Bamblog

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I’m on the train from Berlin to Bamberg, preparing some blog postings to publish later. The last week has been quite intense, but really great, with two conferences, followed by two more days in Berlin at the "weallspeakfootball"-flat and the ZDF Arena for the GER-SWE match. But before I move to the football content, first some more thoughts about the ICA.

I’ve never been to a conference this big. It was an interesting experience, but now I know that I actually prefer the smaller events. In part this is due to the general feeling of ‘option overload’ I had at the ICA, with sometimes 20 sessions going on at the same time, in part due to the thematic focus (or the lack of it) that comes with conference size. Nevertheless, there were a couple of very interesting presentations on Blogs and Social Software, and I’ve exchanged some cards to keep in touch with the researchers. My own presentation went well; I’ll have a separate post about it.

I very much liked the keynotes; it was great to listen to both Manuel Castells and Jürgen Habermas. Castells talked about the relation of power and counterpower communication in network society, stressing the new technological and social context. He repeatedly used the term ‘mass self communication’, not giving a definition, but referring to phenomenons such as blogs, Vlogs, Wikis etc., even citing Technorati figures about the growth of the blogosphere. He argued that these new autonomous forms of content creation and content distribution might assist counterpower communication, e.g. in controlled media systems. Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand, spoke about the importance of a normative theory (referring to his own ideas of deliberative democracy) for empirical communication research. The manuscript contained an interesting footnote that connects to Castell’s ideas which I quote in full.

Allow me in passing a remark on the Internet which counterbalances the seeming deficits that stem from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting by reintroducing deliberative elements in electronic communication. The Internet has certainly reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However, computer-mediated communication in the Web can claim unequivocal democratic merits only for a special context: it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes who try to control and repress public opinion. In the context of liberal regimes, however, the online debates of web users tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics. The rise of millions of fragmented chat-rooms across the world endangers only political communication within established public spheres, when news groups crystallize around the focal points of print media, e.g. national newspapers and magazines, which are the pillar of national public spheres. (A nice indicator for the critical function of such a parasitical role of online communication is the bill for €2088,- which the anchor of Bildblog.de recently sent to the director of Bild.T-Online for ’services’: the bloggers claimed they improved the work of the editorial staff of the Bildzeitung with useful criticisms and corrections.)

Habermas has made similar remarks when he received the Bruno-Kreisky-Preis in 2005. However, he might underestimate the consequences of the rise of ‘interpersonal public communication’ (my variant of Castell’s ‘mass self communication’). In many cases, Blogs connect to and draw upon ideas and issues expressed in ‘traditional’ and professionally produced publics (rather than being detached from them), adding another layer of communication: Personal remarks, critical or affirming statements and discussion, which I see as another important aspect of deliberation. (Other [german] voices here and here at AXONAS; media coverage at "Spiegel online" and "Tagesspiegel")

Finally, there are some lessons to be learned for conferences I’m (co-)organizing myself, like the Blogtalk Reloaded or the DGPuK-conference to be held in Bamberg next year. Most importantly: Make Internet access freely available… 30 minutes hotspot access at the Hotel or the conference centre were 4,- Euro, and it was only at the last day that I discovered the router where you could plug into the ICA-provided access point with your own LAN cable. Ah well… Another important point: provide opportunity and stimulation for discussing the ideas presented! (Not a new lesson, of course..). For Blogtalk Reloaded, we might experiment with the format a little bit to avoid the ‘broadcasting style’. More on that in a couple of days.