Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Politics

Snurb — Sunday 21 October 2007 10:25

Online Politics Research

Politics | Produsage Communities | AoIR 2007 | aoir8 |

Vancouver.
Wow, time has passed quickly (and very enjoyably). We're in the final session of AoIR 2007 here in Vancouver, and Chris Wells and Justin Reedy are the first speakers; their interest is in the use of Internet in direct democracy. Direct democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere is increasingly common, increasingly important, and different from conventional democratic forms in important ways (the European constitutional referenda in a number of countries are one key example here, while in a number of U.S. states there have been referenda on limiting property tax rates).

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 20 October 2007 02:25

A Quick Excursion to Club Bloggery

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Club Bloggery |

Vancouver.
I may be at AoIR 2007 in Vancouver, but back in Australia our Club Bloggery series as part of the ABC's online Australian election coverage continues. The third instalment of Club Bloggery has now been posted on the ABC site, and we've also posted a version of the article to our Gatewatching group blog:

Beyond Gotcha: Blogs as a Space for Debate

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, and Barry Saunders

The mainstream media and critics of Web 2.0's "cult of the amateur" often suggest that blogs and citizen journalism will never replace their mainstream counterparts because they "don't break stories". Notwithstanding the fundamental furphy - who ever said anything about "replacing" the MSM anyway? - there is some truth in this. It goes without saying that most bloggers don't have the resources, pulling power or proximity to the pollies to do much original political reporting: this is something that most sensible public affairs bloggers concede. (Though how often the mainstream media really break stories - as against exploiting deliberate, calculated 'leaks' from party spinsters - is a separate question.)

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 12 October 2007 09:03

Blogging outside the Echo Chamber

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Club Bloggery |

Well, the next instalment of our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online has now been published. On the Gatewatching blog which Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders and I run, we've posted a slightly earlier, longer version of the piece, which asks quite simply what we know about the real impact of blogging on political debate in Australia, beyond the realm of those already addicted to the machinations of the political scene...

Blogging outside the Echo Chamber

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In the current political climate, it's no surprise that a number of sessions at the recent …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 5 October 2007 14:12

Welcome to Club Bloggery

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Club Bloggery |

The second of our weekly series on pre-election blogging for ABC Online's Opinion section has just gone online, and we've also found a name for the series - Club Bloggery. I'm very pleased to say that it's also been crossposted to the ABC's Election Tracker site, and an extended version is now up on our group blog Gatewatching. The first instalment generated some interesting discussion (which I'll refer back to in the third piece I'm currently developing) - hope it will be the same for this one:

Club Bloggery Part 1: Consulting Bloggers as Citizens

By …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 28 September 2007 08:45

Introducing Gatewatching

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) |

No, the book isn't getting a re-release (yet). There's a lot of other activity going on around the fields of citizen journalism, news blogging, and online opinion writing, so Barry, Jason, and I thought it would be a good idea to set up a group blog dedicated to tracking these developments - and I'm pleased to announce that our new blog at Gatewatching.org is now open for business. This doesn't mean that I'll stop blogging here, of course - but my citizen journalism-related thoughts, and the outcomes of our collaboration on Youdecide2007 and beyond, are going to be collected there …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 25 September 2007 18:23

Blogging Conference Coming Up

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | BlogOz 2007 |
BlogOz

I would have liked to mention this here some time ago, but with one thing and another (such as my trip to PerthDAC) I just didn't get around to it. Anyway, for those of you within two days' travel of Brisbane: Peter Black from QUT's Law Faculty is organising Australia's first blogging conference this coming Friday (28 September 2007), at the Creative Industries Precinct. True to the theme, the conference won't be a broadcast-style 'shut up and listen to my paper' affair, but a discussion-based unconference (similar perhaps to the Fibreculture conference I organised with Geert Lovink and …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Wednesday 19 September 2007 22:37

He Scoops, They Score!

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) |

Youdecide2007.orgSometimes things just come together. We've only done a soft launch of the Youdecide2007 site which will provide hyperlocal citizen journalism coverage of the upcoming federal election in Australia, with a number of electorate profiles, interviews with local citizen and MPs, news releases, and opinion pieces now available on the site - but that hasn't stopped the site from attracting a good number of visitors, some press coverage, and now even a mention in parliamentary question time. A little while ago, Jason Wilson did a phone interview with Liberal Party member for Herbert, Peter Lindsay (available on the site as a nice YouTube clip overlaid with images from the electorate). In the interview, the MP rather appears to digress from his prepared talking points (about half-way through the clip), and makes the somewhat general claim that "young people today are financially illiterate", thereby causing themselves unnecessary mortgage stress. The federal opposition was quick to pick up on the story, and the Honorable Kevin07 engaged in some opportunistic political point-scoring on the basis of the statement.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Monday 27 August 2007 17:15

Mainstreaming Citizen Journalism in Australia: YouDecide2007

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) |

As we're slowly approaching the official start of the Australian federal election campaign (not that the unofficial campaign hasn't already started...), we're also getting very close to the launch of our citizen journalism site to accompany the election. This is the first major project in a three-year ARC Linkage research programme around citizen journalism which involves SBS, On Line Opinion, Cisco Systems, the Brisbane Institute, and my colleagues and me at QUT Creative Industries.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Monday 2 July 2007 15:30

Mobiles and the Public

Politics | Mobile and Wireless Technologies | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Mobile Media 2007 |

Sydney.
The post-lunch session at Mobile Media 2007 is started by Janey Gordon, who focusses on the use of mobile phones in critical situations, contributing to the public sphere; she's focussing especially on the SARS outbreak in China in 2003, the tsunami in the Indian ocean in 2004, and the London bombings in 2005. SARS was initially underreported, and news about it was restricted by the Chinese government, until a Beijing doctor became a whistleblower about the crisis; in this context, the mobile phone became a key tool for the spread of grassroots information about it. SMS messages were later also used to send out blanket information to the public in order to manage public knowledge.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 9 June 2007 08:51

The Cult of the Professional

Politics | Produsers and Produsage | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Wikipedia |

There's been a certain amount of publicity recently for Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur, which roundly criticises citizen journalism, Wikipedia, and pretty much anything else associated with 'Web 2.0' and user-led content creation for 'killing our culture'. Looks like it's striking all the right chords with the usual moral panic crowd who find it hard to accept that anyone but themselves could be in charge of determining what's good and worthy - or indeed, that users themselves, as the participants in culture, might want to have a say in such decisions.

Keen's one-man cultural …

» continue reading...

Pagination

  • Previous page
  • 138
  • Next page
Politics
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.