First of all: The organizers have done a great job in putting together a diverse and international program which not only promised, but delivered many inspiring talks and discussions. So thanks to Katrin Weller, Cornelius Puschmann and all your colleagues!

Some more thoughts on two questions which kept me thinking, because they popped up in various presentations over the two days. The first one: If we agree that Twitter (and other Social Media) is affording new public spheres with unique structures that differ from mass-mediated public spheres – do we then also need a new concept to describe the communicative mode in which people enter, form, contribute to and (re-)produce these networked spheres?

To put it in other words: If mass-mediated publics are formed etc. in and by the communicative mode of “publishing”, and if interpersonal communication is formed etc. in and by the communicative mode of “conversation”, what is the equivalent for the networked public sphere of “mass-self communication”¹? “Twittering” (or blogging, ‘facebooking’, …) right now factually serve as concepts for that, but they are not very well developed yet (or are they?) as a communicative mode² .

The second question is more of a comment :-) It has to do with the kind of research that was dominant at the workshop: More or less large-scale studies which used data accessed through the Twitter API, analysing manifestations of communication (=content of tweets, hashtags, …) over certain time periods. To put it somewhat sarcastically: The research is following the data Twitter makes availabe to researchers, but not necessarily the questions that are relevant, important or more interesting.

This should not be understood as finger-pointing; I have absolutely no problem with exploring data, looking for patterns without starting from elaborate hypotheses or theoretical models, experimenting with methods (thus advancing, of course, knowledge), etc. But just having read the paper “Six provocations for big data” by danah boyd & Kate Crawford, I agree with many of their observations and caveats about the particular kind of research that comes with big data (and they specifically refer, but not restrict themselves to Twitter research), in particular:

• The problem of the “black box Twitter” in general and the API’s selectivity in particular which make it hard to assess the generalizability of the data;
• The ethical questions connected to privacy, informed consent and the re-contextualization of communication by research.

Since I had to leave before the final discussion, I apologize if these questions have been reflected and discussed there; if not, I’d love to have space for thoughts and reflections at a #DIATA12 or #DIATA13.. :-

In the meantime, I hope I’ll also find time to correct, refine and advance my own ideas on the emerging regime of audience measurement on Twitter; if you’re interested in the presentation, just have a look below.

1. As Castells put it, thanks Michael for the reminder.
2. Which, as an analytical concept, would include aspects and dimensions such as perception of audience, mediating technologies, dominance of certain speech acts over others, shared routines and expectations of “legitimate” or “right” behaviour, ….

One of the main goals of the network is nearly reached: An scholarly volume on “Privacy Online”, edited by Sabine and Leonard, which gathers research papers on various aspects of our topic. The print version is scheduled to be available within the next months, but I’ve recently finished my contribution and am able to provide a preprint version of it:

Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik (2011): (Micro)Blogs: Practices of Privacy Management. In: Trepte, Sabine / Leonard Reinecke (Eds.): Privacy Online. Heidelberg: Springer. 159-173

The preprint is available online. The original publication will be available at http://www.springerlink.com.

Abstract:

This paper examines the ways users of (micro-)blogs navigate the boundaries between the private and the public. Various studies show that authenticity and subjectivity are dominant ideals for selecting and presenting content within blog-based personal publics, and that (micro-)blog authors share routines and expectations of “writing about oneself”, influencing the range of personal information shared as well as the specific ways of presenting these personal information to an imagined audience. This paper discusses the sociotechnical development, that is: the evolution of both tools and practices, from the rather static personal homepages of online diaries to distributed conversation of the blogosphere and to the constant and near-live streams and feeds of current (micro-)blogging within articulated social networks. This evolving communicative architecture, it is argued, affords the emergence of personal publics, where user share information of personal relevance with an audience consisting of strong and weak ties to engage in conversation.

My talk was on “Another structural transformation of the public sphere? On recent challenges and current research projects”, which of course is a somewhat presumptous title, since it alludes to Jürgen Habermas’ grand theory of the public sphere, and there is no way I could do that justice in about one hour. But then there are changes in the structures and mechanism of the current sphere that have to be accounted for, and I presented some concepts and research ideas to analyze it. The slides are below – the livestream of the presentation is archived and can be watched on HUMlab’s stream site. The part about the structural changes (slides 6 to 10) starts about here, and the part where I discuss our research findings (slides 11 onwards) starts about here. Transformation janschmidt umea_2011_print

Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles of users and contributors within social media environments. Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.

Produsage processes are now evident across a wide range of activities – mainly online, but increasingly also extending to the offline world – from citizen journalism and communal knowledge management through to collaborative artistic activities, from learner-led education models to citizen engagement in political processes. As such models establish themselves, what does an examination through the lens of the produsage framework reveal about their internal operations? How do they affect the existing institutional, industrial, social, and cultural environments within which they operate? How may they be guarded against cooptation and exploitation by corporate interests? What possible futures do they foreshadow?

