Archive for Social Media

| March 22, 2013
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What is participatory media?

One of the key aspects of my PhD research is the practice and theory of participatory media, which I originally took to be more self-explanatory than it apparently is.

For me, the term participatory media has always encompassed and been greater than the term Web 2.0, which I find reflects old paradigms of thinking about technology and, perhaps more importantly, human interaction with technology1. For starters, Web 2.0 is technological determinism in its most bizarre and insidious form. Whereas it might seem Web 2.0 puts emphasis on the social aspects of the web, to me it places the emphasis on the medium (the Web) while deliberately attempting to obscure that fact. Take, for example, this definition of Web 2.0:

a collection of Web tools that facilitate collaboration and information sharing. (Casey and Li 2012, p.204)2

This clearly places the primacy on the technology in use. Such a construct is insufficient for the nuances of participatory media as I imagine it.

Participatory media needs to include aspects of shared knowledge making, where the users are in dialogue with each other. Penman describes it as being a situated interpreter, or “to engage in sense-making in our relation with others” (2000, p.45)3 This is very much a Bakhtinian sense of dialogue, which recognises the essential joint (or social) nature of human relationships and language (Penman 2000)34. This understanding of dialogue is important also for conceptualising how I see participatory media articulating with existing structures of Web 2.0. Participatory media is in a dialogue with Web 2.0. As such, without a solid understanding of what Web 2.0 is and where it comes from (the topic of another blog post), participatory media cannot be fully articulated. Suffice to say that Web 2.0 is both too restrictive and discursively destructive to play too great a role in underpinning understandings of participatory media.

Aside from being a shared process of knowledge making, mediated though it is, participatory media is also in a superior dialogue with theories of participatory culture. Indeed, it would be plausible to argue that participatory media are absolutely integral to the modern participatory culture. Here’s how Henry Jenkins describes participatory culture:

A graphic showing Henry Jenkins' typology of participatory culture

(Jenkins 2006)5

If this is a participatory culture, than we can assume participatory media to be those electronic tools that are used (as opposed to ‘enable’) to participate. In my research, the method and form of participation is that enabled by local government authorities. For Casey and Li, this is only effective if it is “sought early, often and ongoing and utilized at multiple phases of the decision-making process.” (2012, p.198)2

The implications of participatory media (in a participatory culture) include the rewriting of old concepts like citizen, consumer and audience. Clay Shirky puts it this way:

Just as social tools are creating members of the former audience, they are creating legions of former consumers, if by “consumer” we mean an atomized and voiceless purchaser of goods and services. Consumers now talk back to businesses and speak out to the general public, and they can do so en masse and in coordinated ways.” (2008 p179)6

The citizen too was “atomized and voiceless” but now has the ability to “talk back… and speak out”. How local governments respond to this, and whether/how they use participatory media to do so, is essentially the core of my research.

  1. See my post on The Human Internet for some of my thoughts on that aspect. [↩]
  2. Casey, C. & Li, J., 2012. Web 2.0 Technologies and Authentic Public Participation: Engaging Citizens in Decision Making Processes. In K. Kloby & M. J. D’Agostino, eds. Citizen 2.0: Public and Government Interaction Through Web 2.0 Technologies. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, pp. 197–223. [↩] [↩]
  3. Penman, R., 2000. Reconstructing Communicating: Looking to a Future, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [↩] [↩]
  4. See also Bakhtin on Wikipedia [↩]
  5. Jenkins, H., 2006. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture : Media Education for the 21st Century, Chicago. Available at: http://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF [↩]
  6. Shirky, C., 2008. Here Comes Everybody, New York: The Penguin Press. [↩]
Category: Social Media, Uni, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 31, 2013
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A Framework of Questions

Some questions to consider during my PhD project.

  • Why do local governments use social networks? Is it because the councillors think its a good idea? Because the managers do? Is there a push from the ‘citizen’ for social media use? Is it just what everyone else is doing?
  • How do local governments use social networks? Is it for consultation or broadcast? Do they only use it during unusual events like emergencies? Why do they do it this way?
  • What other participatory media are being used? Do they have wikis? What functionality do their websites have? Do councillors formally crowdsource motions, ideas, etc?
  • Are local governments using participatory media under a well-defined framework, or on the fly? Is there a broad strategy or ad hoc adaptation?
  • What is eGovernment and how does it apply to local governments? Do local governments pay attention to concepts like ‘eGovernment’? Do they know what it means?
  • What is participatory about local government? Is the citizen only relevant at election time?
  • What does the citizen think about all of this? Do they care?

If you think you can offer some insight into any or all of these, I’d be happy to hear from you. Leave a comment or tweet me.

Category: Media, Social Media, Uni, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 21, 2013
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Someone is going to get Mendelaid

Have you heard that Elsevier is buying Mendeley? No? Well, that’s probably because you don’t care.

In the hustle of daily start-up takeover news that has been the staple of TechCrunch and Mashable for the last few years, this one is small bikkies. But TechCrunch did report on it, which spurred others to re-report. Then someone started a feedback query in Mendeley protesting the rumour. It has 72 votes so far. Against the supposed $100million payoff, I doubt Mendeley has taken much notice of the protests. Blinded by green, you might call it.

