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Archive for political communication

Soap Box Project

April 11, 2008 at 10:43 am · Filed under deliberation, political communication, politics

This project led by Dr Sally Young at the University of Melbourne will be of interest to those who wish to understand the history of political advertising in Australia.

Politicians and members of the public would once stand atop a soapbox in order to shout their message across to an audience. Now they use a wide range of media including TV ads, social networking websites and all manner of radio and television appearances. This website will harness a range of materials ─ including photographs, texts of speeches, transcripts of debates and political ads ─ to allow visitors to see (and assess) how Australian political actors communicate.

Election campaigns are usually focused on the short-term – the hectic 3 to 6 weeks of the formal election campaign. This website instead allows you to see elections as a continuum; to look back over time to see what the parties and their leaders have said (and promised) in the past. The website includes material dating back over a hundred years so that visitors can recall recent campaigns or compare current events with historical ones (link).

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Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference: Second Call For Papers

October 6, 2007 at 8:30 am · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics, social media

Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference: Second Call For Papers

Hosted by the New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics
and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London.
http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk

April 17-18, 2008.

http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/politics-web-2-0-conference/

Second call for papers

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new
media - a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do
broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if
at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the
communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help
democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for
researchers to share and debate perspectives.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Online Democratic Deliberation in a Time of Information Abundance

September 14, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, governance, humanities computing, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This article of mine recently appeared in the journal, Fast Capitalism.

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplainedespecially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

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Pollies embrace Google for the ‘e-election’

September 14, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under political communication, politics, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age

John Howard says the internet is “not some sort of gimmick” and has invited voters to have a conversation with him on YouTube.

Peter Garrett believes the web will play a “really really critical role” in the upcoming election, which Joe Hockey has dubbed the “e-election campaign”.

The Prime Minister, opposition environment spokesman and Workplace Relations Minister broadcasted the comments over YouTube this morning in glowing endorsements of Google’s new federal election website. (link)

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Only one party’s in the game for attention in cyberspace

August 15, 2007 at 8:05 pm · Filed under media, political communication, politics, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age

Kevin Rudd has a genuine presence on the web. The Coalition seems to be lagging, writes Catherine Deveny.

LET’S be honest here, it’s a bit hard to sex up Kevin Rudd. Sure, he’s probably a good bloke. Actually, he must be a good bloke seeing that Howard and his mates have done their best to dig up dirt on him, and all they found out is that he speaks Chinese. The H Team kept opening closets hoping skeletons would fall out and all they found were doilies, neatly folded linen and a tea towel that read “WANDILIGONG! IT’S ABORIGINAL FOR PARTY!” (link)

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From Google to gaggle

August 13, 2007 at 7:12 pm · Filed under deliberation, media, political communication, social media, web2.0

From the Guardian Unlimited.

People quoted in featured stories on Google’s US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine’s role (link).

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Oxford University spies on Facebook profiles…

July 20, 2007 at 6:44 am · Filed under political communication, social media, web2.0

Thanks to the Melbourne Age. I wish that I was important enough that King’s College would spy on me!

For students at the University of Oxford, Facebook is a great way to keep posted on gossip and parties. For campus officials, it’s a new way to find - and fine - troublemakers.After exams, students at the venerable English university traditionally drop their serious ways and indulge in a spasm of “trashings” - rowdy revels that include dousing classmates in foam, eggs and flour.In recent years, students have taken to posting photos of the mess on Facebook, a popular online social networking site (link).

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Australian Conservatives give MySpace a wide berth

July 18, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under media, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age. And Ironic considering that MySpace is owned by the biggest Australian Conservative of them all.

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel - which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters - officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

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Democratisation and the Networked Public Sphere

April 12, 2007 at 8:32 pm · Filed under events, political communication, social media, software, web2.0

* Panel Discussion with dana boyd, Trebor Scholz, and Ethan Zuckerman

Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and alumni with valid ID

This evening at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics will discuss the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation.

danah boyd will argue four points. 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understandings of public/private are being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths’ access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?

Trebor Scholz will present the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Content generated by networked publics was the main reason for the fact that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for most Internet traffic last year. Community is the commodity, worth billions. The very few get even richer building on the backs of the immaterial labor of very very many. Net publics comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, learn and by doing so they gain much: the pleasure of creation, knowledge, micro-fame, a “home,” friendships, and dates. They share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses get value from their attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against this naturalized “factory without walls” and will demand for net publics to control their own contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on issues of media and the developing world, especially citizen media, and the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide issues that go alongside it. Starting out with a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, the
ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize.

