Long post, sorry! but it was an interesting second day. some key issues around trust, what exactly makes a community, and the fact that ITV are not going to have regional news after 2011! shocking.
Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka: Innovative Media for a digital economy –use and usability challenges.
Oxford e-Research Centre
Digital economy research programme, innovative media for the digital economy research cluster. Focusing on social tech systems in creative industries, transport and health.
STS including social networking systems (facebook, myspace, youtube etc) and UGC
Roadmap – http://www.mindmeister.com/17984994
Increasing use of social media of all kinds is creating a num of new opportunities in digital economy. These SNS and modes of communication, interaction and exchange are facilitated or enabled in many cases extentions of models found in other media – but other they are not. It is clear that although highly economically significant, these new media are now accounted for entirely from models drawn from economics, trading and finance. Social networking and related techs are complex systems- their use and usability challenges requires a consideration os socio-philosophical legal issues relateg to reputation, ownership, identity and trust.
Trust key theme that kept coming up again and again – what different conceptual frameworks might work with trust as a theme.
Questions:
- What forms of exchange
- What forms of production and consumption
- What forms of value
- What forms of trust
What is the digital economy… does the digital economy programme actually have a definition?
Questions of technology -Spades as an example of simple, appropriate and useful design. This is the kind of straightforward design that digital technology needs.
Flickr – plethora of digital entities. What is the value of this? Does any one image have value on flickr? Why is the value of an entity on #flickr? Many: economic (scarcity, labour, demand), emotional, aesthetic
Value and scarcity:
Multitude of digital entities, emails images tags bookmarks documents spreadsheets music movies data in every shape and variety
By the very nature of digital artefacts: Reproducibility, speed, replicability, intermittent existence, lightness (Augustin Araya)
Value and quality: disintermediation, loss of ‘quality control’, by passing traditional gatekeepers (editors, publishers, creators, professionals)
Trust
We used to trust the gatekeepers, now that they have been bypassed, has trust disintegrated?
An co-operative activity requires trust (buying & selling, enterining into any contract or agreement
Niklas Luham: trust as a complexity reducing solution.
Implicit trust or trust ‘without reason’
Trust makes reasonable mistrust valuable.
Crisis in trust? Does User created content and Web 2.0 lead to a crisis in trust?
Authenticity and provenance, institutional roles: authorship editorship and curatorship, stats expertise and professionalism, truth, ethics, technological system – reliability and security
Technologies are disruptive or our normal practice…? are they? Depends on your definition of *normal* practice. Technology is my normal practice.
Value and trust –
Trust involves entrusting some valued thing to someone
Complexity reducing solutions – ratings, reputation, apomediations (a guide on the side), provenance tracking, reliability, and encryption and security
Technologies are disruptive or our normal practice – they bring thses practices to the fore and make us reflect on them – then make use wonder…
Writing as a disruptive technology
Trust in the virtual physical inter-world
Difficulties of studying trust: Broach the methodological challenges that trust brings up
- Calling it trust
- Assuming that there is trust
- Relation between empiricial, historical and theoretical studies of trust and related notions
- Rethink the relation between trust, value and evidence/reasons for trust
- Rethink the relation between real and digital
- Rethink the relation between subjects and objects
Real vs digital
Permeation of reality with mechanical equipment (Benjamin)
The mechanical equipment and its output is a form of interation with that reality
Activities – gathering, collecting, hording, tagging manipulating, embedding in mashups, exchanging, sharing, distributing
Evidence based trust –
- trust and evidence as externally related – trust as finally based on independent values and reasons.
- Trust and evidence as internally related – trust values and reaons inter define each other within thick contexts
Meg Pickard: content communities and collaboration: How GNM is making media social
Guardian News and Media
work with 3 groups tech, editorial and readers/users
guardian.co.uk -36 million monthly unique visits!
High level of participation, Word limit of 5000 characters on comments on site.