Potential contributions to this special issue could include, but are not limited to, areas such as:

• Conceptualising produsage: theoretical frameworks for examining produsage activities, practical examples of produsage projects, …
• Historical and comparative perspectives: produsage and other forms of collaborative and commons-based work, precedents of produsage, …
• Technologies and practices of produsage: collaborative dynamics of leading produsage spaces, impact of the technological foundations of produsage, …
• Empirical perspectives on produsage: case studies of produsage and its effects, ethnographic research into produsage communities, …
• Methodology: research approaches to the study of produsage, tracking and evaluating produser activitities, …
• Critical perspectives: economic, legal, pedagogic, sociological perspectives on produsage, …

For this special issue of NRHM, we invite contributions on these and other topics related to produsage. Full papers should be around 7,000 words; shorter papers (around 3,000 words) for technical notes, industry perspectives or opinion pieces are also welcome. More detailed instructions for authors can be found online: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/nrhm. Queries should be directed to the Guest Editors.

Authors should submit their papers online via the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Manuscript Central site: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham

Important dates

• 16 July 2010 – paper submission deadline
• 24 September 2010 – author notification
• 15 October 2010 – final copy due
• Northern Spring 2011 – publication

Guest Editors

Axel Bruns, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (Brisbane), a.bruns@qut.edu.au
Jan Schmidt, Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research (Hamburg), j.schmidt@hans-bredow-institut.de

Background for this evaluation: In February 2009, a number of Social Network Site providers agreed on the “Safer Social Networking Principles”, a set of seven goals and subsequent measures to protect their users’ privacy, safety and personal information. Providers had to outline how they comply to these principles – be it via their terms of service, codes of conduct, software design, or other ways. These self-declarations were then compared to the actual platform – the interface, the user experience, the information and guidance given, etc. – along a specific set of criteria formulated by the lead experts Elisabeth Staksrud (Oslo) and Bojana Lobe (Ljubljana).

The results are now published in two reports, one summarizing the whole findings, the other documenting the separate platform reports. There is also a german version of my summary report on the VZ networks¹, and a press relase with other related material.

In addition and to frame this public presentation, a couple of panel discussions were held throughout the day – mostly with six or seven participants from different providers and organizations. In one, representatives of some of the tested networks (Facebook, mySpace, Netlog) welcomed the evaluation but also suggested that they should be involved more directly in the testing (e.g. by designing the questionnaire / code sheet).  Additionally, four young adults stayed on all the panels and were frequently included by moderator Sonia Livingstone into the discussion. This led to some interesting conversations, for example when one of the, Daniel, confronted the Facebook representative Richard Allan² with the case of the “privacy setting change” [link ??]: How come that the privacy settings had changed without proper notice to the users? Allan responded that the setting had not changed, but actually the privacy framework was tweaked; users were then given a notice and could choose which settings they wanted. Daniel, however, insisted and made a great point: For ordinary users there was no way to guess from the notice how the change in the privacy framework and their selection would influence their visibility.

In another conversation between the four of them, the young adults agreed that tagging other users in uploaded pictures should be regulated more strictly: Ideally, a person tagged on a picture should get a notice and the opportunity to disapprove (or approve) BEFORE the picture would be published. This change in design would surely affect social routines – only one of twenty persons tagged in a party pic from last night could ‘block’ the whole photo from being published, thus spoiling the fun for the others – but in respect to privacy it would definitely be a better solution.

All in all it was interesting day worth the hours travelling to and from Strasbourg. Some other noteworthy stuff:

• I didn’t notice before, but the conference was on the same day that the parliament voted on the new EU commission. So not only did Viviane Reding give her last speech as Commissioner for Information Society and Media, when she welcomed us in the morning, but we also had the chance to be in the parliament after lunch, right in time for the statements of the fraction presidents and the actual vote. Great timing!
• Part of the Safer Internet Day 2010 was the opening of an exhibition on online identity, which included pictures from the “Alter Ego” project by Robbie Cooper (BBC-Article on his work). It was great to meet Robbie in person, since I use some of his pictures for quite some time now in some of my presentations. I promised him to buy his book now… ;-)

1. Translated from the english version I handed in to the lead experts, so some phrases might sound a little bit awkward.. ;-)
2. Director of Policy EU

Thanks to both of You!

(Click to enlarge)

1. … using MS Word.. ;-)

Here’s parts of the call for proposals (full text over here):

BlogTalk 2009
The 6th International Conference on Social Software
September 1st and 2nd, 2009
Jeju Island, Korea

Overview

Following the international success of the last five BlogTalk events, the next BlogTalk – to be held in Jeju Island, Korea on September 1st and 2nd, 2009 – is continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference (which this year will be co-located with Lift Asia 09) is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software and social media, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software and social media communities.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2009 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

• Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
• Social software in enterprise and educational environments
• The political impact of social software and social media
• Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

(…)

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and social media, and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

Submitting your proposals

You must submit a one-page abstract of the work you intend to present for review purposes (not to exceed 600 words). Please upload your submission along with some personal information using the EasyChair conference area for BlogTalk 2009. You will receive a confirmation of the arrival of your submission immediately. The submission deadline is June 27th, 2009.