About the Panelists:

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. In particular, she is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts amidst invisible audiences. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.
http://www.zephoria.org/

Trebor Scholz is a media theorist, artist, and activist who is interested in the economics of sociable media and networked social life in relation to politics and education. As founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), he contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited “The Art of Free Cooperation” (forthcoming). He is currently professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich (Switzerland).
http://collectivate.net/journalisms

Ethan Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, and on the use of technology for international development. With Rebecca MacKinnon, he leads a project called “Global Voices” which focuses on using weblogs around the world to close gaps in mainstream media coverage. In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa.
http://ethanzuckerman.com/

* This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Centers program cycle on The Public Domain.

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Who are Civic Actions?

March 16, 2007 at 9:49 pm · Filed under CMS, political communication, politics, web2.0

Another wonderful ‘virtual’ organisation spread across Europe and the US who are active in the Drupal (Content Management System) community is Civic Actions.

We believe that our works should be available for the larger good. Whenever possible, we work to share our innovations with other consultants and organizations. We believe in growing the size of the universe, as opposed to subscribing to a model of scarcity. We are active in the Drupal community, have recently began to participate in sharing best practices with other firms, and are actively working to drive the education of independent consultants to create a larger field of skilled practioners for all firms including ours, as well as our customers.This website is a work in progress, and will always be, because our work is. Please take a look at our People, our Clients, and our Projects and let us know if you have any questions (link)

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Semantic Grid Tools for Rural Policy Development and Appraisal (PolicyGrid)

March 14, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, e-science, political communication, social media, web2.0

How’s this for political communication? And Dr Geert Lovink of Nettime still thinks that blogs are technical advanced.

  1. To facilitate evidence-based rural, social, and land-use policy-making through integrated analysis of mixed data types;
  2. To demonstrate that Semantic Web/Grid solutions can be deployed to support various facets of evidence-based policy-making through the development of appropriate tools;
  3. To focus on the authoring of relevant ontologies to support rural, social and land-use policy domains;
  4. To investigate issues surrounding communication of semantic metadata to social scientists and policy practitioners;
  5. To promote awareness of the Semantic Grid vision and supporting technologies amongst social scientists.

Social scientists and policy practitioners are focusing increasingly on methods and tools for integrated policy evaluation. The importance of greater pluralism in policy evaluation approaches has grown in recent years, reflecting the increased complexities of overlapping governance and policy delivery mechanisms, and the challenge of evaluating policies with multiple, often cross-cutting, objectives. The result is increased emphasis on multi-method or mixed-methods approaches to evaluation, where emphasis is placed on plural types and sources of data, as well as diverse epistemological approaches and analytical techniques. In practice this is characterised by increased mixing of qualitative and quantitative techniques (e.g. surveys and interviews, ethnography or phenomenology, case studies, simulations) and the mixing of formative (evaluation which tries to improve an intervention) and summative (evaluation for accountability, measuring results or efficiency) techniques.

The node focuses on the challenges of using Semantic Grid technologies to enable more powerful analysis of mixed-method data, thus adding significant value to the work of social scientists engaged in the analysis of evidence bases for policy evaluation, and matching evaluative capabilities to the demands of integrated policy evaluation. There should also be benefits for the wider social science community, through facilitating mixed-method analysis in other contexts (link)

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UK Government Restrictions on Street Photography

February 27, 2007 at 1:51 am · Filed under governance, political communication, politics, social media, software, technology, web2.0

(the software for No 10 was developed by MySociety.org)
Signing up to ask the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions
regarding photography in public places

The UK Govt are about to propose restrictions on photography in
public places which could make street photography and documentary
photography against the law. There's a petition on the Downing St
website against the Government's proposals to restrict the use of
photography in public areas. Sign up to the petition now. (thanks to Nettime for the link)

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/

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Fidel Castro Search Engine

February 19, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under internet, media, political communication, politics, technology, web2.0

Cuba built an internet search engine that allows users to trawl through speeches by Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other government sites, but does not browse web pages outside the island. The search engine (www.infosoc.cu/buscador) unveiled at a conference last week underscored restrictions on internet access in communist-run Cuba, which the government blames on US trade sanctions (from the Age link)

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What is CivicSpace?

January 25, 2007 at 9:36 pm · Filed under deliberation, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This service used the Drupal content management system?

The CivicSpace On Demand service provides any individual a simple, web-based solution to the problem of bringing individuals and groups together on the internet. Communicate with supporters via a website and e-newsletters. Offer them opportunities to act in support of your cause by making an online donation, volunteering or attending an event. Keep track of your supporters in a powerful, integrated central database. No software to install or maintain: all it takes is your web browser (link).

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What is Drupal?

January 25, 2007 at 9:30 pm · Filed under deliberation, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

One of the best content management systems around; especially for civic applications.

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites, including

  • community web portals and discussion sites
  • corporate web sites/intranet portals
  • personal web sites
  • aficionado sites
  • e-commerce applications
  • resource directories

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