You are here

Produsage Communities

Dynamics of Chat Spaces

My first session on this second day of the Association of Internet Researchers conference 2005 in Chicago is on the 'Internal Dynamics of Online Spaces'.

Janet Armentor-Cota: Uses of Web Chat

Janet Armentor-Cota from Syracuse University is the first speaker, presenting on the dynamics of a Web chat community. The paper she presents here is coming out of her dissertation, and looks at a Northeast (U.S.) romance chat room. Web chat, of course, is usually real time, multi-participant, and consists of messages of short length, with almost constant traffic around the clock. Web chat is also a multimedia phenomenon and can incorporate images and audio and video streams. So, how do processes and structures of multimedia technologies organise the chat space, and what processes occur here?

What Makes a Successful Online Community?

The first of the afternoon sessions this Thursday at AoIR 2005 is on 'Participation and Trust in Online Communities'. Andrew Cox from the University of Sheffield is the first presenter. 

Andrew Cox: The Parameters of an Online Community

Andrew's work looked at the links and knowledge sharing amongst people working in different organisations and across different organisational jurisdictions - in this case, the Web developers working for universities. There are a number of online spaces available to them, some used, some not, as well as various conferences. in the UK, they continue to use listservs as a key tool, and in the U.S., the main equivalent uwebd is also listserv-based, and has seen a continuing importance (even though we might consider mailing-lists as a somewhat old-fashioned CMC tool by now). There has been some decrease in list membership in recent years, however, declining by some 5% per annum since 2003. It is also interesting that some 25% of list members have turned off mail delivery of the list (presumably accessing the list via the Web?). And there is ongoing churn of members (new members joining, old members dropping out). List traffic is around 120 per month, and again this has declined gradually in recent years.

Civic Engagement, in Many Contexts

Well, the 2005 Association of Internet Researchers conference is finally underway. We start the Thursday morning 'Civic Engagement' session at with a paper by Irene Ramos-Vielba on the use of political blogs in Portugal and Spain, and their potential contribution to democracy.

Irene Ramos-Vielba: Political Blogs in Spain and Portugal

Blogs have of course be recognised in the Anglo-Saxon context already, so how does this play out elsewhere? Are blogs creating an authentic political sphere for deliberation and political action? Journalism and politics are of course two of the key fields which have been affected by blogs as they comment on and promote discussion on political issues - but what is the contribution made? A polarisation between civil pessimists and civil optimists has now perhaps been overcome - we are no longer prediction either a utopia or dystopia that is likely to be brought about by blogs. Rather, what emerges is perhaps an additional political sphere which allows for communal and multidirectional exchange, and may enhance the democratic process.

My Upcoming Events in North America

Furling

Heh. Our recently announced book project Uses of Blogs is starting to build some interest. I've seen a number of visitors come in from Furl blogs over the last couple of days, and it's interesting to see some of the comments from people who are using Furl to blog about the book. My favourite comment so far:

If I used Amazon, I'd put it on my wish list.

Check the Furl reference for the Uses of Blogs entry for more information.

The Contemporary Web and I

I'm heading off to Canberra on Monday, where I'm speaking at a conference on Archiving Web Resources organised by the National Library of Australia. My topic is "Contemporary Culture and the Web" - not an easy area to summarise in 30 minutes! This conference follows on from the IIPC meeting at the British Library which I attended in Septemb

Cyberactive Resistance?

The next (and last for this conference) session is about to begin, titled simply 'resistance?' Still a good turnout for the session even though people are now starting to leave the University of Sussex to catch their various planes. Andrew Ó Baoill starts this session with a study of MoveOn.org, a political group which started in 1998 around the Clinton impeachment campaign and enables participation in political action by members of the public.

Back in Blog

Back after lunch now, and we're in the next session on blogs and related media forms. Karen Gustafson makes the start, speaking on blogs and the creation of community, especially on political blog sites. She has selected four high-ranking political blogs to study, including Instapundit and others. They have a range of ideological positions and are themselves influential amongst blogs. However, this is of course a very narrow subset of all blogs.

Redrawing the Public Sphere

Finally had an opportunity to do some basic networking in the break. I really don't seem to have much success with technology at the moment, though - now even my mobile phone seems to be acting up! I came in late on Mattia Miani's presentation on electronic democracy in cooperative enterprises, so I'm not sure how much sense I'll be able to make of the rest of this talk.

Bloggers Unite

Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Produsage Communities