Copenhagen.

The final speaker today at COST298 is Maria Bernschütz. She takes us back to the emergence of the digital individual - identity emerged with the emergence of ID photos in the mid-1800s, but it was determined by the photographer; today, users are able to edit their online identities, photoshop their images, and otherwise control their online presence. So, what practices are in use here, especially by youth? Maria examined this in the context of the Hungarian sites MyVIP and iWiW.

Copenhagen.


The next speaker at COST298 is Constantin-Bala Zamfirescu, whose interest is in developing Group Decision Support Systems. These have traditionally be implemented in physical infrastructure developments, such as 'situation rooms', bringing together decision makers and information in the same physical space, but can now also be turned into virtual spaces. Performance of GDSS is dependent on software configuration and instruction.

A GDSS is commonly used over a number of phases, for example from data gathering to situational awareness. Ideally it presents a solution space (possible solutions to a problem) within a larger search space (including all available information); this creates a great deal of cogitive complexity.

Copenhagen.


Finally for this COST298 session we move on to James Stewart; his interest is in how we create place and space, especially in the context of using personal ICTs (pICTs). This also ties into the question of user co-creation, of course, especially where it is looking forward towards future uses. The research project took place here particularly in the context of branded meeting places - locations which were clearly marked as governed by an established brand (e.g. Starbucks, McDonald's).

Some interesting activities here included linking online and physical spaces, and connecting with Twitter and Facebook in order to enable group interactions. The 'virtual' and the 'real' are increasingly blurred in the process; in practice, they are linked by electronic gateways. The idea of tagging emerged as a very important practice in this (tags understood here as anything from metadata tags to signs, logos, stamps, barcodes, and much more) - we appropriate the world by tagging, and we can see our and others' tagging activity for example in map-based representations.

Copenhagen.


The next speaker in this COST298 session is Simona Isabella. She notes how the mobile phone as a technology that crosses public and private spheres can be seen as an embodiment of contemporary society. Overall, the meaning technological artefacts assume depends on internal technical as well as external social factors; technologies are socially shaped, within the constraints imposed by technological possibilities, and may ultimately even be domesticated - but in different ways by different groups.

Mobile telephony history shows these developments: in Japan, for example, the humble pager evolved into a medium for interactive text communication, while the landline picture phone in the US failed because of concerns over privacy. Today, the emerging broadband society can be described as a society of perpetual contact; the mobile phone embodies and enacts this. By adding Internet access features, it transforms telephony from one-to-one to one-to-many; additionally, the use of social networking sites through mobile devices heightens the always-in-touch nature of contemporary society.

Copenhagen.


Eva Törnqvist is the next speaker at COST298, who highlights a specific form of user-led, bottom-up innovation in the use of mobile phones: by birdwatchers in Sweden. Traditionally, this community has used other tools to disseminate information about where to see rare birds: for example sticking paper signs on the back of a road sign, later on using answering machine and pager messages (to the point where they clogged the phone lines in small Swedish towns to breaking point).

Today, a community called Club 300 (as in, at least 300 recorded sightings of rare birds) uses mobile phones to share their knowledge. The switch to mobile phones also allows for the transmission of substantially more information (bird pictures and sounds), and connection with other services (such as road directions). Similarly, the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management now also share their wildlife and hunting pictures and videos on the Web, as well as through mobile phone services.

Copenhagen.


The next COST298 speaker is Serge Proulx, whose interest is in forms of user contribution in Web 2.0. Here, users are voluntary contributing en masse to create large amounts of content, and this is increasingly harnessed by corporations as value added to their services. Why are users so ready to contribute in this way - are they voluntary participating in a new form of information capitalism, and expropriating the social link put in the service of the economic sphere of production, and/or are they participating in the emergence of a new form of individualised mass media, a form of symmetric media which may empower users through the social capital they construct, potentially leading to the creation of a more participative democracy?

Copenhagen.


Next at COST298 is Mijke Slot, whose interest is in user motivations in the online entertaiment domain in general. This is based on previous work surveying the possible roles users may take online, across a large number of Web 2.0 sites. Mijke begins by taking us through some of the perceived pros and cons of Web 2.0 first - the negative and positive side effects of user empowerment. But what does an actual observation of user roles tell us?

Mijke's research surveyed some 600 mainly Dutch Internet users, and examined their (self-reported) online roles - key terms here include consuming and communicating, but also creating and facilitating. Consumption, not unexpectedly, still dominates, though, and less active roles are carried out more often than more active forms of participation. However, there are also substantial generational differences here - younger users are online for longer, and engage in more activities; they engage in more novel activities, and are more active on social network sites; but they don't classify themselves as more skilled than the average (what they perceive as 'average' may differ from older age groups, though!).

Copenhagen.


I've made the trip to Ballerup again for the second day of COST298 (my last - tomorrow I've got to travel back to Germany). We begin with Ike Picone, whose interest is in user motivations for participation in produsing the news. Ike begins by extending the produsage model to a two-dimensional structure (from production to usage, and from passive to active; 'old media' are therefore largely passive and comsumptive, while many Web media forms also remain consumptive, but are more active (passive and active could also be translated here into 'lean back' and 'lean forward', then).

Copenhagen.


The final speaker at COST298 is Peter Mechant, who draws our attention to the different modes of participation in social networking, and begins by showing a number of existing approaches to understanding these different participatory modes. Interactivity can also be divided in user-to-user, user-to-document, and user-to-system interaction, and each of these forms of interaction can be further subcategorised (e.g. can documents only be accessed, or can users add information; indeed, can document creators specify the range of interactions which they wish to allow).