Blog

Tartu

The second morning at CATaC 2006 begins with a session I'm chairing, and my own paper is also in this session - so I'll try to blog the other three papers, and to post the slides and text for mine. Chris Newlon and Anthony Faiola are the first presenters, on mega-collaboration. They begin with a focus on Hurricane Katrina, which they describe as exhibiting a pattern of success and failure. The response to the hurricane was a spontaneous gathering and coordination of information resources by private-sector ICT organisations and individuals, but the government failed to effectively make use of this wealth of information. Of course, planning is usually for the expected, but not for the worst imaginable extreme - how, then, to plan for the unexpected? Chaos was the only response in the Katrina case, especially also because of cultural barriers between the different agencies and entities involved in the flood response. At the same time, the use of private ICT resources can be described as a success - socially connected information networks were in clear evidence here, including privately run missing persons databases, as well as blogs, lists, bulletin boards, etc. This builds on a small world principle where most individuals are connected, but where such connection depends on contextual information which points towards the most useful contacts to utilise.

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.

Tartu
Wolter Pieters starts the post-lunch session at CATaC 2006. He describes current moves towards e-voting as they have happened here in Estonia and elsewhere: is Internet voting the future? Estonia was the first country to use e-voting in local elections, but in the Netherlands and elsewhere there still exist many questions around it. There are promises that e-voting would increase voter turnout, but the Estonian experience does not necessarily support this - here, e-voting was introduced for its ease rather than to increase participation.

Tartu
Next is Mary Morbey, speaking on the changes to museum representations through information and communication technologies. She focusses on two iconic national museums: the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This study is framed by concepts of cybercolonialism and cyberglocalism, and involved theoretical exploration as well as on-site observation and interviews. The key approaches to ICTs are the view of cyberculture as a new frontier in an American tradition, and a kind of techno-orientalism in which the Net replaces other objects so inscribed, and the two sites reflect these respective trends.

Tartu
The first session here at CATaC 2006 focusses on cultural diversity. Lori Kendall begins by showing a brief amateur-created online video from Japan set to a Romanian song sung by a Moldovan group; the video contains a broad range of cultural references. Many of the videos use Flash as a media form; this is part of a growing trend - but what cross-cultural references are being portrayed in such videos? Humour theory can be useful here (many jokes are about the pitfalls of intercultural exchange and/or employ cultural stereotypes), as well as Barrie Thorne's studies of 'borderwork' between boys and girls playing at school which maintains gender-cultural boundaries.

Tartu, Estonia
Well, after a brief few days visiting family in Germany we've now made it to the 100,000-strong university city of Tartu in southeastern Estonia (the country's second-largest city). I'm here for the CATaC 2006 (or Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication) conference, which will take place here over the next three days. This is actually my second time here in Estonia - ISEA2004 was in Tallinn, and the presence of such conferences is a clear sign of the keen interest of the Estonian university and government sector in embracing technological and intellectual advances. By now Estonia is one of the best-connected countries of the world, with WiFi hotspots virtually everywhere in the major centres.

Dresden
Finally, then, there was the panel I participated in, on participatory journalism. Obviously I didn't get around to blogging it, but I made an audio recording - and if it turned out OK I'll try and put it up here soon. Some very interesting international perspectives on the challenges for journalism brought on by participatory media - and I thank my co-presenters Christoph Neuberger, Jane Singer, and David Domingo, as well as Mark Deuze who proposed the panel and brought us all together. Let's see if we can do some more follow-up work on these issues. Here's our abstract for the panel:

Dresden
The last day of ICA2006 starts with a panel on Weblogs. The first speaker, Jae Kook Lee, couldn't be here, but there's a video message and a recorded presentation by him instead. The first question is whether the blogosphere is a public sphere - to analyse this, the structural and functional mechanisms of the blogosphere, the contentions surrounding the concept of the public sphere, and the possibiity of the blogosphere as a public sphere need to be examined.

To begin with, the blogosphere is the network of blogs connected by hyperlinks. It enables direct audience participation by posting and searching for relevant information, and has grown exponentially in recent times. The public sphere is a space where informed citizens exchange rational discourse, but there are questions over whether it has ever existed, whether it excludes certain groups, and whether rational discourse is actually functional. Thus, the public sphere is really more an ideal form rather than a reality. But how closely can the blogosphere approximate the public sphere? Yardstick requirements are inclusivity: whether all individuals can participate (and on the Net, there is a low barrier of entry and a minimal cost for participation in the blogosphere, and high interconnectedness); equality for all partricipants: retrieving and disclosing information without revealing their identities, and free expression and exchange of opinions are possible (but elites may dominate exchange in the blogosphere); rationality: the blogophere is a knowledge repository and enables the process of meaning-building (but inappropriate behaviours, production quality, self-segregation tendencies, and skewed distribution of attention in the blogophere are problems); and autonomy from state and economic power: no-one is fully independent, but low barriers mean there is no need for advertising to support blogs, and there is no intervention from state at least in democracies (but publicity is distributed unevenly and some commercial models are emerging).