gatewatching

Update: For those prepared to contemplate the erotic allure of blogspot profile photos in relation to the Henson debate, the NSFW (language) Grodsthink for this week should provide some food for thought.

This week, in the tissues and the blogosphere, there has been a lot of discussion of art, and its “evil twin” pornography, in relation to some photos. A lot of it’s been that simplistic - either Bill Henson’s photos are art or porn, either we should plump for “freedom of expression” or the “protection of children”. In this sense, many responses have amounted to little more than a less-than-helpful jerking of the knees.

For mine, neither one side’s claims to be speaking for common decency and the Law, nor the other side’s gratuitous displays of cultural authority or browbeating dismissals of “philistinism” have been particularly enlightening. The whole debate so far has caused nothing but confusion for some people, not least pollsters in some metropolitan tabloid newspapers.

(Image from Yesterday’s Crikey) Read more…

Daily Telegraph academia, art, Bill Henson, Bolt, Crikey, criticism, Daily Telegraph, Larvatus Prodeo, Mentalization-Positive, Sorrow at Sills Bend

One of the biggest annual events in our disciplinary area is the International Communications Association conference.

Our colleague Terry Flew is there, and judging by his activity on his blog over the last few days, he’s going to be filling us in on what we’re missing. He’s already railed against the fast and loose use of “neoliberalism” as a non-specific term of abuse, so it may be that this record of the conference will not be mere reportage.

I’ll be looking in regularly, and so should you if, like me, you enjoy vicariously attending gigantic academic conferences.

Uncategorized academic, conferences, Terry Flew

Alcopops, petrol tax holidays, who leaked emails from whom… Sometimes its difficult to get serious policy discussion in the MSM (unless, like me, you’re a Fin junkie).

The best way to find out about major policy developments that impact on your areas of concern is through your RSS reader. I thought I’d try to start sharing some of what I get on a semi-regular basis on the blog. We’ve posted about policy matters before, but at the moment there is important stuff coming out pretty well every week that has a direct bearing on citizen journalism and politics online. I thought I might as well stick it all together for readers now and again.

With all the reviews and inquiries going on just now, there will be a mass of reporting coming along shortly which will be informing big policy initiatives. Also, notwithstanding some MSM narratives of the first six months, I’m with Mark Bahnisch and Possum in holding that there is actually a fair bit going on already - you just have to look around in a clear-eyed fashion. There are some fundamental policy shifts slowly being put in place, particularly in the communications area, but for whatever reason it’s not being picked up on by the big outlets. I guess that’s one area where bloggers come into their own.

Read more…

ACMA, Steven Conroy, Telstra, blogging, broadband, media literacy, regulation ACMA, blogging, broadband, futures, infrastructure, media literacy, policy, regulation, Steven Conroy, Telstra

It’s good to get offline for a while now and then. Last night I went to the Belgian Beer Cafe in Brisbane with some colleagues and friends. The mussels were lovely (as was the beer), but as well as getting some nourishment and giving my eyes a rest I got to hear about an interesting local campaign: Save Our Kenmore!

The reason SOK is of interest here is that they’re using blogs and social networking to coordinate protest about a controversial freeway development in Brisbane’s west. Some background: the plan being protested is part of the (ahem) “Moggill Pocket Sub-Arterial”, known as the Kenmore bypass, but its most controversial element might be that it doesn’t actually “bypass” Kenmore. The road is a State Government initiative intended to speed car travel from the leafy western suburbs into the city. Admittedly, the traffic situation on the western arterials is horrendous, but many Kenmore folk are worried about the impact on their suburb, lifestyle and land values, especially since it isn’t clear how directly the road will advantage them. Some residents (including my informant) are being threatened with resumptions.

As SOK’s main site puts it:

This site represents the effort of a large community united to find a better alternative to the Moggill Pocket Sub Arterial (Stage One and Two), which includes the so-called Kenmore Bypass. This proposed major road would slice through the reserve corridor from Kenmore to North Tivoli and many suburbs in between. Stage One starts by dividing Kenmore, and this is where all the threatened communities must make their stand to stop Stage Two.

Kenmore is a pretty solidly middle-class suburb, and obviously there are more than a few web-literate folk who are opposed to this road. They not only have a blog (which seems well-patronised) but a Facebook group!

Read more…

blogging activism, blogging, Brisbane, hyperlocal, protest, Queensland

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I’ve also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In a previous post, I’ve already mentioned Megan Boler’s edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I’ve now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan’s interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism

Courtesy of Club Troppo’s always excellent Missing Link, I was led to read Lyn Calcutt’s view on the climate change blow-up of the last few days. Interestingly, it relates pretty well to the previous two posts on Gatewatching.  She thinks the latest GW spat is pretty unedifying, and writes:

Compare these brawls among a few high profile figures, where expertise is guarded with complexity and specialist terminologies, and the amazing collective intelligence at the psephological blogs before the election where both sides of politics left with more than they arrived with. People who just wanted to know who was going to win came out of it understanding some pretty sophisticated stuff about stats, demographics and strategy, and they could join in and learn even more from one another. The whole became more than the sum of its parts.

Hmmm. I can understand Lyn’s point of view, though I think the comparison has its limits. It should be remembered that the psephs have attracted their share of snark, too, getting some heavying from people in high places, and I have to say that I, at least, had to take some of their statistical reasoning on trust Still, the point is that she feels that the GW discussion is largely a matter of people sniping from entrenched positions, and that she’s not learning anything. For Lyn, the discussion is a little sterile.

I suppose it’s a fine line in all blogosphere stoushes - at what point does fighting your corner become raking over the coals of a stale debate? It’s very difficult to gauge, especially for people at the centre of the action who hold their beliefs passionately. And for some bloggers, on some issues, “agree to disagree” is not an option - there’s too much at stake.

