Blog

Hannover.
After the excitement of AoIR 2008 in Copenhagen, I've travelled south to Germany for a few more events, and to catch up with my family here in Hannover. Before getting to Hannover, though, I've spent a couple of fabulous days as a guest of the Hans-Bredow-Institut for media research at the University of Hamburg. My host there, Jan Schmidt, invited me to speak at the university as the first talk in a lecture series on Web 2.0, and I think this won't be the last collaboration between us. I'll add audio for the talk later, but for now, here are the slides: Here are slides and audio recording (slightly noisy, sorry):

Copenhagen.
It's the final session here at AoIR 2008. I've come in a little late for Lisa McLaughlin's presentation; she's been working in Malaysia to examine the Multimedia Super Corridor project which incorporates the Cyberjaya (technology) and Putrajaya (administration) districts.

The project was initiated in 1996 with much fanfare, but met with limited success as companies approached to develop representations there were initially reluctant to do so as the availability of a highly skilled technology workforce was doubtful. There was also strong skepticism about the project from the local community, not least because the building of the MSC required the displacement of existing communities of Tamil plantation workers. If knowledge societies require 'fast subjects', then these existing communities were now pushed into a position of 'slow subjects' providing menial services to those working and living in the MSC.

Copenhagen.
As it turns out, I have two papers in this post-lunch session on the last day of AoIR 2008 - in competing sessions. Luckily, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai are on hand to present one of them (I'll post the slides for this as soon as I get them from the two) - and I'm here to present my paper with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders on hyperlocal citizen journalism (understood here in a relatively broad sense).

The first speaker here is William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose aim is to move beyond terms such as Netizen and citizen journalism and towards an understanding of various political uses of the Net as forming a fifth estate, in addition to the press as a fourth estate in society. Such uses promote social accountability in business, industry, government, politics, and other sectors.

Copenhagen.
The final keynote at AoIR 2008 is by Steve Graham. His interest is in the politics of urban space in the context of ubiquitous computing. He begins by noting utopian projections of the future, where everything is mediated profoundly through digital technologies - what Dana Cuff has called 'enacted environments'.

This includes visions of augmented reality (involving the delivery of location-specific information), and builds on ideas such as the 'Internet of Things', the use of RFIDs, biometrics, tracking systems, computerised surveillance, security discourses about e-borders, geolocation, GPS tracking, etc. This relies also on machine-readable entities, with sensors linked to databases that recognise and track individual objects of interest.

Copenhagen.
We're starting the last day of this very enjoyable AoIR 2008 conference already. This one is going to busy for me, as three of my papers are scheduled for today - two of them, in fact, in competing sessions (but luckily my colleagues Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai, who are the lead authors, are able to present one of them). This morning, we're starting with a session on the online dimensions of national elections across a number of countries.

The first presenter is Yeon-Ok Lee, whose focus is on last December's presidential election in South Korea. The previous election to this, of course, was won by a small margin by the liberal underdog Rooh Moo-Hyun, due in good part to the activism of Korea's Netizens and to coverage by citizen journalism site OhmyNews. This made the 2007 election a particularly interesting case for further research.

Copenhagen.
We're now starting the second keynote here at the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen, by Rich Ling. He begins by asking how technology has become part of the 'social woodwork', how it is being domesticated. The Internet, he suggests, is actually a quasi-broadcast medium, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary - a one-to-many metaphor holds sway for many of its services (excepting email, of course, but certainly this applies for many Websites).

Mobiles, by contrast, are a point-to-point form of communication - SMS and mobile voice communications account for the vast majority of usage, and the mobile telephone enables individual (rather than geographically fixed) addressability. Mobile phone communication is also a relatively intimate form of communication - and while new phones and new services may change this, most people use relatively old and limited phones which do not cope with such services particularly well (the most popular phone in Norway, for example, belongs to a now discontinued and comparatively ancient line of phones).

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session here at AoIR 2008 begins with a paper by Ronda Hauben. She notes that 2008 is the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of Michael Hauben's seminar article on the 'Netizen' concept - a concept emerging from Michael's research that spread rapidly and widely, and (especially in Asia) still has a great deal of currency. The concept had a great deal to do with the fight against commercialisation of the Net which was prominent then; today, for the same reason the concept has been suppressed to some extent by those interested in a more commercial Internet.

Copenhagen.
I spent the first session of this second day at AoIR 2008 as a member of a panel on academic publishing - I didn't blog this, for obvious reasons. This second session starts with a paper on "Transcoding Place" by Vicki Moulder, in the overall area of social design and media convergence. How do communities enact agency in this space, especially given that digital social architecture is a fluid system, unlike conventional physical architecture?

Designers and creative professionals have a responsibility and are able to cause real change in design; this is especially important in the context of the changes brought about by media convergence. Can meaningful online agency (e.g. tagging and uploading content to YouTube and other social media sites) compare in any real sense with activism on the streets? Vicki and her colleague Jim Bizzocchi examined this question in the context of the Crude Awakening event at Burning Man, comparing the semantic structure of a face-to-face event in the Nevada desert (attended by some 45,000 spectators) with its video documentation (which was uploaded to YouTube by numerous users within hours of the event).

Copenhagen.
The final session of this first day of AoIR 2008 begins with James Owens, whose focus is on online news and democratic communities. Interactive technology enables the production of new social formations, but can also reproduce existing social formations; this can be related especially also to local community formations. James is interested in three Chicago-based Websites (of the Tribune, a citizen journalism site supported by the Tribune, and the local Indymedia site), and is interested here especially on whether such sites promote or prevent social fragmentation.

Copenhagen.
The next session at AoIR 2008 is on the civil society. Paul Nixon and Antje Greber are the first presenters, and begin by addressing the question of how to define civil society in the first place. This is related to traditional conceptions of the public sphere, of course. One definition is of civil society as aggregated interest formulation, accumulated in a community of associations.

In a democratic society, civil society and its organisations form the third sector (in addition to government and public administration, and for-profit businesses and corporations). This third sector also contrasts with the private sphere. There are also views by which in a corporative state, civil society organisations are providers of social services; additionally, civil society organisations allow for more particpation in the policy-making process, protest and monitoring, advocacy, community building and democratisaton, etc.