I’m a user of Mendeley, but I’m not overly attached to it. It certainly is the best reference manager I’ve come across, but there are other tools out there, and really, what does it matter what I care about the deal anyway. The whole episode raises some interesting questions about the nature of academic publishing, and the players in that space. Not because Mendeley is “disrupting” academic publishing (according to TechCrunch’s source) but precisely because it isn’t as disruptive as it might be, as some have identified.

Despite my best instincts, I’m about to wade into an ongoing debate I have little expertise in, hopefully wearing all the appropriate personal protective equipment, especially troll-retardant. There is one very disruptive company operating in the publishing and information-sharing and gathering space that could do a very good job at spoiling the party for academic publishers wanting to own their own reference managing company – Google.

Google’s issues with privacy are well-known. Their mantra ‘Do No Evil’ has often been called into question. And, well, they’re a corporate blood-monster desperate to suck up all your spare cash and data and sell it to advertisers. But wait, there’s more: they are also very good at building truly disruptive products in markets they have little business being in. If Tom Tom or Garmin had seen Google Maps coming, investors would have sold out a decade ago. Microsoft’s Hotmail was equally as unprepared for Gmail and Google Apps. And their self-driving car technology has left the established auto-makers at the starting blocks. They haven’t quite cracked the social networking market, but they’ve largely infiltrated it by default anyway. Google Drive, Gmail, Google Plus, YouTube.

Then, there’s Google Scholar. It isn’t linked to from the Google.com homepage anymore, so you might think its on the way out, but Scholar has some very nifty features that could form the basis of a handy reference manager, with the added bonus of native connections to Google Drive. Researchers can already create professional profiles in Google Scholar, download citations to articles in a number of formats, and track the number of citations of particular authors and articles. Add to that the fact that Google is a publisher of new academic research.

Google Plus is already a niche network. It would be pretty simple for Googlers to link Scholar profiles to Plus and organise those connections around disciplines to build out an instant academic social network ready to become a reference manager as well.

Google’s mission is ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Aside from their core search engine, what better fits that mission than user-generated citation lists written by experts?

Category: Media, Social Media, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 21, 2013
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Starting a PhD

Following completion of my honours year in 2012, I applied for and received admission to a PhD program at the University of Wollongong, and an Australian Postgraduate Award.

I’m looking forward to beginning work on the project, but at this stage it is still in the very early developmental phase so I’m finding it hard to get genuinely excited about the work. Nonetheless, I think I’ve developed an interesting, challenging and valuable research proposal. Partly in a bid to launch myself into this project, this post outlines my research project – largely without the academic language that the actual proposal is littered with – and the key topics in my project. Then, whenever someone asks me what I’m studying, I’m handing them a URL!

The topic makes good use of my experience and studies in communications and media, and also builds on my interests in politics.

Title 

I set out to keep the title of my thesis simple, but my supervisor suggested it needed to include more detail. So, while I liked simply “Hyperlocal eGovernment”, it now is appendaged with: “participatory media practices by local government authorities in NSW”. Posed as a question, it would basically be ‘How do NSW Councils use participatory media?’ Ah, but what is participatory media? And what the hell is ‘hyperlocal?’ Read on!

Key Topics

  • Hyperlocal: this term has largely come from a new media form of journalism that focuses on neighbourhood news. ‘Hyperlocal’ news is specific to distinct small communities. It is a somewhat fluid term, but denotes geographic areas much smaller than Australian (and American) states, and also smaller than regions such as “the Illawarra“. For my purposes, I am finding the boundaries of ‘hyperlocal’ at the edges of local government/council areas.
  • eGovernment: short for ‘electronic government’, this term largely relies on communicative technologies and strategies. Governments of all sorts are beseeched to communicate more and better with employees, citizens, visitors, businesses and others. The term also refers to delivering government services and processes via electronic resources. I’m interested in how well this term applies to what local governments do with electronic tools, including the internet. Does the term apply to how they do business? If not, why not? Perhaps there is need of a new term, or perhaps the term needs to be redefined to encompass the practices of local governments.
  • Participatory media: participatory media in this context refers to the tools and processes by which the citizen communicates with and accesses the eGovernment referred to above. This relies on participatory culture, which links strongly to to participatory journalism (and hyperlocal journalism).

Key theorists

  • Jay Rosen, who theorises the “people formerly known as the audience” in a media context. These phrase could be rewritten as the “people formerly known as the citizen” in that the idea of a citizen as someone who votes once every few years is uprooted by opportunities to continually participate in government processes.
  • Henry Jenkins and Howard Rheingold have both both written extensively on participatory culture.

Methods

This project will involve development of a framework to collect and analyse data from Councils including published documents and plans that are both broad and related specifically to eGovernance. In addition to analysis of these documents, I anticipate that there will be surveys and focus group research with Councillors and Council-staff. The existing literature on e-Gov, and other research on local governments, will also be useful.

Significance

This study is intended to have a definite impact on the participatory media practices of local government authorities, both in New South Wales and elsewhere. It will develop a framework for effective use of participatory media which is intended to guide local governments in their thinking about e-governance and participatory media. Further, the challenge to the efficacy of the term ‘e-governance’ could have wide ramifications in communications, media and political academic circles.

Category: Media, Politics, Social Media, Uni, Web | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| April 10, 2012
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I’m A Simpson

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