Funferal

AoIR recap – blogging, dissent, and more

I spent the end of last week in Toronto, at the AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) conference (by the way, the conference has a public blog). Good fun. I got to meet Clancy Ratliff of Culture Cat, and hear a number of interesting sessions.
Clancy’s spoke about Creative Commons Licences, presenting the project through which I first came to know her, arguing that the use of such licences should be placed in the context of other movements in intellectual property, and is playing a part in the creation of an intellectual commons. She talked about the mystification of IP law (in the context, I think of questions of legitimation) and about the spirit of sharing, as a mainstay of weblogs, providing an example for other groups.

It was an interesting paper, but didn’t get as much play as it deserved in the discussion afterwards. This was mainly because the other two papers were strictly weblog focussed, which is where the questioning and commentary remained, leading some interesting issues of intellectual property and popular action to be neglected.
The other two papers looked at the social objectives of blogging, and a case study of some of the prominent bloggers. The latter paper, by Dave Park, drew on an interesting range of ideas to interrogate the image of these bloggers as authoritative yet ‘disconnected intellectuals.’ He highlighted the way that media coverage has participated in perpetuating a romantic view of weblogs, with rhetoric of egalitarianism and democracy, but with continued emphasis on a small core of ‘super-bloggers.’
Another interesting session was centered on questions of dissent. One of my fellow ICR students, Victor Pickard, talked about assessing Indymedia as a radical democratic space. He mentioned one of the important concerns with Indymedia, the fetishisation of process, and concerns about the relationship between the newswire and feature articles. (I’m interested in this aspect as the newswire takes an opposite approach to the elitist one of, for example, Slashdot, but seems inferior, in my eyes, to the Kuro5hin process, as a means of balancing utility and access).
Finally we had a paper on the development of MoveOn as a space for collective action. This paper focussed on the anti-war activity of the site/group, and gave some background information on how opposition to the war percolated up through MoveOn’s user forums.