Following notification of acceptance, you will be invited to submit a short or long paper (four or eight pages respectively) for the conference proceedings. BlogTalk is a peer-reviewed conference.

Timeline and important dates

• One-page abstract submission deadline: June 27th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: July 13th, 2009

Full paper submission deadline: August 27th, 2009

For about two hours, we talked about why traditional media and professional journalists are under pressure, and what the consequences for journalism as a practice will be. Gillmor vehemently argued that the current newspaper crisis is caused not by a failure of journalism as such, but by the breaking-apart of its traditional business model: selling readers’ “eyeballs” to advertisers. The monopoly of newspapers for classified ads is crushed by portals like eBay, Craigslist and monster.com, so the main revenue source is drying out. Add the fact that more and more readers turn to alternative online sources and aggregators for just-in-time information, and you have a situation where traditional media are loosing ground rapidly. To Gillmor, however, this does not imply that journalism is doomed, but rather that there have to be new ways for funding and financing good journalism; to paraphrase him: “I’m agnostic regarding financing of journalism, wether it’d be through foundations or private companies – I care for good journalism!”

Other interesting points we’ve discussed covered education and journalism programs – Gillmor is running the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, a program designed for, as he put it, “helping students to create their own jobs”. To me it seems, that in a nutshell, its mission is to bring startup culture to media student: providing them the knowlege on current trends in digital technology, journalism and entrepreneurship, together with opportunities to experiment with ideas and formats. Here, Gillmor’s Silicon Valley background clearly came to light; he pointed out that within the mindset of the startup culture, failing is not a bad thing at all (unless it is ‘stupid failing’): “if you haven’t been part of a failure, you’re not that interesting to investors”. So basically the idea is evolutionary: by encouraging media students (and others) to be innovative and experimenting, there will be a lot of startups, new ideas and projects. While most of them will fail, some will be successful, and they will shape the future for media and journalism.

Over the past decades, a variety of new technologies have reconfigured the ways
in which we initiate and maintain social and economic relations. Today, millions
of people around the globe buy goods from people they have never met in person,
edit the online encyclopedia Wikipedia without monetary rewards, use e-mail and
SMS to organize political protest, stay in contact with friends via social
networking sites, or look for a new partner via online dating services. In
short, an increasing part of our lives is taking place in digitally networked
environments. Powered by information and communication technologies built on
cheap and interconnected processors with considerable computing capacity, these
environments are characterized by novel forms of interaction.

Digitally networked environments are often assumed to magically govern
themselves. Especially when traditional modes of governance like law and
centralized regulations fail, researchers tend to resort to ideas like
?self-regulation,? ?decentralization,? ?liberalization,? or ?peer production? to
describe the complex interactions and mechanisms that take place in large-scale,
loose-knit socio-technical networks. Moreover, the network itself is often
contrasted with markets or hierarchies as a new mode of governance in its own
right.

This workshop will adopt a different approach and take a closer look at new and
non-obvious modes of governance in digitally networked environments.
Specifically, we would like to explore what these modes are, how they work, and
who or what controls them. Questions might be, but are not limited to: What is
the role of calculation, measurement, classification, trust, accountability, or
reputation? How can we understand leadership and authority under these
conditions? Which role does the technical infrastructure play? Is there evidence
for a new form of network governance? Overall, the goal of the workshop is to
generate a deeper conceptual, empirical, and normative understanding of these
new modes of governance through open and creative discussion.

Format:
We are planning on having a one-day workshop with several sessions, focusing on
one mode of governance each. A session will be kicked off by a presenter and a
respondent, preferably grounding their arguments in empirical analysis. At the
end of the day, we hope to wrap up the workshop and summarize the findings in a
brief report.

Participation:
The workshop is open to a maximum of 16 postgraduates and post-docs from all
departments and universities. If you would like to participate, please send a
brief abstract (300 words) including your name, affiliation, and contact details
to malte.ziewitz@oii.ox.ac.uk by Feb. 20, 2009. Priority will be given to those
who commit to introducing a mode of governance of their choice for discussion.
Refreshments, lunch, and challenging ideas will be provided. A limited amount of
travel funding is available.

Contact:
Christian Pentzold (christian.pentzold [at] oii.ox.ac.uk)
Malte Ziewitz (malte.ziewitz [at] oii.ox.ac.uk)
Oxford Internet Institute ? Oxford University
1 St. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, United Kingdom
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/

Generously supported by the Web Science Research Initiative

Congratulations to Raquel and her colleagues Adriana Amartal and Sandra Montardo, and thanks for having me on board!

Schmidt, Jan (2009): Práticas de blogging em língua alemã:resultado da pesquisa “Wie ich blogge?!”. In: Amaral, Adriana / Recuero, Raquel / Montardo, Sandra (Hrsg.): Blogs.com. Estudos sobre blogs e comunicação. Sao Paulo. S. 109-131.