CATaC 2012 Proceedings: Part 2

eighth international conference on

cultural attitudes towards technology and communication 2012 edited by

michele strano herbert hrachovec fay sudweeks charles ess

Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2012 Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication Aarhus, Denmark, 18-20 June 2012

edited by

Michele Strano

Bridgewater College, USA

Herbert Hrachovec

University of Vienna, Austria

Fay Sudweeks

Murdoch University, Australia

Charles Ess

Aarhus University, Denmark

Eighth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2012 Aarhus, Denmark, 18-20 June 2012 International Organizers Chair Charles Ess, Aarhus University, Denmark and Drury University, USA Honorary Chair Fay Sudweeks, Murdoch University, Australia Program Chairs Michele Strano, Bridgewater College, USA Herbert Hrachovec, University of Vienna, Austria Executive Committee Jose Abdelnour Nocera (University of West London, UK) Ylva H책rd af Segerstad (Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden) Leah Macfadyen, University of British Columbia, Canada Kenneth Reeder (University of British Columbia, Canada) Andra Siibak (University of Tartu, Estonia) Maja van der Velden, University of Oslo, Norway

Sponsors Media Studies, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark Drury University, USA School of Information Technology, Murdoch University, Australia University of Vienna, Austria Bridgewater College, USA

Cover photo: Charles Ess: Old and New Technologies, Danish style

ISBN 978-1-921877-02-5 PUBLISHED 2012 School of Information Technology Murdoch University, Murdoch WA 6150 Australia catac@it.murdoch.edu.au, www.catacconference.org

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface

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Online Political Engagement Social media and political participation in Saudi Arabia: The case of the 2009 floods in Jeddah

1

Y. Al-Saggaf

Using digital art to make the tensions between capital and commons transparent: Innovation in shaping knowledge of Internet business practices as a form of cultural knowledge

16

C. Kampf, G. Cox

Gaza as Panopticon and Panspectron: The disciplining and punishing of a society

25

M. Dahan

Making Identity Visible The making of online identity: The use of creative method to support young people in their reflection on age and gender

38

P. Hernwall, A. Siibak

Participatory, visible and sustainable: Designing a community website for a minority group

51

A. G. Sabiescu, M. Agosti, P. Paolini

Chahta Sia “I Am Choctaw”: Using images as a methodology for cultural and technological discourse

67

M. L. Kaarst-Brown, J. Dolezal

Use, Adaptation and Interpretation I A pyramid of cultural markers for guiding cultural-centered localized website design

84

A. Mushtaha, O. De Troyer

“It is magic”: A global perspective on what technology means to youth

100

E. Buehler, F. Alayed, A. Komlodi, S. Epstein

On the myth of a general national culture: Making visible specific cultural characteristics of learners in different educational contexts in Germany

105

T. Richter, H. Adelsberger

Repeating an experiment from the USA as a cultural probe into experiences of computer usage in Jordan 121 F. Ali El-Qirem, G. Cockton

New Technology and Learning Student perspectives on m-learning for local cultural studies in Malaysia

135

S. A. Ariffin, L. E. Dyson

A longitudinal study on the effect of hypermedia on learning dimensions, culture and teaching evaluation

146

C. Lee, F. Sudweeks, Y. W. Cheng

Promoting intercultural competence by means of blended learning D. Todorova

163

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a tool for intercultural education: A collaborative experience in secondary education in Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero, Mexico

174

L. Lazos-Ramírez, R. Feltrero-Oreja, X. Rueda-Romero, J. C. García Cruz

In/Visibility Discussion Panel In/Visibility in the internet’s third age

187

L. Green, H. Hrachovec, K. Sorensen, M. van der Velden

Online User Visibility Managment It’s all a matter of “choice”: Understanding society’s expectations of older adult ICT use from a birth cohort perspective

193

J. L. H. Birkland, M. L. Kaarst-Brown

In/Visible bodies: On patients and privacy in a networked world

199

M. van der Velden

In/Visibility of LGBTQ people in the Arab Spring: Making LGBTQ voices heard

212

D. Kreps

Narratives countering the democratising ideal of discourse in an online forum of a higher education institution

228

L. Postma, A. S. Blignaut, E. A. Sutinen, K. Swan

Online Community and Social Action Collectivism as potlatch in the network age

244

T. Iitaka

The limitations and possibilities of co-creation in the public domain in Rotterdam

259

L. Nordeman, E. Visser

Building an online community in the context of an existing social network site

270

C. Witney, L. Green, L. Costello, V. Bradshaw

Lipdubs as an instrument to overcome invisibility in the mass-media: A study of four enthusiastic cases made in Quebec, USA, Catalonia and Basque Country

284

T. Ramirez de la Piscina

Online User Interaction Goffman bitches: Rhetorical attribution and the perversion of meaning

304

K. Alstam

Post borders: Informal bilingual blogging and intercultural communication competence

319

M. Parisien, K. Reeder, L. Gunderson

Two screen viewing and social relationships: Exploring the invisible backchannel of TV viewing

333

M. D. Johns

Regional languages on Wikipedia: Venetian Wikipedia community interaction over time A. Zelenkauskaite, P. Massa

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Online Community Reflecting upon the challenges of building online community, or: ‘A techie’s guide to the help dummies need’

v

359

L. Costello, L. Green

Firewatch: Use of satellite imagery by remote communities in Northern Australia for fire risk communications

372

D. Brady, D. Holloway, L. Green

The hidden side of transparency among government agency bloggers

383

A. Agderal-Hjermind

Use, Adaptation and Interpretation II E-learning as a cultural artifact: An empirical study of Iranian virtual institutions

393

D. Masoumi, B. Lindström

Exploring cultural differences in HCI education

410

J. Abdelnour-Nocera, A. Austin, M. Michaelides, S. Modi, C. Oyugi

Factors influencing perceptions toward social networking websites in China 420 W. Gong

Factors Impacting Visible Content Globalization or localization? A longitudinal study of successful American and Chinese online store websites

430

G. Zhang, S. C. Herring

How visible will our history be?