Anyway, let’s hope no permanent damage is done in the current kerfuffle.

Stoush climate change, Lyn Calcutt, psephology, Stoush

Before, during and after the last Federal Election, psephological bloggers put MSM noses out of joint. They also demonstrated the value of alternative online sources of political information to a lot of people for the first time. Although some blogs like Poll Bludger, Possum’s Pollytics, Simon Jackman and Mumble had actually been around for awhile, an impending, much-anticipated election, and maybe (ironically) the MSM’s very prominent fulminations against them, brought these psephs to the attention of a wider audience.

The audience stayed because these blokes (and they are all blokes) write well, know what they’re talking about, offer comprehensive information archives and/or new and useful interpretations of polling material, and have an infectious enthusiasm for the mechanics of electoral politics and polling. In the last little while, I’ve interviewed both Possum and William Bowe from Poll Bludger. These interviews will be appearing soon in published forms, but what came through strongly in my conversations with both of them was that their main motivations were pretty altruistic. They were driven mostly by a desire to share information and knowledge, t to talk to others with similar interests and (especially in Possum’s case) to correct the grave calumnies in the MSM’s “interpretations” of polling. Of course, they also get kudos, job offers (Possum now writes regularly for Crikey), lots of readers and the pleasure of the odd smackdown, but fundamentally they’re working to educate their audience in a pretty specialised branch of knowledge. (That’s how the blogosphere “gift economy” works, as Margaret Simons book argues far more eloquently than I could.) As a result, many readers, including myself, now have the words “margin of error” forever embazoned on their minds, will never read the Australian’s Newspoll wrap in the same way again, and wonder daily whether their $1.30 is really money well spent.

Read more…

Graham Young, blogging academic, blogging, Graham Young, Margaret Simons, Mumble, Poll Bludger, polling, Possum Comitatus, psephology, What the People Want

UPDATE: I missed Tim Lambert’s contribution to the Quiggin/Young bout.

First in a new series offering links to fresh and robust stoushing. I’ll try a longer post about snark and stoushing later this week!

BANG!!!

John Quiggin replies to Graham Young’s On Line Opinion piece on warming “bullying” with an invocation of Godwin’s law. (Look down the comments for a further reply from Graham)

THUMP!!!

Grods issues a new entry in a snarky series on Alexander Downer: Blogger.

THWACK!!!

Jeremy Sear takes on Guy Rundle’s arguments (locked up in yesterday’s Crikey) on gay marriage.

Be careful out there, and remember, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, etc.

John Quiggin, Stoush Alexander Downer, Crikey, Grods, Jeremy Sear, John Quiggin, snark, Stoush

Graham Young has started releasing a polling series measuring the impact of the Rudd Government’s first budget. Graham is On Line Opinion’s founder and chief, and our colleague in the ARC citizen journalism project. But he’s also been pioneering the use of online qualitative polling over an extended period, and lately he’s been testing new tools that analyse his panel’s responses in innovative ways.

Although there’s more to come, Graham’s results so far suggest that the Government got the politics of the budget right. WTPW’s real interest is in its qualitative insights, but the raw numbers show that Swan’s budget was a hit with the Labor base, and has entrenched the sense that Dr Nelson is incompetent, even among Liberal voters. Graham concludes:

This poll was taken before (Nelson’s) address-in-reply so it may have improved after that. However, what it says is that while the budget didn’t win Rudd any votes, it lost Nelson some. You’ll have to wait for the qual to find out why, but my strong suspicion would be that it is to do with his performance.

In the first batch of qual, Graham analyses what the panel said they approved of in the budget, and uses lexical analysis software Leximancer to pull out the main threads, or “concepts”, in their responses.

Read more…

Graham Young budget, Glenn Milne, Graham Young, Kevin Rudd, Leximancer, polling, Possum Comitatus, Wayne Swan, What the People Want

Andrew Norton has written about the Australia Election Survey’s findings about who reads political blogs.

It’s the raw numbers that make you stop and think. Although the proportion of the sample who had read a political blog doubled between 2004 and 2007, that still only amounted to 2.7% of the sample. To put that in perspective, it’s a little less than the proportion of South Australians who voted for Family First in the 2007 Senate Election (2.89%), and far less than the proportion of my fellow Queenslanders who decided to vote for Pauline Hanson’s United Australia Party in the Senate (4.2%).

I guess that conversations about influence, even if they are proposals to use two-step models to talk about the blogosphere’s influence, really need to account for survey findings like this.

There are some more useful tidbits in Norton’s post about the characteristics of blog readers (along with caveats about generalising too much from what ends up being a pretty small group of respondents).

30%… had done some work for a party or candidate. Only 25% voted Liberal in 2007 (slightly below the proportion who gave their party ID as Liberal). Many of the others were serious Howard haters, with more than half the sample rating their feelings about John Howard at 1 or 2 on a scale that ran from 1 ‘Strongly dislike’ to 10 ‘Strongly like’. They were more than twice as likely to feel that way about the former PM than the sample as a whole. By contrast, no readers of political blogs seriously disliked Rudd, compared to about 8% of the sample as a whole.

So, politically active, strongly left-leaning, and very predisposed to disliking Howard. (I wonder how much wanting to see Howard go down was a stimulus to consuming more of all forms of political information for some people during the last campaign.)

Also, Norton reports that they tended to be younger (with a quarter born in the 1980s), more likely to have attended a private school, and relatively balanced in terms of gender.

blogging, readership, surveys Andrew Norton, blogging, influence, readership, statistics, surveys