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Re: SMS
by Aaron Delwiche 18 Jan '03

18 Jan '03

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned previously on the list, but SMS was used by political organizers to coordinate mass demonstrations against President Joseph Estrada in January 2001. In his book SMART MOBS, Howard Rheingold documents the role of text messaging in the popular uprising. Organizers disseminated messages that asked protestors to "swarm" key public locations such as Epfianio de los Santas Avenue. Within less than ninety minutes of the initial call, at least 20,000 protestors had gathered at this historic location. Within four days, the number climbed to more than a million. Estrada was ultimately forced to step down. The preceding account is paraphrased from Cecil Johnson's article in the Star Telegram. For more details, see: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/4647456.htm Best regards, Aaron Delwiche Lecturer, Department of Communication University of Washington e-mail: <mailto:redwood@u.washington.edu> redwood(a)u.washington.edu

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Wellman and Haythornthwaite
by Nancy Baym 18 Jan '03

18 Jan '03

Colleagues, Last week I got my copy of Wellman and Haythornthwaite's new collection _The Internet in Everyday Life_ and I have been reading through it. It is wonderful. Thanks to Barry and Caroline for putting it together and to the many Aoir-ers whose work is included. It really does move us forward and provides a great foundation for those of us who want to argue for differentiated ways of understanding the internet, and for understanding the internet as integrated into mundane life rather than set in opposition to it. Not a paid announcement, just a token of sincere appreciation, Nancy -- ________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org

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RE: [Air-l] SMS?
by Rosenberg, Adam (SCH) 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

About short message service (SMS), I would point out that it was an add-on to the Global System for Mobility (GSM) cellular standard and it took off like hotcakes in Japan. There is also EMS, extended message service, that sends sound bytes and stuff like that. And there is multimedia message service (MMS) that can send images. MMS phones are the ones that can point at something and e-mail a picture, I'm told. Japanese teenagers may have shortened thumbs from sending so many short messages on their cell phones. > -----Original Message----- > From: Mark Warschauer [mailto:markw@uci.edu] > Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 11:37 AM > To: air-l(a)aoir.org > Subject: Re: [Air-l] SMS? > > > >Where do you live, Mark ? > > > Southern California. > > SMS is not as prevalent here as in Europe, and apparently neither is > the term (though I'm sure people more astute than I are familiar with > it). > Mark > > Mark Warschauer > Vice Chair, Department of Education > Assistant Professor of Education and of Information & Computer Science > University of California, Irvine > tel: 949: 824-2526, fax: (949) 824-2965 > markw(a)uci.edu; http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw > > _______________________________________________ > Air-l mailing list > Air-l(a)aoir.org > http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l >

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Developing critical thinkers online
by Andrea Lapa 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

Dear All, My name is Andrea. I am a Brazilian Ph.D. candidate, based in London for the current year. I was addressed to this list by my advisor: Michel Menou. My work deals with the changes brought to learning processes by the switch from real to virtual spaces. A special concern in this respect is the formation of critical and autonomous thinkers. The concept of critical thinkers seems a great umbrella. But for me it is less a matter of fostering individual skills and more a social interaction process, which promote a collective questioning, criticism and creativity. I am fostering interesting examples of pedagogical practices. I believe I will find good clues on dialogical methods, such as discussions and collaborative learning, but it's not a "straitjacket". I am also interested in experiences that create and/or maintain community interaction. Does it ring any bells to any of you? I would either appreciate indications of related research and publications. Thanks in advance, Andrea Lapa a.b.lapa(a)soi.city.ac.uk

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RE: [Air-l] Global data on Teen Internet use
by Anderson, Ben 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

