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Hi<br><br>
I am proposing the following multi-paper panel for Association of
Internet Researchers (AoIR) 7.0 Conference taking place in Brisbane from
28-30 September, 2006. If you are interested in being a member of this
panel, please send me an email with an abstract of your paper or
presentation before 21st February 2006. Panels are given a 90 minute time
slot and will have about 4 - 6 papers of 10-15 minutes duration.<br><br>
The general AoIR Call for Papers, as well as relevant conference
information, can be found at
<a href="http://conferences.aoir.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://conferences.aoir.org/</a> <br><br>
Regards<br>
Terry Flew<br><br>
ONLINE NEWS MEDIA AND CITIZEN JOURNALISM<br><br>
Panel Proposal for AoIR 7.0 Brisbane 28-30 September 2006<br><br>
A key question for 21<sup>st</sup> century citizenship is whether new
ICTs are leading to the fragmentation of civic discourse or revitalising
public communication by providing new forms of information provision, and
renewing a sense of common ownership and civic purpose. This panel will
explore the capacity of ICTs to promote multi-directional information
flows and democratise the capacity to publish in the public domain, and
how this may relate to other trends such as the rise of the open source
movement, in promoting new forms of collaborative engagement and
networked interaction.<br>
<br>
Even before the Internet was popularised as a mass medium, writers such
as Herbert Gans (1980) identifying the need for multiperspectival news in
liberal democracies that could develop outside of the filters of
conventional journalism practice. We now see online sites such as
<i>Slashdot</i>, <i>Indymedia</i>, <i>Kuro5hin</i> and the Korean
<i>OhMyNews</i> opening up the scope for users to act as citizen
reporters and ‘gatewatchers’, in open publishing and open source media
models. In these emergent online news models, the journalistic process
can develop a more flexible and distributed format, where users become
what Axel Bruns has termed ‘produsers’ of news (Bruns 2005). <br>
. <br>
The potential for digital media and peer-to-peer modes of news
production/distribution to have a transformative impact constitutes an
important intellectual fault-line in media and journalism studies. Turner
(2005) argues that online journalism remains an elite, individualistic
pursuit, lacking sufficient audience reach, sustainable business models,
or the pro-social objectives of public service broadcasting (PSB). By
contrast, Couldry (2003: 45) has proposed that these online news forms
may mark the emergence of ‘a hybrid form of media consumption-production
… [which] challenges the entrenched division of labour … that is the
essence of media power’. <br>
<br>
These debates present larger questions about the nature of ‘public
service’ media. In traditional PSB models, principles of universality,
equitable access and service to the public good relate to a model of
media provision where it is the role of suitably trained media
professionals to present and interpret news for a mass audience. By
contrast, it has been argued that open source models understand the
public space as an information commons defined by experimentation,
content co-creation and continuous user/producer feedback loops, governed
through a loose ecology of collaborative value-adding networks. These
debates raise wider questions about the relative merits of
institutionalised and networked forms of information production,
distribution and management to empower people as citizens. <br>
<br>
This panel is seeking papers which address the following:<br>
· Critical evaluations of the implications
of such developments for journalistic practice, contemporary citizenship
and the nature of media power; <br>
· The extent to which traditional news
media organisations have been ‘reinventing’ their approaches to news
gathering through online sites (e.g. BBC Action Network);<br>
· Linkages between collaborative online
news production and other forms of networked collaboration and user-led
innovation (e.g. open source);<br>
· Case studies of collaborative online news
production.<br>
<br>
<b>References Cited<br>
<br>
</b>Axel Bruns, 2005, <i>Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News
Production</i>, New York, Peter Lang. <br>
Nick Couldry, 2003, ‘Beyond the Hall of Mirrors? Some Theoretical
Reflections on the Global Contestation of Media Power’, in N. Couldry and
J. Curran (eds.), <i>Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a
Networked World</i>, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham. MD, pp. 39-54.
<br>
Herbert Gans, 1980, <i>Deciding What’s News</i>, New York, Vintage. <br>
Graeme Turner, 2005, <i>Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television
Current Affairs in Australia</i>, Sydney, UNSW Press. <br>
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