks. Links on politicians' sites in Japan, for example, may connect to the politicians' constituencies, show their political affiliations, or facilitate the use of new media for supporter mobilisation. There is also a question of where links are located (on a separate links page or on the politicians' sites' front pages), of course, which points to their different level of impact.

Singapore.
The next speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Se Jung Park, whose focus is on the use of the Korean social networking site Cyworld by politicians. South Korea is a leading country for Internet access, of course, but sites like Facebook and Twitter are not very popular; YouTube, in fact, is partially censored. So, Cyworld is the main space for social networking - including for politicians.

The present study examined the comments left on the Cyworld 'mini-hompys' of Korean politicians during April 2008 and June 2009; from the total number, some 200 comments from each politician's space were randomly selected, and a semantic sentiment analysis was then conducted. There were obvious spikes in commenting during the recent mass protests against the reintroduction of US beef imports.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session at ICA 2010 this Friday starts with our own presentation on our large network mapping project, and I'm posting the Powerpoint below. No luck recording the audio this time, unfortunately - looks like my recorder is out of juice!

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.