>I've been digging around for days looking for global data on the number/percentage of youth (any segment of ages between 9 and 24) who use the Internet/use email/use IM, and I've come up with very, very little. You are right - I have seen very few surveys which ask about IM as well as email. There have been some good qualitative studies though (see below). Our 2001 e-Living survey has some results on net/email/sms etc usage by the 16+ group (Rich Ling again :-). See http://www.eurescom.de/e-living/deliverables/e-living-D7.4-Age-Gender-Socia… >I'd also love a comparative look at IM versus SMS use in a variety of countries. In countries where SMS use is so prevalent among youth, is IM ever used? yes, extensively. Often to the same people as they are sending SMS/talking to/emailing. Gitte mentioned Sonia Livingstone's work - in a more recent project (funded by BT) she has used qualitative methods to look at how young people use SMS, IM, email etc as part of their communications repertoire (see http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/soniaLivingstone.htm and section 4 of http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/pdf/btreport_familiesinternet.pdf) She is currently writing this up as a book I think. Ben -- Dr Ben Anderson www.essex.ac.uk/chimera +44 (0) 7710 187 806

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re: internet as database - or rather an archive
by Rune Dalgaard 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

Hi Denise and others A few comments on the idea of the internet as a database, which has recently been brought forward by Manovich - and a suggesting to think of the internet as a meta-archive instead. There are many issues at play here. Manovich (2001) (not unlike hypertext theorists from the early 90's) contrasts the database as a cultural form with narrative. There are some interesting points about this in his 'The language of new media' but generally I am sceptical of his argument. One reason is that his notion of database is so general that it fits any kind of archive or collection containing recorded human expression. A second objection is that comparing narrative (movies and novels) with collections/archives, which what is really done conceptually, seems like comparing apples and oranges. Denise, you construct a dichotomy between CMC and Databases claiming that one is about distribution and the other about storage. I think it is more appropriate to think about different modi of communication/archiving where both dimensions are present. One of the interesting qualities of the internet is exactly that it creates (from a media historic point of view) a new relation between storage and distribution. One way to take this issue further is to regard the internet as an archive (not a database): a meta-archive constituted by many archives. One among many interesting qualities of this meta-archive, is exactly that distribution is build into the medium as a general potential (in principle any point on the net can be accessed from any other point). Taking of the net as an archive in other words, demand that you consider its qualities with respect to distribution I would venture. Along the same line the archival dimension of most forms of communication on the net (email, chat etc. etc.) would be interesting to explore. Anything communicated through a computer is stored if only for a few seconds, and very often this storage capability is used to create 'archives', which differ from earlier paper-based archival forms. Think about the mailboxes that any one of us accumulate and sometimes order compared to paperbased letters. That's all for now - I hope it shows a shared interest. Best, Rune ________________________________________________ Rune Dalgaard | MA, Ph.D. Candidate | Information and Media Studies | Aarhus University | Denmark runed(a)imv.au.dk | http://www.imv.au.dk/medarbejdere/runed > From: air-l-request(a)aoir.org > Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org > Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 12:01:03 -0500 (EST) > To: air-l(a)aoir.org > Subject: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #606 - 3 msgs > > Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 14:40:44 -0800 (PST) > From: "Denise N. Rall" <denrall(a)yahoo.com> > Subject: Re: [Air-l] Internet as a database? > To: air-l(a)aoir.org > Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org > > Dear Aoir's - > > Thanks, Jeremy and others for replying. It's also good > to think about the split between comm & DB as > differnet aspects of the net. I am not really trying > to take this on academically, so to speak, but to > understand it for myself. > > I guess it's the problem of transport that is still > bothering me. I can see that cmc helps out with the > transport idea, because communication always includes > some sort of broadcast/reception, send & receive > model. I've never thought of DBs that way. > > I did think, however, of the power of the query. It > is clear that the query starts the transport mechanism > for internet, that as one inputs or clicks on an > address, that invokes TCP/IP for server to send the > file to the desktop making the query. > > So the query would work as a sort of mechanism to > activate the database, that model works out great for > the search engine. > > How one arrives at the database, especially a > proprietary DB as you were talking about, it doesn't > seem to be a send & receive option but with the query > invoked, maybe that makes sense, but . . . > > Ok, maybe I'm the only one interested in this . . . > > Denise

