Blog

It’s that time of the year again – I’m frantically working to get ready for my October overseas trip, which will take me through much of northern Europe. Here’s what’s on the agenda – if you’re in the neighbourhood, say hi (and connect with me on Dopplr to make catching up easier).

My first stop is in Berlin, where we’ve scheduled a couple of workshops for our Mapping Online Publics ARC Discovery team (involving my CCI colleague Jean Burgess as well as our partner researchers Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from Sociomantic Labs). From there, I’m heading on to …

Canberra.


Finally at ANZCA 2010 we're on to Hamideh Molaei, whose interest is in the use of social media during the 2009 presidential elections in Indonesia. Social media have impacted on political processes, of course - social media are used for networking and fundraising, political discussion, and the dissemination of political messages. Facebook has been used in this way in a number of contexts, of course - both by politicians and ordinary citizens.

Six social media sites - including Facebook - are amongst the ten most popular sites in Indonesia. The last presidential election there was held on 8 July 2009, as the second direct election after the end of the Suharto regime, it was won by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Facebook was used as a venue for advertising and disseminating election-related material. Candidates had personal pages; there were election education groups; and a variety of independent pages were also set up.

Canberra.


The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Julie Freeman, whose interest is in impediments to local e-government development. She suggests that there needs to be further education about ICTs of policy makers; one of the councillors of the city of Casey, in the south-east of Melbourne, whom she interviewed asked whether email was considered to be Internet use, for example.

The current population of Casey is around 256,000 residents (on 400 square kilometres), and continues to grow; some 89% are under 60. There are 11 councillors representing residents in the city council. The city has an extensive and sophisticated Website (with multilingual information and mobile versions), and its Twitter account (@CityOfCasey) has some 500 followers; there are significant visitor numbers (over 700,000 in 2008/9), while call centre calls are slowly declining. There is also a civic networking site, and the overall e-government costs are around $10,000 per annum.

Canberra.


The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Serene Tng, whose interest is in the influence of citizen journalism on journalistic reporting; her case study are the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Citizen reporting is increasingly important in such major news events; this is social media in action. Serene examined the coverage of the attacks across four major international newspapers, in order to examine how citizen reporting affects the traditional dominance of standard institutional sources.

The role of the media is fundamental in any terrorist acts: the media could be seen as promoting the terrorist cause by reporting acts of terror, but government sources tend to dominate in the reporting and framing of such events; especially in breaking news, however, government sources are often backgrounded in favour of voices from the scene, and this may affect how stories are framed at such times.

Canberra.


The final session at the ANZCA 2010 conference starts with Carolyn Michelle, whose interest is in the TVNZ programme Reservoir Hill, released weekly as an online interactive drama and advertised on TV and buses; the story was about a teenage girl moving to a new city who resembled another girl from that community who had gone missing. Each of the Webisodes lasted some 6-10 minutes.

Viewers were encouraged to text in with comments and advice to the main character, and extra bonus scenes were created from this; they were also incorporated in further episodes, and viewers' names were acknowledged. There was also a video blog by the character, as well as Facebook and Bebo pages. Initially, the show had an audience of some 20,000, but gradually this audience declined; it also won a Digital Emmy.

Canberra.


The next paper at ANZCA 2010 is by Jocelyn Williams, who shifts our interest to the question of opinion leaders online. This is in the context of a qualitative study of free Internet access for low-income school-based families, which also pointed to other difficulties and barriers for Internet uptake by low-income families; what can account for differences in uptake even between different case studies in this research project?

One likely explanation is the role played by key individuals who had influence on their peers and may have acted as role models in taking up Internet usage. What needs to be considered as a framework here is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information - society plays a central role in the knowledge formation process. Knowledge is socially constructed by people in relation to one another, within specific contexts; research therefore also needs to consider multiple realities, stakeholders, and angles on the research problem.