Session 2: Emerging Practices in Social Networking
5th Global Conference
Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria
Striated Space-Examining Changing Dynamics in Digital Social Networks
Len Ball
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
This paper examines the intimate connection between human and machine through social networking sites (SNSs) as defined by boyd and Ellison (2007). While open source in nature, having no endpoint or progress as an identified purpose for SNS development questions in what direction the adaptability of the human condition will go. A model is presented to address this issue.
“Striated space” is proposed as a model for the simulated environment of SNSs. It provides a framework with which to describe the increasing integration of online and offline activities, a dichotomy becoming outdated, as an object in digital space, and highlights two primary issues: (1) individual users develop stronger relationships with mediating technology than with other individuals and therefore complicate the recognition of physical others; (2) more dependence on technology often means users become less conscious of its operation. Though common in everyday urban life, and increasingly more common outside urban areas, the affects of SNSs on communication dynamics remain largely unrecognized in contemporary spaces – as digital communication increases, the physical presence of the technology decreases (Schaefer & Durham 2007). More specifically, the sequelae of using mediating technology are somewhat concealed in the flow of digital communication.
As the digital age signals an abrupt shift from depth to speed in information processing priority, new principles for navigating a progressively more networked world are emerging. The striated space model describes how these principles affect cultural participation and the necessity of them for understanding human networks and societies. Presenting risk as well as opportunity, the shifting nature of SNSs features new landscapes of interactivity contingent on how users, as an emerging type of citizen, participate in them.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Election 2.0: How to use Cyber Platforms to win the US presidential Elections
Sabine Baumann
Institute for Media Management and Journalism, University of Wilhelmshaven/Oldenburg/Elsfleth, Germany
From a political communication perspective presidential elections have significant characteristics. There is a large, global audience looking for information. The information material is highly suitable for interactive exchange (latest events, voter opinions; candidates’ positions on election issues; updates; personalisation). Not surprisingly, this potential for interactivity has unleashed the use of cyber platforms to share information not just via the customary media channels but virtually from citizen to citizen. Candidates or parties not familiar with the potential of communicating via interactive cyber platforms no longer stand a chance to win the election. Democratic election processes have completely been transformed with regards to how to communicate with the electorate.
The major candidates in the 2008 US presidential elections, Barack Obama and John McCain, have used all communication channels, including those in virtual environments, on an unprecedented scale. This included sharing information via social networks, communicating on electoral topics, and Obama’s extensive grassroots campaign. Obama, in particular, mobilised followers to become information brokers by creating and sharing their own content, reporting on the latest events of the campaign trail, organising local and national events as well as collecting donations to support their candidate.
The paper will explore how cyber platforms fulfil a variety of functions within democratic election processes: spreading information, creating commonly accepted topics, building voter networks, and attracting sponsors. The communication strategies of the US presidential candidates are used as examples to study the application of virtual environments to shape ideas across societal groups and hence, the influence on opinion building. The paper will demonstrate how ordinary citizens can be motivated to become part of virtual political networks on a global scale. Immediate interpersonal communication through cyber platforms provides the new extended foundation to gather votes and funding within the democratic election process.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Bodily Aware in Cyber-research
Judith Enriquez
University of North Texas, USA
This paper extends the interest in the embodied nature of human experience to cyber-research by exploring ‘bodily issues’ that have been left to the natural sciences while social science concentrated on cultural and social matters. In education and technology studies in particular, there is a need to move learning and knowledge production away from the body and mind dichotomy. The overemphasis on learning as something that goes on in the mind has to be abandoned. Discussion about situatedness and embodiment in learning in cyberspace must include bodily acts.
The body is increasingly being recognised in the ‘mobility turn’ of understanding society and the effects of new media and ubiquitous computing. The role the body plays in mobile or portable devices/technologies must be investigated. As a result, the body becomes a key focus in this paper. There are two interrelated developments that have become significant to the rise of the technologised body:
(1) the widespread production and consumption of virtual spaces (ie, cyberspace) through the Internet and portable devices;
(2) the incorporation of non-human material into the body, not only in the literal sense, where machine parts become replacements to enhance the body, but also in a more prosaic sense wherein there is a merging of humans and computers (eg, ‘cyborgisation’ of society).
The description and discussion in the ‘corporeal turn’ of this paper is focused on the mobile practices that reflect upon the enhancements and mobilities that technologies have introduced into our everyday lives. These include the transformation of human (bodily) encounters and the re-configuration of spaces. This corporeal turn implores researchers to be ‘bodily aware’ of the embodied performances implied by repeated production and consumption of knowledges and the development of cyber-literacies in terms of what used to be known as oxymorons: absent presence, distant proximity and isolated connectivity.
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