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Re: [Air-l] SMS?
by Ildiko Kaposi 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

>>> Bart.Bonamie(a)rug.ac.be 01/17/03 08:33 AM >>> > In Europe, people call a mobile phone text messages an "SMS" (which is short for Short Message Service). Hi all, And now there's MMS, or multi media message service, where you can also take and send pictures on your cell phone. There's currently a series of ads introducing the new service, the ones for Vodafone feature David Beckham (who's an English football player, Mark:)) Ildiko

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Re: [Air-l] SMS?
by Bart Bonamie 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Mark Warschauer wrote: Hi Mark, > What's SMS? > Mark Warschauer > In Europe, people call a mobile phone text messages an "SMS" (which is short for Short Message Service). Best wishes, Bart ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hit a man on the head with a fish, and he'll have a headache for a day ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bart.Bonamie(a)rug.ac.be - Dept. of Education - Univ. of Ghent (Belgium) http://memling.rug.ac.be - http://simsim.rug.ac.be/staff/bart

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Call for Proposals to Promote Civic Engagement in Global Governance (re: World Summit on the Information Society)
by RG Lentz 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

Call for Proposals to Promote Civic Engagement in Global Governance Summary: The 'Global Civil Society' Portfolio of the Ford Foundation has set aside $US1 million to promote civic engagement in global governance and to encourage global civil society actors to address the democracy deficits apparent within global governance. With this call for proposals the Ford Foundation is seeking civil society organizations that have a strategic plan to strengthen or promote accountability mechanisms between global governors and global citizens. We also seek effective mechanisms for a broad swath of citizen voices to be heard within global public policy deliberations. For two decades or more civil society organizations have followed and attempted to influence global negotiations relating to public policy in the fields of human rights, environment, empowerment of women, labor rights, consumer safety, development, peace and poverty alleviation. Today, many of these issues are impacted by decisions taken to develop a global market, create uniform global standards and/or address fiscal imbalances in developing countries. Impacts on health, human rights, consumers, gender relations, democracy or the environment are often not the first consideration of negotiators and often fall outside of their expertise. For these reasons, civil society actors often follow negotiations within international financial institutions that will have an impact on social policy and issues, but are not necessarily oriented toward those particular issues. As another strategy civil society actors attempt to strengthen global institutions that are specifically oriented toward social problems or encourage interaction amongst institutions so as to counter balance the power and authority of some financial institutions. Lastly, civic actors have promoted the idea to create new institutional global homes for some issues, like the World Environmental Organization, or to create competition for existing global financial institutions through promotion of regional institutions. Have these efforts been successful? In many instances, civil society has been effective in expanding the competitive pool of policy ideas within specific existing institutions, widening the terms of debate to take into account impacts that may not have been reviewed by negotiators, and in rare instances actual new policies have been created to address the concerns raised by civil society. Rarer still, civil society periodically is successful in addressing governance questions and has succeeded in restructuring the decision making path for permanent inclusion of the issue, developed and forced accountability measures to be created within governance structures or succeeded in opening up the process of decision making to include intended beneficiaries or other broad stakeholders. However, the instances where civil society has managed to address imbalances in governance are so rare that one can count them on one hand. Within the multilateral development banks, governance issues that have been addressed include: information policies, opportunities for impacted communities to question the adherence of the institutions to their own policies (inspection mechanisms), and in the case of structural adjustment programs promoted by the World Bank, opportunities for the public in developing countries to discuss the social and economic expenditures of their governments through the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. At the United Nations (UN), civil society organizations have a process through which they can be accredited to monitor the UN activities which take place through UNESCO. In certain instances, civil society has permanent processes for consultation such as at the Convention on Biological Diversity negotiations. In other forums, there is token civil society representation as well. For example, Consumers International has a seat at the Codex Alimentarius. However, these positions are often granted through national governments and are not sanctioned by the multilateral governing body. The lack of attention