Internet 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 …

Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 session starts with Alex Farivar, whose interest is in mobile phone diffusion; such diffusion has also been an important driver of economic development and democratisation in a number of countries, it has been claimed. Alex’s project examined some 122 countries for the years 1946 through to 2009, studying economic growth patterns and examining (in more recent years) the role of Internet and mobile diffusion. Similarities in economic positioning, geographic context, and other factors were also considered.

Does mobile and Internet diffusion predict economic growth; does socioeconomic instability or democratic instability hinder such growth? Variables here …

Seattle.
The first keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Mike Monello (who was also the producer of the Blair Witch Project). He begins by noting the importance of team collaboration, and says that Blair Witch emerged as a completely organic process involving its principal creators. The filmmakers wanted the dialogue to be completely improvised, and so created a deep mythology for the Blair Witch story; some of the (very realistic) clips recorded for the film were then broadcast on TV, and audiences were encouraged to go to the online community Split Screen to discuss whether what they’d seen was …

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 starts with Caroline Bassett. Her focus is on Harvey Matusow and the Anti-Computing League (in the 1950s), as an example of political activism. How were groups turned on or off from nascent media technologies; how did they come to see potential uses of such technology?

The Anti-Computing League emerged at a time when personal computers didn’t yet exist; computers weren’t yet viewed as media, and counterculture was driven by Oz Magazine which presented print with television aesthetics. The ACL in England had some 5000 members in the late 1960s (roughly matching the number …

Seattle.
After a brief visit to Taipei (more on that on Mapping Online Publics soon), I’ve now made it to Seattle for the 2011 Association of Internet Researchers conference. We start with the Ignite session of very short and fast papers:

Nick Proferes, whose talk is in Dr. Seuss style, examines the origins of research ethics; he studied the content of the AoIR mailing-list to examine qualitative trends in conversations on ethics (and considered the ethics of doing so as well, of course); email traffic peaked around 2006/2007, and ethics, IRBs, and permissions were amongst the key terms, especially …

Cardiff.
If it’s Thursday, it must be Wales: I’ve made it to the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, which starts with a keynote by Emily Bell. She begins by noting that discussions about the future of journalism only started in the UK with the Murdoch papers’ move to Wapping, and it has been mainly about the role of technology in the transformation of journalism; before then, there was a strong commitment to continue doing journalism as it had always been done.

Today, journalism is becoming less defined by the business models that support it, and more by the activities …

Reykjavík.
The next speakers at ECPR 2011 are Jean-Marc Francony and Françoise Papa, who take an information science approach. They begin by noting that their research encountered a number of major methodological difficulties – challenging problems to learn from for further research.

The Web has become more important for the communication of politics in France. TV and traditional mass media still remained the first channels of communication for political parties, and as a tool for politicians to present themselves, and Websites of political parties mainly pursued a top-down communication model in the 2007 presidential campaign, but this is slowly changing …

Reykjavík.
The next session at ECPR 2011 is the one our paper is in, too – but we start with Darren Lilleker, whose focus is on the online communication strategies of Members of the European Parliament. One idea of this study was to examine the role which their various domestic political and media systems played in determining their communication strategies – but there was no obvious correlation at all. (Part of this might be due to the fact that all MEPs receive equal resourcing.)

So, the question becomes: what audiences are these MEPs targetting, and how? Darren and his team …

Reykjavík.
The final speaker in this ECPR 2011 session is Giovanna Mascheroni (or is it Alice Mattoni?), whose interest is in online politics in Italian regional elections during 2010. Her team developed a code book for assessing online party presence and performance during these elections, which is now also being applied to local and European elections. This included Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube as well as general online presence.

To what extent does the use of social media in Italian elections bear any traits of a convergence culture, with political debate taking on elements of transmedia storytelling …