My “conference fatigue” really started to show on day 3, so it was nice to get a time-out from all the exciting bouncing-around through sessions on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning with shifts at the table. I’ve definitely left the conference with many more questions and perspectives, but it has been very heartening to see and hear passionate people doing and caring about the sorts of things that I’ve been cooking up in relative isolation – as is often the case.
Here’s a bit more detail about my day 2 sessions as well:
- Matthew Allen, Roy Bendor – Both were looking at Web 2.0 from a critical perspective, though I sadly wasn’t able to pry my eyes open early enough to see all of Matt’s presentation. Roy’s was also deftly executed, and the questions were all very eye-opening. Roy’s paper focused specifically on the relationship of user groups, user feedback and the idea of “perpetual beta” to the software development cycle, challenging claims of Web 2.0’s democratizing nature. As others have argued, there are differing shades of Web 2.0-ness, some of which I would say are closer to the ideals of democracy than others. For the example that Roy chose, Google Mail, I would say there are different “classes” of users – clients who pay for use of the service (Google Apps for Domains subscribers), internal Googlers, and those who get it for free (most Gmail users). I am not certain whether Google has any way of differentiating these classes in taking feedback, or whether all claims of incorporating any feedback whatsoever, regardless of its source, into the code, is dubious. A fascinating perspective nonetheless.
- Jan Ferbeck and Gwen Schaffer, Ted Coopman and Aaron Veenstra – the title of the session was civic engagement, so I was really excited to attend this one. The topics were varied (namely, community wi-fi, Indy Media network, and links between on- and off-line political engagement), but still exciting and interesting to see, as they all reflected different facets of and approaches to examining and supporting communities. The political engagement paper had a lot of resonance with other papers that I would see presented in the “Politics and Politicians” session.
- Keynote: Henry Jenkins – this was pretty neat. I’ve had some exposure to fan studies through Henry’s blog and some reading I did for Buffy papers a few years back, but I hadn’t really started to connect the co-production, co-creation aspects of my honours to the notion of a fan community until after this talk. As if my honours needs yet another Big Idea.
The other big thing for me at all of the papers I saw presented was being able to hear a rundown of the methodology, which is a bit of a weak point in my academic learning. I’ve taken 2 qualitative research classes and it does not really show in what I know at all, so being able to see things like “coding” and “regression analysis” applied was really nice.
Day 3 had some pleasant surprises in store for me as well…
- Kirsten Foot, Sal Humphreys and Axel Bruns – I didn’t have high expectations for this session but I ended up enjoying it immensely. It was my first encounter with link analysis and looked specifically at the Fair Trade movement in the US and the UK. The session was a nice counterpart to my Web of Change experience, since there I was talking to the people who orchestrate campaigns and organize for non-profits doing social movements, whereas Kirsten was studying the actual online manifestation of that movement as a network through linking, as well as the positioning in the differing US and UK contexts.
I really enjoyed Sal and Axel’s project presentation as well – their project has their team making a placeblog for a place, then giving the existing community and community groups (artists, schools, etc.) Internet training to teach them about the advantages and possibilities of blogging. As I mentioned her after the session, it’s very much the opposite approach of many existing placeblogs, although the objectives – highlight the unique, local characteristics, and having a community take ownership of the Internet representation of a geographic locale in the global Internet context – remain similar. I’ll have to keep abreast of when their site goes live.
- Justin Reedy and Chris Wells, Shefali Virkar, Kevin Wang and Hyung Min Lee, Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki and Han Woo Park – this session for “Politics and Politicians Online” was both a bit on and off-track for me, just because I’ve never been big on formal politics, in terms of campaigning, following the newspapers, public opinion polls, and platforms. It often irritates me that the culmination of all the daily effort spent observing, synthesizing, debating, reading, and hoping is the throwing of my faith into a vote that doesn’t change over time and requires of me several compromises, unless I want to support a fringe party. Not sure proportional representation schemes will resolve that, but I digress. These aspects of politics really don’t hold much allure for me, so I wasn’t as engaged as I could be, but I was particularly interested in Justin and Chris’ work on direct democracy – a very alien concept to me in Canada compared to the States, it would seem – and Shefali’s work on the UK Prime Minister’s Office’s ePetitions. The practice of governing, however that looks like, is something I’m becoming more interested in. Elections seem to be the government equivalent of “fall plans” in corporations, where you have to justify what you’re doing to those who you are accountable to, except that if you are high enough up into a government, failing at an election can mean losing your job (though I suppose it is no less cutthroat in corporations). Kevin and Hyung Min’s work on web interactivity on candidate websites was already telling, confirming that web presences are meaningful on insofar as they support offline relationships that lead to action, and where they represent values that resonate deeply with the voter base. As they themselves said, incumbency is still the strongest determining factor in whether a congressman will be elected, which says more to me about people looking at the ballot going, “Well, we didn’t go to hell in a handbasket, so he must be doing a decent job,” and checking off the box next to the word ‘incumbent.’ Did I mention I don’t like electoral politics?
So that was AoIR! I’m quite grateful for having had the opportunity to both attend the sessions and participate in the discussions, as well as getting a peek behind the curtain to see what goes into producing and orchestrating such an event. Thanks to Richard Smith for being great company, as well as all the gracious grad students (many listed at the School of Communication), volunteers, and many others that I met, who shared their experiences and made me feel welcome. Perhaps I’ll socially engineer a way to get to Copenhagen this time next year… 