to the process of governing is frustrating in that it limits the outcomes that pertain to specific sectors and fails to address the larger questions of power and accountability. For example, after ten years of negotiations (1983 - 1993) with the World Bank, the environmental movement succeeded in their efforts to get the Bank to implement ten policies that protect minority communities and environmental resources from negative unintended consequences of development decisions. Today, those policies are under negotiation for the third time, with each round of negotiations resulting in a weaker set of policies with more responsibility shifting away from the well resourced World Bank and accruing to developing country governments. Each round of negotiations requires that the movement both demonstrate a sustained commitment to mainstreaming environmental concerns within Bank lending decisions and to hold the line on issues that it thought it had successfully addressed over a decade ago. There is no advancement. The same story can be told of the development community's efforts to mainstream participation within the field of development at the multilateral and bilateral agencies. Similarly, civil society organizations waste an enormous amount of time reinventing the participatory wheel every single time the UN holds a new global conference. Currently, the battleground is the World Summit on Information Society. The UN does not have a uniform way in which to invite and set the parameters for civic observation and participation in its deliberations. The worst offender within the UN system is the Security Council which locks out the bulk of members of the UN and civil society from its deliberations. Global institutions not only have tenuous links between the governors and the governed but also weaken democracy in three ways: one, they fail to operate along democratic principles. Two, international negotiations are the privilege of the executive branches of government. The judicial powers of a national court do not extend to the international political arena. And parliamentarians have no formal role in international negotiations. Three, there are no elected officials that are directly accountable to citizens engaged in negotiating global public policy. There are also indirect ways in which global governance undermines citizen rights. For example, the failure to operate within democratic parameters globally continues to justify less accountable forms of governance at national levels. By way of example, proposals could address the following: the need for a public record of security council agendas and deliberations; a reconstitution of voting shares at the IMF and World Bank; and end to green room deliberations at the WTO; an end to negotiating authority that truncates the role of representational branches of government; parliamentarians with voice and vote in international negotiations; elected national representatives operating within our global institutions; transparency campaigns; campaigns oriented toward strengthening global courts or holding global institutions accountable to national law; judicial enforcement of international law in national courts; advocacy for accountability mechanisms, etc. Projects that focus on deepening connections to the benefit of citizens between national and international governance mechanisms are encouraged. These issues are offered by way of example only. Applicants are encouraged to think creatively. Proposals can come from any issue-based (health, security, human rights, etc.) process but must move beyond the impact on the issue to address the governance process that might be improved. Proposals are welcome oriented toward any global institution, but will be judged in relation to possible demonstration affects. In other words, if the institution one seeks to change does not have considerable political or economic authority, the onus would be on the campaigners to argue the importance of the particular institution relative to other global governance institutions. Governance structures are difficult to change. It can take many years of sustained effort amongst a group of actors to create the conditions for social change. If the goals of a campaign are long term in nature, short term objectives should also be included. Multi-sectoral coalitions are encouraged; i.e. those that combine activists and actors from different issue-based fields. Multi-stakeholder projects, i.e. those that combine civil society actors with the private sector and governments are encouraged as well. This call is for active campaigns. Stand alone research projects will not be considered favorably. How to Apply The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2003. Proposals should be no more than ten double spaced pages and should include a 150 - 200 word summary. Longer proposals will not be reviewed. Proposals can be sent to the attention of Lisa Jordan, Ford Foundation, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, New York, 10017. Please include the code CFP at the top of the cover letter and cover page of the proposal.. Electronic versions can be sent to l.jordan(a)fordfound.org with the code CFP in the subject line. Decisions will be made by June 1, 2003 by a committee familiar with global governance issues. Applicants should expect to hear from the Foundation by June 15th. RG Lentz, UT Austin

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New book: "From Usenet toCoWebs"
by Danyel Fisher 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

