People

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is David Kurt Herold, who shifts our focus to China. ‘Online China’ represents a very large population now (at more than 400 million users), but is connected with the rest of the world through only 27 major connections. The Chinese Internet remains government-owned, too – China owns the network backbone, and government control over the Net is therefore the default setting. There is also substantially less content creation on the Chinese Net; Internet use is consumption-oriented, and operates largely through fairly old-fashioned major portals and BBSes. It is also a very violent place, with ‘human flesh search engines’ (RRSS) that enable users to search for and harass other users.

The Net has also been used for self-help purposes, though, through very similar mechanisms; the site 5-1-Zhao-Ren is a people search engine used to find long-lost friends and relatives, for example, or to otherwise highlight people who have performed positive actions in the past. Such sites have been used to highlight abuse and abductions – a group of 400 fathers whose kids had been abducted as child slaves for a factory posted an open letter about this, for example, and most of the kids were rescued in the end.

Hamburg.
The final speaker in this ECREA 2010 session is Sabine Baumann, whose interest is in online grassroots campaigning especially in the past US presidential election. There, of course, to win a candidate not only needs votes, but campaign funding in the first place, and the Obama campaign was exceptionally successful in attracting campaign contributions (collecting twice as much money as John McCain, mainly from small donations under US$200).

Spending figures are also interesting in this regard – McCain spent some US$4.6m on Internet campaigning, Obama spent a whopping US$24m. The Obama campaign Website also prominently displayed its donation and online merchandise functionality, of course; the online store was hugely successful, in fact (offering campaign clothing and art from notable designers and artists).

Henry Jenkins is leaving MIT, to take up a position at the University of Southern California. Whoa - that's big news, and something of a seismic shift; Henry has been such a major driver of media and cultural studies (especially also in the new media area) in the US, and he's one of a handful of people who have made MIT a very strong player in this field. I wrote my Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage book while I was a visiting scholar with the Comparative Media Studies group there, and I'm very grateful for Henry's support and collegiality during and after that time (and in his announcement post, he's even found the time to include our Creative Industries Faculty at QUT as one of a select number of leading research institutions in the field) - so I wish him all the best at the new place; at least the flight over to Australia has now become a good deal shorter for him... Commiserations to the folks at MIT - it will be interesting to see whom they find to fill Henry's shoes!

Jean and Catherine (nice to hear from you again!) have both tagged me. It's taken me some time to reply to this challenge, but here we go - five things you didn't know about me:

1. I once served in an electronic warfare unit in the West German army, and had to learn some basic Russian - our task was to listen in to Red Army transmissions in then-East Germany, presumably to work out if and when the Soviets were going to attack. Of course they didn't, and in fact during my time in the army the wall came down and the whole exercise became fairly pointless. (Well, you probably did know that one if you've read "The Redundant Spy"...)

Leeds / Lincoln / Leeds.
I'm back from a quick trip to the very pretty town of Lincoln, where I've visited my former M/C colleague turned University of Lincoln lecturer Guy Redden, to catch up and do a quick guest lecture: a very much revised version of 'Anyone Can Edit', the lecture I toured on the U.S. East Coast in late 2005. This new revision of the lecture incorporates some more of the research I'm currently undertaking for my book project From Production to Produsage, of course. After the lecture, I was also able to catch up with some more of the students at Lincoln, which was very enjoyable.

At the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto last year, I met a couple of colleagues from Breda University in the Netherlands, who run a number of creative industries-related courses - but in a leisure management context, which is quite different from the approach we're taking at QUT, but also includes exciting new concepts such as ' imagineering'. This week, Peter Horsten and Arend Hardorff are in Brisbane to visit QUT as well as a number of other local organisations (such as Michael Doneman's Edgeware) and explore opportunities for further collaboration. Last night, Ann and I took them out for dinner at the Tibetan Kitchen, and ended up chatting until the restaurant staff had to tell us in no uncertain terms 'we're closing now'. Let's hope we can maintain the connection - good to see you again, guys...

Frankfurt
Well, this European journey is almost at an end. We spent the last few days visiting my mum on Ibiza, taking in some summer sun and sampling the local food (we bypassed the plethora of dance clubs advertised everywhere, though). And in what's likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime moment, Ann and I got to hold the real Oscar awarded to Casablanca as best picture of 1943, which now lives in the El Palacio hotel alongside a range of other movie memorabilia. It's about as heavy as you'd expect!

Hannover, Germany
We spent the last few days on a brief visit to my home town of Hannover, via a brief detour through Berlin and the Hurricane music festival at Scheeßel, to see Australian sensation Wolfmother. (Luckily, the storms which led to the cancellation of the later days of the festival only hit after we'd already left again.) This is the first time in six years I've been back to Hannover, and only the second since I left Germany for Australia in 1994. Strangely, I'm finding myself in a position of seeing Hannover (and Germany more generally) through the eyes of a tourist rather than those of a native, which is somewhat disconcerting - albeit a tourist with better local knowledge than many of the football fans and other travellers currently traversing the country.