valtysson.net

The yearly conference for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) is coming up. I participated a year ago in Sweden, and am looking forward to this one. Now it’s in Seattle (the city of grunge) and the topic is on performance and participation. I’ll be presenting two times. First, I will be presenting a paper that my colleague Kjell Ynge Peterson put together on the Ecotelemedia project, which is touches upon the Aesthetics of Global Connectivity.

Second, I will be presenting my own work which I call Performing Democracy – The Story of How a Clown Became the Mayor of Reykjavik. As the title indicates, this is a study in the communicative, cross-media techniques that the Best Party uses to gain 35% of the votes in the municipality elections in Reykjavik in 2010. I conduct a discourse analysis of the campaign prior to the election as well as a qualitative content analysis on the Mayor’s Open Diary on Facebook. The purpose is to analyse the power of performativity, the absurd and laughter in generating cultural public spheres that induce civic agency – as well as analyse how the fun dwindles when pragmatic politics in the political public sphere take over.

Looking forward to it – should be good!

Just came back from a great NordMedia conference in Akureyri, Iceland. Very well organized, interesting papers, discussions – and hopefully outcomes.

I presented in the Political Communication section, along with my colleague Christina Neumayer, a paper called Tweeting Ideology? – The Reproduction of “Us” and “Them” in Anti-Fascist Protests on Twitter. We were also in a panel on Political Economy and Critical Theory of the Internet, chaired by Christian Fuchs. This panel was a part of the Media, Culture and Society section and here I presented my piece called Facebook as a Digital Public Sphere – Colonization or Emancipation?

Have to say that I’m looking forward to the next NordMedia which takes place in 2013, in Oslo.

My article on Europeana which is published in the ICS (Information, Communication & Society) is now available.

Abstract:

In this article a critical discourse analysis is conducted on the formal EU documents that led to the construction of the digital library Europeana. The analysis links these discourses to the actual user experience of the current beta version of Europeana and examines how they relate to the interactive, user-generated and participative features of Web 2.0. At ceremonial occasions and in the communication conducted on Europeana’s portal, user-generated content is underscored. This is, however, neither mirrored in the discourse analysis nor when Europeana is further tested. Therefore, even though there is will to incorporate the digital flows and processes of mass self-communication within the sphere of Europeana, the library as the purveyor of the ‘right’ knowledge is still a dominant factor, and therefore the modern ‘produsers’ are left out.

The article can be accessed here

I’m currently working on a paper with my colleague Christina Neymayer. The paper has the working title Tweeting ideology? – The Reproduction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in anti-facist protests on Twitter. If eveything goes according to the plan, we will present the paper at the NORDMEDIA conference in Akureyri, Iceland in August.

I will be lecturing in a very interesting PhD Course called Citizenship in the Digital Republic, arranged by Maria Bakardjieva and Christina Neumayer. The course will take place here at the IT University of Copenhagen. Apart from me and Maria Bakardjieva, Peter Dahlgren, Andrew Feenberg and Lisbeth Klastrup will also participate as lecturers.

Here is additional information on the course:

This course brings together four thematic threads with a common focus on the concept of citizenship in a society characterized by the thorough penetration of digital information and communication technologies in all spheres of life. Citizenship, broadly defined, includes any form of democratic participation in social systems – political, technological and expert. The digital republic, for its part, is understood as a political community defined by the governance of the people. How is such governance possible in a digital society? What opportunities for involvement do citizens have in a densely mediated polis? Can technological development itself be democratically steered? The goal of the course is to critically explore the new forms of democratic participation that the pervasive presence of digital media in contemporary societies affords and requires. The course aims at attracting and giving a forum to students whose interests focus on participatory forms of design, political and civic involvement, technological politics, regulation and education. The themes comprising the course take up the concept of citizenship in four distinct contexts:
• public participation in technological development, design and policy;
• digital media technologies and civic engagement;
• digital media and citizenship in everyday life
• digital media and cultural institutions

The first theme will encompass issues of public participation in technological development, design and policy. The questions raised under this rubric will address the possibilities and challenges of democratizing technology. Starting with a discussion of the relationship between technology and society from a philosophical perspective, this theme will go on to engage actual cases and strategies of public involvement in technical design and decision-making.

