Politics

Boston.
My colleague Jean Burgess is the first presenter this morning at MiT5 - we have an all-QUT panel going this morning. She begins with a nod towards Andrew Keen's recent book The Cult of the Amateur, which provides an argument not based on a deep understanding of Web2.0, but is mainly a response to the increasing hype around Web2.0 (providing a kind of hysterical anti-hype which in itself still adds to the hype, though). Jean's own work on vernacular photography provides a more intelligent, nuanced look at some of the Web2.0 phenomena.

Hot on the heals of my research into blog coverage of the David Hicks case, some more of my IssueCrawler crawls have completed recently. Eventually (when a number of followp-up crawls I'm planning for the coming weeks also complete), I'll analyse them in some more detail, but for now, here are a few preliminary observations. Larger images of the network graphs are on Flickr; click the respective images to see them. I've also uploaded the interactive SVG graphs; you'll need the Adobe SVG viewer plugin in Internet Explorer to display them correctly...

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The next speakers here at ICE 3 are Leah Macfadyen and Anne Hewling, presenting on their experiences with a University of British Columbia online course in global citizenship, which they developed from scratch. Aims of the course were for students to develop an understanding of the concept of global citizenship, as well as ultimately to consider the impact they might have as global citizens within local, national, and international communities. Students within this (elective) course come from a very brad range of disciplinary backgrounds (and in fact also from the universities of Hong Kong and Melbourne, who were remote partners in the project).

Leeds.
I'm really quite happy with the way that my first real attempts to use the IssueCrawler tool to map the Australian blogosphere have turned out. As I've mentioned here previously, I'm currently exploring this tool as a means of tracing how particularly topics are discussed across the distributed and ad hoc networks of blog-based conversation, and I used the case of Australian-born Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks as a case study - with renewed calls for the Australian federal government to urge the Bush administration to finally bring Hicks to trial or release him (he was captured in December 2001, but has not been charged yet), there was increased discussion about Hicks's fate over the last couple of months, and I've been interested to see how this has played out in the blogosphere.

So, my work on this was meant both as an exploration of the methodology for and proof of concept of using IssueCrawler in this context. Overall, I think this has worked pretty well, and I've begun drafting a paper to discuss my approach in detail (most of this was written while waiting around airport lounges during my rather circuitous trip to Ibiza and back last week, incidentally). This first research project is part of my wider work with the Citizen Journalism ARC Linkage project at QUT (for which Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, and I are chief investigators), and will also feed into a chapter which QUT PhD student Debra Adams and I have just successfully proposed for the upcoming collection Accented Blogging. I'm not going to post all of my current thoughts on this research work right now, but here's a first overview of what I've found, with a few graphs of the resultant networks:

Leeds.
(I realise I've started the last few posts with 'well' - so let's try to avoid this for a while.) As a long-time news junkie, since I've arrived in the UK, of course I've been looking to BBC television news for my daily fix. As television news goes, BBC World is usually held up as an alternative preferable to CNN - which like most U.S.-based TV news channels has lost a great deal of credibility in recent years, due to their insufficient ability to maintain a critical stance towards administration rhetoric. Similarly, BBC News Online is of course one of the most respected online news sources, and indeed has also shown some interesting and innovative tendencies to incorporate user contributions and external content in an effort to embrace citizen journalism within the confines of the BBC Charter.

Leeds.
Well, the inevitable has happened, and it's begun to snow in Leeds. So far, there's been little more than a light flurry, which I understand is less than what they've had further down in England's south - but we'll see how things go as we approach the evening. At any rate, the weather has put a dampener on any idea of further exploring the Leeds University and the city itself - I think I might wait until it turns a little more pedestrian-friendly again.

In the Australian context, the debate about citizen journalism has been rekindled by a recent piece by James Farmer in The Age's 'blogs' section, provocatively titled "Citizen Journalism Sucks". Unfortunately, though, the piece regurgitates a number of the 'home truths' which industrial journalists have been trying to spread about their citizen cousins - yet at the same time, the sharply critical debate which took place in the commentaries attached to the article also demonstrated clearly how effective citizen journalism (properly understood as a discursive, dialogic form of journalism) can be. Here's my response to the article.

Next up is Pam Hu from the Media Development Authority in Singapore - which is one of the best-connected nations in the world, of course (next to some countries in Scandinavia, as well as South Korea, and Japan - indeed, the entire country is a wireless hotspot...). The MDA is similar to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Singapore is looking to position itself as an East-West Media Gateway, involving media financing, production, aggregation, and distribution; this is done in part also through the Asia Media Festival (29 Nov. to 3 Dec. 2006), including film, television, and animation components, and Broadcast Asia (in June 2007). Singapore is also increasingly placing itself in international media projects to develop global awareness of what it has to offer. The Media Development Authority was established on 1 January 2003; it is charged with developing the Singaporean media industry and acts as a facilitator, promoter, and catalyst.

The second day at ATOM2006 has started, and we're beginning with a keynote by Kathleen Tyner from the University of Texas at Austin. She begins by noting the relationship between form, content, and context in studies of the media - and that the relationship between skills and knowledge in media studies and production is very difficult to reconcile. She also notes 'the tyranny of the narrative' - creating a conflict between how things are done, from a practical perspective, and what the storyline of any one media artefact is.

In youth media, there is now a transition to a digital literacy culture, with better access to lower-cost tools; this has also led to a remix culture supported by greater availability of content archives and new distribution networks. Further, there is also now the beginning of more supportive academic standards and practices. Newseum.org, Internetarchive.org, Livingroomcandidate, and the Library of Congress's American Memory project are all useful archives which can provide raw materials for such remix culture projects.