Blogs

Brisbane.
The next presenter at ANZCA 2009 is Toija Cinque, who continues the discussion especially of public broadcasting in the online environment. The Net increases the diversity of information available to inform the citizenry, of course - but public broadcasters continue to be bound also by their charters and need to adddress their obligations.

Journalism is now becoming more a process than a product, and this provides journalists with less and less time to ascertain what is true and significant. This may mean that the public now gets more pure opinion than factual detail - and crowdsourcing information from users only adds more problems with fact-checking to this process. This also pertains to the use of hyperlinks on news Websites, of course - one reason why still so few mainstream news Websites link to information outside of their own sites (in addition to the desire not to provide easy avenues for users to leave the news organisation's own site).

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with a paper by my colleague Terry Flew, who is also the chair of the conference. He begins by noting the old trope of the journalist as hero (as embodied for example by Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate affair), and its decline (Glenn Milne is the anti-hero in this context). There are substantial impacts of Web 2.0 technologies on contemporary journalism, of course, and there are serious questions about the future role of journalism. News organisations have most trouble, in fact, not in coming to terms with new technologies but with this new lack of deference to their once powerful position.

Brisbane.
The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Michael Galvin, who focusses on a number of trends related to medical tourism and makeover culture. There are now a number of operators offering package travel deals which offer makeover holidays that include tourism, beauty treatment, and cosmetic, elective, or even very serious surgery components - often offering trips to destinations like Malaysia where the costs for such procedures are substantially cheaper.

Websites advertising these services provide brochure-style information about the getaway hotels as well as the hospitals involved, and potential clients are positioned both as potential patient and potential tourist - packages offered include the 'mummy makeover', for example, and describe a fairytale makeover story. (The Singapore tourism board similarly has a special 'Singapore health' brochure.)

Brisbane.
Susan Ward is the next ANZCA 2009 speaker, and focusses on talent agencies - she begins by distinguishing between internationalisation (trans-border flows of goods and services) and globalisation (the creation of global audiences, and global forms of organisation and a global functional integration of processes). This is visible especially in the context of international trade fairs, which are used to conduct business transactions, disseminate market intelligence, facilitate networking, promote an awareness of industry innovations, establish the identities of participants,and promote common assumptions and a common business culture.

Brisbane.
Bugger: the ANZCA 2009 programme incorrectly listed Brian McNair's keynote for 10 a.m. rather than 9 a.m., so I missed almost all of it - very, very frustrating. Hope someone else blogged it...

So, I'm now in the first panel session of this last conference day, and the first speaker in this session is Nazanin Ghanavizi, whose interest is in blogging in Iran - a very timely topic at this point, of course. She begins by noting that one of the most important factors of social life is being able to give voice to one's ideas. Iranian society is already highly active online, especially by blogging - Persian is a major blog language, with some one million blogs in Persian, even in spite of the comparatively small population of Persian-speakers worldwide.

Brisbane.
The final speakers for this ANZCA 2009 session are Sherre Delys and Marius Foley fromthe ABC Pool project. Sherre, its Executive Producer, comes from ABC Radio Arts, and one of the motivations for starting the site was in maintaining a space for radio arts as well as providing one for other forms of (especially collaborative) multimedia work. The overall idea was to open up public media as a conversation, to address the people formerly known as the audience. Part of this was also to partner with Creative Commons Australia and to use open source technology (Drupal is used as the platform for Pool).

Brisbane.
The next ANZCA 2009 presentation is a group affair which starts off with Nicole Matthews. This paper focusses on the use of Facebook by Deaf young people (some of whom jokingly use the term 'Facehook' for the site). There are possibilities as well as threats in young Deaf people using such rich social media sites - often, such users have been early adopters of such sites, but there also remain barriers to their use, not least because of the significance of sign language for such communities (especially for politically oriented Deaf communities).

Brisbane.
The last ANZCA 2009 session for today begins with a paper by Fiona Martin (and my laptop seems to be dying, so I'm not sure whether I'll capture all three papers successfully...). She notes the role which identity definition plays especially for teenagers, and is part of a Prix Jeunesse research project investigating how young people are using research tools to represent themselves visually, how this can be understood in terms of diversity, and how this can be related to educational television.

This has been prompted to some extent by TV producers' interest in social media, partly because they are concerned that social media will steal their audiences (even though there is no clear evidence for this). TV producers also need more information on what users are doing in social media in order to develop effective cross-media strategies, especially for educational television.

Brisbane.
The final speaker for this ANZCA 2009 session is Alison Henderson, who focusses on the organisational use of social networking sites. Such sites (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace) provide a space for the communication of 'friendship' through the creation of online profiles and friendship networks, as well as for the sharing of information, audiovisual materials, and other personal material. They provide a space for networking and for creating connections. (There is a slight difference here between social network - representing and maintaining friendship - and social networking - making new friends - in some of the literature, too.)

Brisbane.
The next speaker here at ANZCA 2009 is Sal Humphreys, presenting on the knitting Website Ravelry as a social network market. Discussions of intellectual property, distributed participation, and user-generated content have struggled to keep up with these developments: social economy is intertwined and interconnected with commercial economy, and there are serious questions about when participation becomes exploitation.

Social network markets characterise these ideas as emergent, and provide a useful basis for their theorisation. Mass media theory also fails to align effectively with these new interactive environments. HOw is power distributed, who has agency, what is the role and impact of institutions in relation to these environments?