This list has periodically discussed ways of dealing with data online: at the end of last year, for example, we talked about ways of extracting usenet data, and what one might do with it. I believe that this book might help address some of these questions, and gives an overview of some of the techniques now available. >From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, eds. London: Springer-Verlag. January, 2003 Price: US$49.95 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~danyelf/projects/book.html FROM THE INTRODUCTION This volume explores ways to look at, and instrument, spaces for social awareness. We want to learn how to look at a space, and understand what is going on with the group that inhabits it. We want to come to a space to learn what it has to offer. We want to build new spaces that open themselves to productive exploration, both to researchers and to participants. These are tasks for statisticians and designers, sociologists, anthropologists, and technologists to work together to explore, characterise, and build these spaces. Through this book, we ask what aspects of an online group are important to its participants. What tools do we have to measure online groups, and what do those measurements mean? What are appropriate tools for the researcher to use to examine the group? What tools might be brought to the group to examine itself? We also try to understand a second question: How can we take advantage of the specific characteristics of social information spaces to build new or enhance existing interfaces to these spaces? Different kinds of spaces have been built with different attributes: some are highly controlled spaces, carefully limiting what sorts of contributions can be made to the space, while others grant a high degree of freedom to their users. These technical attributes partially drive the social abilities of users. Because software can be used to restrict certain types of use, software drives the culture, norms, and understandings in the groups. Differences in user interfaces can be affect the participants' experience of the space-as well as the ability to study the groups, and the ability to collect data from them. These differences will delineate some of the abilities to measure and understand the spaces, and will shape the conversation happening within the spaces. Researchers have enjoyed extensive access to social information spaces. Usenet is publicly accessible and discussion lists are often easy to join, so an anthropologist can lurk quietly, asking questions of a few key informants but remaining largely hidden. Online spaces have been a popular domain of study: a researcher of virtual worlds once commented half in jest, "every MUD has its own ethnographer." The longer tradition of formal online research has been dominantly qualitative, as those public spaces allowed for close examination. From this tradition has emerged a rich variety of projects, from examinations of individuals and their social interaction, to larger-scale issues of group overload and crises of filtering. Our emphasis in this volume, however, is with an eye to fine-grained, quantitative studies. Quantitative researchers take advantage of the fact that online spaces are easily amenable to computer analysis. Of course, some aspects of online interaction can be invisible to quantitative techniques. Although these types of studies may never fully convey the texture of a space, they can be powerful tools for describing many of the important group behaviours and attributes. They have the ability to process large amounts of data at once, allowing visualizations to interactively compare different data sets. Quantitative methods can therefore be very good at highlighting potentially interesting sites for closer future study. TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: Introduction to Online Studies and Usenet 1 Introduction: Studying Social Information Spaces -- Danyel Fisher 2 "A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications": Usenet and the Socio- Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values -- Bryan Pfaffenberger Part II: Studying Spaces 1 Measures and Maps of Usenet -- Marc Smith 2 The Dynamics of Mass Interaction -- Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, Lynn Cherny 3 Conversation Map: A Content-Based Usenet Newsgroup Browser -- Warren Sack 4 Silent participants: Getting to know lurkers better -- Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece Part III: Enhancing Spaces 1 Computer Mediated Communication among Teams: What are "Teams" and how are they "Virtual"? -- Erin Bradner 2 CoWeb - Experiences with Collaborative Web spaces -- Andreas Dieberger and Mark Guzdial 3 From PHOAKS to TopicShop: Experiments in Social Data Mining -- Brian Amento, Loren Terveen, and Will Hill 4 GroupLens for Usenet: Experiences in Applying Collaborative Filtering to a Social Information System -- Bradley N. Miller, John T. Riedl and Joseph A. Konstan 5 Exploring Interaction and Participation to Support Information Seeking in a Social Information Space -- Christopher Lueg Appendix: Studying Online Newsgroups

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