Users interact with content in different ways: consume, react, curate, create
Context is king” rather than content is king. Data, community, multimedia, and text all combine
MP expenses scandal –
(Guardian is only major newspaper to have open API, allowing others to play with content, and take it away and use)
Investigate your MP’s expenses – allowing users to dig through MP expenses. What is the breadth of participation that we could get? 15000 people in first two days using the Mps expenses app to do citizen journalism for guardian. Crowdsourcing data. involvement allowed more detailed analysis than would have been possible otherwise, draft exclusion, soft furnishings, ducks etc used IP tracking to see which political offices were trying to deflect interest in documents.
How do you reward behaviour? added gaming mechanisms like progress bars, ranking, encouraged more participation
This was all built in a few days!
Are three people waiting for a bus a community? Have things in common, but there is no interaction and no recognition therefore not a community. A group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around contexts which are or interest to all of them for varying individual reasons (Jake McKee – communityguy.com
Can’t think of readers as readers any more they are consumers.
Social media doesn’t need to be sociable. Don’t think social media makes a friend for life.
Howa re people getting, being exposed to or monitoring news? How are users discovering new non-news experiences and content
Pre masticated content. A lot of social news, is bits that have been chewed and passed on by friends…
Mutualised journalism means developing and nurturing – mutualised journalism and community, changing nature of resources
Content experience and talk amongst yourselves.
Listening to what users say is not the same as letting them dictate the editorial.
Mutualisation of news – what it means for users
- participation by users before and after publications ( to inform, influence and add values to professionally produced content)
- Greater awareness. Involvement
It doesn’t need to be complicated.
mentions issues of curation of open data — responsibility to keep up to date, but once out there… and time burden
five things journalists have to do:
commission, write, edit, curate for the web
plan for and predict likely interaction
George Thiruvathukal: IEEE Computing Now: putting social back into society
Loyola University of Chicago
Computer now is a new initiative from IEEE Computer society
Who are the actual users? Academics in computing related disciplines, information tech professionals, students libraries, corporat clients and there is a large market that IEEE likely don’t serve very well.
Efforts being undertaken by computing now to address matters of usability and engage users, in particularly, members of the IEEE computer society.
Are our users taking usability into their own hands?
- Increasing numbers of institutions requiring faculty publications to be available
- Open access and institutional repositories (Southampton eprints project)
- IEEE CS allows authors to disseminate ‘private’ copies in most cases
- Sites like myexperiment.org are social portals for sharing scientific workfloes and research planes
- Open source projects
Cross cutting themes, social networking aggregated on site (linkedIn, blogs, twitter) what impact do these initiatives have?
How do you properly ‘tweet’ an article?
Tweet the title? Perhaps but many hournal article titles are not written to attract general interest
Tweet length is a constraint
Need to rethink the entrenched print concepts
What scholarly impact does IEEE have?
Computer now is in its infancy – need to gain a better understanding of our users and what they want from the society
Regardless of what they want being savvy in current methods is vital to attracting the new generation of computer scientists
Incentivizing participation is necessary.
Gary Graham – web 2.0 and the creation of local news clusters
Manchester Business School
Who is the least trusted people in society? Politicians and journalists
Local news media to serve the workforce. Peak in newspaper circulation in the 1930’s. Longterm decline in printed newspapers.
The printed model is the main model for newspapers. Print media is what is important.
Online revenue – roughly 5-10% for newspapers. Not very profitable.
Digital age newspapers – Citizen journalists
Itv will stop producing regional news from 2012- when digital switchover is complete! What does that mean from regional identity!?
Independently financed news consortia – jan 2010 – 8bids (Scotland, wales, tyne tees/border) 3 pilot projects roll out for 3 years .
Genuine innovation, not jus business as usual; strong multiplatform applications working together across the web, local newspapers, local radio and tv where appropriate utilising each different mediums special characteristics.
Social ecosystems media ecology
Gary’s personal opinion is that print will survive – perhaps not in the medium of that is currently utilised. Idea of personalised print content. Print on demand. Etc
Claire Bailey-Ross 