The second theme will look at the uptake and appropriation of digital media technologies for the purposes of civic action and political participation. It will review the advances made by social movements and civic activists in rallying support and making an impact on political life and the political establishment through the creative use of digital media. The new civic cultures emerging from these processes and their relation to digital technologies and uses will be examined.

The third theme will be centered on the notion of ‘mundane citizenship’. It will propose directions for the empirical investigation of the new practices of citizenship anchored in everyday life. The premise of this investigation is that digital media of communication are bringing knowledge, collective mobilization and civic action spatially and humanly closer to ordinary people. As a result, ordinary citizens acquire the competence, confidence and resolve to intervene into the affairs of abstract systems of all sorts. Thus the definition of activism needs to be revisited and a wider gamut of forms such as ‘subactivism’ should be given serious consideration.

The fourth theme takes the notion of citizenship to the terrain of cultural institutions and cultural practices. It discusses the liberating and repressive forces at play in the way users co-produce culture online both within and outside formal cultural spheres. It also calls for a more critical reflection on what cultural citizenship is and on the degree to which what we see online in terms of activity is in fact representative of the few, rather than the many? If we want to use cultural mundane citizenship as leverage for citizen engagement in general and as an inspiration for future cultural institutional practices, it is important to ask: what makes people engage in cultural activities online, what new forms of activities are emerging and how should we conceptually and theoretically address current use practices?

We at the Center for Network Culture (CNC) are organizing a symposium on Net-Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks that will take place tomorrow. I will, along with Isabel Froes, be a moderator for the round table discussion in the afternoon.

Here is a further description of the topic:

Networked interactions permeate our world. We no longer enter the Internet – we carry it with us. We experience it while moving through physical spaces. Mobile phones, GPS receivers, and RFID tags are only a few examples of location-aware mobile technologies that mediate our interaction with networked spaces and the people in them. And increasingly, our physical location determines the types of information with which we interact, and the people and things we find around us. These new kinds of networked interactions manifest in everyday social practices that are supported by the use of mobile technologies, such as participation in locationbased mobile games and social networks, engagement with location-based services, development of mobile annotation projects, and social mapping, just to name a few. The engagement with these practices has important implications for identity construction, our sense of privacy, our notions of place and space, civic and political participation, policy making, as well as cultural production and consumption in everyday life.

Follow this link for the full programme

I’m participating in a very interesting project called Telemediations -Exploring aesthetic paradigms in hybrid ecologies. We are having a symposium in Rio next week. Unfortunately, I can not be there, but will participate in workshop/conference online from Copenhagen. Here is a further description of the project:

Telemediations. Exploring aesthetic paradigms in hybrid ecologies” is an international symposium resulting of a collaborative process between the universities: UFRJ – Brazil, IT University – Denmark and Central Conservatory of Music – Beijing, China under the signature of  “The aesthetics of global connectivity: exploring design strategies and networked technologies of distributed sites through artistic processes”. This major project has as objective to establish research and artistic methods, substantiated by local and telematic exchanges between artists and researchers by means of symposiums, workshops, and laboratorial visiting.

The symposium will focus on the investigation of aesthetic paradigms emergent from telematically mediated environments. We seek to explore new forms of artistic agency through processes technologically assisted. Emphasis is brought to experimentalism with natural and artificial systems, the participatory and interactive experience through performance, image and acoustic interfaces and the inquiring into the hybrid nature of a new ecology in course. The symposium is going to approach these questions and your contribution is of great value to this meeting.

For further info see here

I just published the article ‘The iPhone and its Use in Museums’, along with my colleagues Rich Ling and Nanna Holdgaard at the DCMC group at IT University of Copenhagen. The book where the article is to be found is called Creativity and Technology – Social Media, Mobiles and Museums, edited by James E. Katz, Wayne LaBar and Ellen Lynch.

In the article we account for the political climate in Scandinavia and how user-generated content is encouraged at a policy level in all countries. We take a look at the iPhone’s use in museums, the available apps, and look at potentials and barriers when compared to Norwegian data on actual use.

I just came from a symposium in the cultural house Hof, in Akureyri Iceland. I was an invited speaker and talked about how municipalities can tailor their cultural policies in concordance with the state. I base my talk on my book on Icelandic cultural policy. The symposium was excellent and good discussions in the panel.

Búinn að smella pdf skrá af bókinni á síðuna.

Íslensk menningarpólitík (Icelandic Cultural Policy) is now available as a pdf.