From citizen feedback to the problem of ties

(via Gatewatching) – The Australian government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) has recently launched its public blog, entitled “Digital Economy Future Directions.” The Australian Government is working on a “roadmap for Australian businesses, househoulds and government to maximise participation in the digital economy;” and the explicit purpose of the blog was to ask for the ideas, comments, views and suggestions of internet users – to solicit direct online citizen feedback on some – thankfully much more narrowly defined – subjects.

Hyperlocal citizen journalism

Here you can find an interesting paper from Bruns, Wilson and Saunders, exploring the roles that citizen journalism might assume in a networked media system. It is less revolutionary as Bruns’ article on the networked ideal model of deliberative democracy. It is more focused too: it takes as a starting to point the claim that “online citizen journalism is unable to conduct investigative and first-hand reporting” – which I guess I often seem to agree with.

(I do. Well, with some reserves.)

The article on the other hand formulates a much more articulate argument, giving examples how, in what context could “first-hand reporting” be a function of citizen journalists. However, it also reaches the conclusion that the professional side cannot be taken out of the equation (for me the most interesting point was the finding that on a semi-professional news site pros articles attracted most of the attention, but amateur journalists’ posts generated more comments and discussion).

I commented on the article on Bruns’ blog, hopefully my comment won’t be lost in one of the spam filters.

A quick update

Finally I have finished my reply to Axel Bruns’ article discussing a networked model for political deliberation. You can find it in the “Papers” section of this blog; your comments are more than welcome.

In not really related news, I have mused yesterday about how the Democrats might find a silver lining in the current economic turbulence – in that it might actually help them win the elections. An article, published also yesterday on a blog of one of popular Hungarian online newspaper “Index.hu,” echoes the same thought – only it has been written by a Democrat activist (living and working in the US).

The world is watching the [economic] crisis holding its breath – but for Barack Obama, and the Democrats, the worse it gets, the better it is.

If you happen to understand Hungarian, here’s the rest of the article.

Monday reader

Before a recap of the weekend headlines, here are two articles probably worthy of your attention: Axel Bruns on the present of journalism in Australia; and Alexander van Elsas on the “free” web2.0 business model.

Visualizing cultural patterns

"Evolution" on Wikipedia (History Flow)

I’m being very uningenious with the title of this entry, which I simply copied from Axel Bruns. In a quite interesting blogpost, he writes about the latest apparent trend in cultural studies: the analysis of cultural trends (all across the largely connected but also largely decentralised cultural – well – public spheres) through their visualization.

Computers are awesome in collecting data (data mining), and, what the idea is now, is to make them help making sense of all the data, through – you guessed it – visualizing them. Citing new media theorist Lev Manovich’s talk:

How, then, is it possible to develop a theory for specific aspects of this global digital culture with its billions of cultural objects, and hundreds of millions of contributors? Our normal, manual methods of talking about different areas of culture are no longer adequate for this task.

Enter data visualisation. What was once confined to the financial pages of newspapers and scientific applications is now entering the realm of popular culture and everyday digital tools; visualisation is becoming increasingly common across a widening range of environments, including the digital arts. Public visualisations of their history and performance at their headquarters have become as prestigious as their logos for some companies, in fact.

OK, so, visualization – but what does this mean in practice? A couple of examples: CultureVis, History Flow (dealing with the history of Wikipedia articles, see the accompanying picture), Visual Complexity; or think of the ways in which Digg tries to visualize all the frantic activity that’s taking place there to keep everything manageable.

At the moment, the baby steps are being taken for this discipline to become accepted and to realize its full potential. It’s going to be interesting to watch (quite literally) how this will develop.

A great blog on citizen journalism

Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology runs an excellent blog on matters related to citizen journalism (and to blogs in particular). He just posted an entry about the publication of a couple of new articles, one of which deals with the idea of the Habermasian public sphere: Life beyond the Public Sphere: Towards a Networked Model for Political Deliberation.

I will post my thoughts about the piece; although I already have quite a long list of things to do, this should be priority. (It perhaps won’t come as a surprise that to some extent I disagree with some of the article’s main points.)