AoIR 2006

Digital Media and Democracy:
Tactics in Hard Times

I'm very happy that a few of the articles and chapters I've worked on throughout the year are now coming close to publication. One of them is a chapter in Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, a book edited by Megan Boler for MIT Press; my contribution is based on one of my papers for the AoIR conference last year and explores the possibilities for citizen journalism beyond the tactical moment, as it transcends the industrial journalism/citizen journalism two-tier structure first described (though not exactly in those terms) …

I'm finally getting around to clearing up a backlog of things. Amongst them are some of the photos from the launch of [weblink:158] at AoIR 2006, taken by Ali Kerr from our friends at ACID. We were lucky enough to have a good number of the contributors to the book at the conference, and Online Opinion's Graham Young was kind enough to launch the book. He did a great job - and the book sold out at the conference and has been selling very well on Amazon since... Not pictured here are Alex Halavais, Brian Fitzgerald, Damien O'Brien, and Adrian Miles, who were also at the conference.

I've been meaning to post this for a while - a call for papers for the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy that's related to the Association of Internet Researchers conference I organised in September. For those who weren't able to make it to AoIR 2006, there's still some time to submit additional articles...

The International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Association of Internet Researchers is pleased to announce a call for further papers for a special issue on Internet regulation linked to the IR7 Conference ('Internet Convergences'). The selection committee - composed of the editorial …

Well, the AoIR 2006 conference in Brisbane is over, and I'm slowly recovering... If I've been slow in updates to this blog in recent weeks, it's been simply because conference preparations had taken over my life - between running around to get things organised, dealing with last-minute registrations, changes, and other issues, and actually being there to make sure everything happened on the days as we'd planned it, there was very little time left for anything else (including luxuries like, say, sleep). Overall I'm very pleased with how it went, though, and we've had some great feedback on the conference …

I should have expected little else, of course - all I got to see at AoIR 2006 were the two panels I participated in, and the two conference keynotes; my duties as conference chair (i.e. running about to make sure there were no major disasters) prevented me from anything else. The two panels, organised by Terry Flew and Ted M. Coopman, went very well, though. Together, they presented the two sides of citizen journalism: its grounding in the activist tactical media movements of the 1980s and 1990s (on Ted's panel "Byte Me! Digital Media as an Activist Critique and Parallel Mediasphere"), and its continuing longer-term establishment as a legitimate form of journalism in relation to the traditional news industry (on Terry's panel "Online News Media and Citizen Journalism").

We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.

We've just sent out a notice to extend the call for papers for the 2006 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September - paper proposals are now due on 21 February (there were a number of requests for extension from people who are only now getting back from their holidays). So, if anyone hasn't submitted a paper yet, now's the time to do so!

Also, some good progress on sponsors and keynote speakers over the last couple of weeks - hopefully I'll be able to say more about this soon... Other than that, this has been a week of meetings for me so far - yesterday I think I had only about one hour in my entire working day outside of meeting rooms. It would be nice to get some work done occasionally, rather than just to talk about what work needs to get done!