Politics

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Bjarki Valtysson, whose focus is on an Icelandic comedian who established the Best Party to contest the mayoral elections in Reykjavík, and won. After the 2008 financial crash in Iceland, there was a widespread mistrust of the political establishment, enabling comedians to successfully make the argument that Icelanders might as well elect clowns to political positions – and the party received 35% of the vote by doing so.

The Best Party successfully used cross-media platforms for promoting its subversive, carnivalesque election campaign, and thereby to perform democracy. It promoted values of positivity …

Seattle.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Susan Kretchmer, whose focus is on the continuing digital divide. The U.S. ranks surprisingly lowly on broadband Internet adoption; some 14 million Americans do not have access to broadband, and 100 million could have access but don’t use it because they can’t afford it or don’t realise the advantages. Rates are especially low amongst the most disadvantaged groups.

This is being addressed through the development of a National Broadband Plan by the FCC, under instructions by the Obama administration. This envisages the U.S. as a 21st century information society …

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose focus is on media selection practices online. She begins by noting the concerns that people don’t necessarily gain a full understanding of current political trends online, if they flock only to those Websites which already speak to their political preferences; this may give them a fundamentally skewed perspective on politics. Additionally, of course, people may also avoid exposure to political news altogether – so there’s a two-dimensional framework here, from low to high political partisanship and from low to high interest in the news.

There is also selective exposure …

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Annette Vee, who positions the Wisconsin protests in a wider context of protest movements in recent years. How do social movements travel across transnational networks? What role do digitally-shared social media play in this context?

Annette suggests that synchronous online digital communication platforms are globalising our imagined communities, so that we identify not with our fellow citizens, but with those around the world who share our ideologies. There are some similarities between the revolt against the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and the protests against Governor Walker’s draconian unionbusting laws in Wisconsin; they …

Seattle.
OK, sadly I missed part of the Wisconsin protests AoIR 2011 panel, but I’m here at least to cover Matt Gaydos’s presentation. The history of Wisconsin’s protest and activist movements is strong, and the recent grassroots movement against the virtual outlawing of unions is an important new step in this; Matt recounts the story of himself and his fellow students becoming outraged enough to be persuaded to act.

Some of the organising took place through community-organised Defend Wisconsin Websites and Twitter accounts; these were useful, but only to people who were involved right from the start – they didn’t …

Seattle.
Kathleen Kuehn is the next speaker at AoIR 2011; her paper is inspired by protest events against the apparently racist attitudes of the operators a local swimming pool which were conducted with the help of the local services consumer review site Yelp. Yelp provides a space for user-created reviews ; how is such consumer-reviewing perceived by users?

This work uses Alvin Toffler’s prosumption concept; consumer reviewing of local products and services can be described as a form of prosumption (and echoing the alternative explanation of ‘prosumption’, participating users may also be thought of as professional consumers). Ideas …

Seattle.
The second presenter in this AoIR 2011 session is Mario Orefice, whose focus is on the political uses of Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. There is a growing mistrust of political institutions and actors in western countries, due to a gradual loss of their representative and democratic mission, increased disruptive influence exerted by lobbyists, and the disappearance of traditional forms of identification and effective systems of representation between citizens and parties. This has led to a shift from dutiful citizenship (imposed by the state) to self-actualising citizenship (determined by personal goals).

Mario’s project examined the top ten most-liked …

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.

Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.

New media technologies …

Seattle.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Ashley Hinck, whose focus is specifically on the 2011 Wisconsin Protests against the eradication of collective bargaining rights. These protests involved conventional in-person protests and demonstrations, calls and letter-writing, but also a range of online activities from simple expressions of sympathy to more sophisticated forms of organising; this may impact institutions, but may also simply be an expression of personal identity – but yet it’s also more than these two basic forms of citizenship.

What’s necessary, then, is to consider citizenship beyond these conventional definitions – to consider how citizenship …