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Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 session starts with Alex Farivar, whose interest is in mobile phone diffusion; such diffusion has also been an important driver of economic development and democratisation in a number of countries, it has been claimed. Alex’s project examined some 122 countries for the years 1946 through to 2009, studying economic growth patterns and examining (in more recent years) the role of Internet and mobile diffusion. Similarities in economic positioning, geographic context, and other factors were also considered.

Does mobile and Internet diffusion predict economic growth; does socioeconomic instability or democratic instability hinder such growth? Variables here …

Seattle.
The first keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Mike Monello (who was also the producer of the Blair Witch Project). He begins by noting the importance of team collaboration, and says that Blair Witch emerged as a completely organic process involving its principal creators. The filmmakers wanted the dialogue to be completely improvised, and so created a deep mythology for the Blair Witch story; some of the (very realistic) clips recorded for the film were then broadcast on TV, and audiences were encouraged to go to the online community Split Screen to discuss whether what they’d seen was …

Seattle.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Kate O’Riordan. Her interest is in the biodigital sequencing of the human genome and its representation in digital culture. Genomes are ‘born-digital’ artefacts, and have become a widespread trope in digital culture; a substantial number of Websites provide information on human genomics through databases, browsers, sequences, scans, wikis, and blogs; genome stories told by emerging celebrities in the field are coming to increasing prominence.

Genome sequences are generated through very abstract computational processes; how is such information made meaningful, and by whom? This is a story of the construction of …

Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 speaker is Aristea Fotopoulou, whose interest is in digital networks. She focusses on the Feminism conference in London in 2009, using both ethnographic and Webcrawling methods. The conference is connected with the wider London Feminist Network, which not least engages with recent political changes in the UK. The network reframes views on violence against women, prostitution and pornography, but Aristea’s ethnographic work was able to trace a range of different versions of feminist identity.

Older divisions are reinvoked in networked conditions, and an imaginary perspective of feminism as a movement is evoked in the process …

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 starts with Caroline Bassett. Her focus is on Harvey Matusow and the Anti-Computing League (in the 1950s), as an example of political activism. How were groups turned on or off from nascent media technologies; how did they come to see potential uses of such technology?

The Anti-Computing League emerged at a time when personal computers didn’t yet exist; computers weren’t yet viewed as media, and counterculture was driven by Oz Magazine which presented print with television aesthetics. The ACL in England had some 5000 members in the late 1960s (roughly matching the number …

Seattle.
After a brief visit to Taipei (more on that on Mapping Online Publics soon), I’ve now made it to Seattle for the 2011 Association of Internet Researchers conference. We start with the Ignite session of very short and fast papers:

Nick Proferes, whose talk is in Dr. Seuss style, examines the origins of research ethics; he studied the content of the AoIR mailing-list to examine qualitative trends in conversations on ethics (and considered the ethics of doing so as well, of course); email traffic peaked around 2006/2007, and ethics, IRBs, and permissions were amongst the key terms, especially …

Vienna.
The final plenary session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 for today begins with Geoff Mulgan, whose brief is to outline a range of social innovation theories. He begins by posing a question: how do we know whether such theories are right or wrong? How can we test them – especially perhaps in such an emerging, novel field? Social innovation seeks to address certain problem areas – poverty, climate change, social exclusions, … –, and so by its nature is a sprawling field; the questions we must always come back to are what do we need to know, and how …

Vienna.
The second plenary speaker in this session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 is Frank Moulaert. He begins by suggesting that much of the interdisciplinary work on social innovation has not been properly recognised, or has even been gently censored. But why is this the case?

We must work towards a shared analytical framework, but this can only happen through an open and wide-ranging discussion of where social innovation research should be going. Research on social innovation goes back to the early days of social science (Weber, Durkheim, Schumpeter, …); such work was synthesised in France (and in French) during …

Vienna.
The next session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 is a plenary which begins with Uwe Schneidewind. he notes that we’re at the intersection of technological and social innovations, and technology still continues to drive things rather too much; but social innovation is gradually growing in importance. This is also because the marginal benefits of purely technological innovations – improving efficiency, for example – are declining, due to rebound effects: the relevant effects of technological innovations are quickly absorbed by the dynamics of the overall system.

Cost savings from cheaper lightbulbs are absorbed by the fact that cheaper costs lead …

Vienna.
Finally in this session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 we move on to Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger, who highlights the question of gender in social innovation – who has a voice and who doesn’t in defining this space? How could gender be incorporated into social innovation, then?

Edeltraud notes for example the impact of microloan schemes on the independence and empowerment of women in upper Egypt – there was significant improvement at the individual level, and women who began to run their own businesses gained a higher status in their families, but at the same time, gender hierarchies in households and …