446

J. Knight

Locally situated digital representation of indigenous knowledge: Co-constructing a new digital reality in rural Africa

454

H. Winschiers-Theophilus, K. Jensen, K. Rodil

Regulating Visibility Copyright, culture and community in virtual worlds

469

D. L. Burk

Robots and privacy in Japanese, Thai and Chinese cultures: Discussions on robots and privacy as topics of intercultural information ethics in the ‘Far East’

478

M. Nakada

Parents’ views and rules about technology: As told by their middle school children in Hungary and India

493

K. E Weaver, A. Komlodi, J. Wang, K. Joshi, B. Sellei

Exposure to online sexual materials and cross-country differences in Europe

502

A. Šev íková, J. Šerek, H. Machá ková

Censoring, censuring or empowering?: Young people and digital agency

514

L. R. Green

Author Index

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M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 193-198.

IT’S ALL A MATTER OF “CHOICE” Understanding society’s expectations of older adult ICT use from a birth cohort perspective JOHANNA L.H. BIRKLAND AND MICHELLE L. KAARST-BROWN Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

Abstract. Little research exists that examines older adults and their Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use or society’s expectations of their use.

Using an intensive interpretive interactionism case study methodology, this paper examines how older adults ages 65-75 (from the Lucky Few birth cohort) view their own use and how other birth cohorts view the Lucky Few's ICT use.

1. Introduction Several conceptual papers have focused on how older adults (those over age 65 (American Psychological Association, 2008)) risk falling victim to the digital divide, experiencing lower ICT use rates due to lower societal expectations (Millward, 2003).

However, no research has actually explored if society expects older adults to be using advanced ICTs. Understanding societal expectations of older adults’ ICT use is important because such expectations can influence policy (of governments and institutions), employment (if people are seen as capable), and social support (access to information or technical support). While there are many models of the digital divide (Van Dijk, 2005) we did not enter this study with the presumption that such models would apply nor did we seek to test positivist theory.

This study uses the concept of birth-cohorts1 to understand expectations of older adults ICT use. Birth-cohorts represent distinct sub-cultures within a society. Members of birth-cohorts experience historical events at roughly the same age range, which means that these events impact members in a similar way. Researchers have found that events such as recessions, wars, and educational system changes tend to impact members of a single birth cohort similarly, while affecting other birth cohorts differently(Carlson, 2009) This paper begins the exploration of whether birth cohorts have distinct expectations of older adults ICT use.

1

Birth-cohorts (commonly referred to as generations) differ from society to society, in both the “years” that a birth cohort spans and in the cultural attributes of each birth cohort. For example, the “baby boom” that occurred following WWII started much earlier in the US than in European countries, despite the shared event of the war. In addition, shared experiences will differ from country to country and society to society.

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2. Literature Review Birth cohorts (Table 1) each have unique experiences with ICTs because of their relative age at which ICTs were introduced to society. Some technologies have existed since before their birth while others are introduced when a birth cohort is middle or old aged. For instance, for the Lucky Few, wireless radio existed before their birth, television was introduced while they were young, personal computers were introduced into the workforce when they were established in their careers, and smart phones were introduced during retirement. This is a much different experience than Millennials, for whom television, radio, and computers always existed; and smart phones were introduced while they were young adults. Although these ICTs are the same, these birth cohorts have very different experiences with them because of their relative age and life stage (child, adult, working, retired) when they were introduced.

Table 1. Birth Cohorts Living in the US Birth Cohort Name (Carlson, 2009) Good Warriors (World War II Generation) Lucky Few Baby Boomers (Boomers) Generation X Millennials

Years of Birth 1909-1928 1929-1946 1947-1964 1965-1982 1983-2001

The theory of technological generations combines the concept of shared experiences of birth cohorts with technological progress (Larsen, 1993; Rama, De Ridder, & Bouma, 2001). The birth cohorts that are children and young adults when an ICT is introduced set the norms for that ICT’s use. These norms then flow downwards to younger birth cohorts (who inherit them) and upwards to older birth cohorts (who must adapt). Individuals in older birth cohorts are often not seen as being “valid” users and may struggle with learning the norms of using new ICTs (Larsen, 1993).

Technological generations theory does not state if use expectations vary by birthcohort. This paper examines if different birth cohorts have different expectations of a single US birth cohort, the Lucky Few. As “young older adults” these individuals will likely have long experiences into the future with ICTs as their life expectancies cover several future decades, suggesting lasting implications for US society.

The Lucky Few represent a small birth cohort born during the Great Depression and WWII. The Lucky Few were more likely to finish secondary education and less likely to suffer long-term health effects than the Good Warriors before them. They reaped many of the benefits that were created for the Good Warrior birth cohort; such as the G.I. Bill (educational benefits for military service) (Carlson, 2008). They were exposed to television, telephones, and radio at a young age. In addition, those who worked were likely exposed to computer technology in the workplace, depending upon occupation type.

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3. Method An intensive, interpretative case study methodology was chosen for this study (Yin, 2009). Each case study consisted of a primary participant (a member of the Lucky Few birth cohort) and several secondary participants (friends, neighbors, family members, or coworkers of the primary participant). Each primary participant was interviewed 3 times for approximately 2 hours each session, using a semi-structured interview methodology to explore their use of and experiences with various ICTs in daily life.

The interviews with secondary participants focused on the relationship and expectations of the primary participant or others in the same birth cohort. For this early paper, the results concentrate on 5 female primary participants and the members of their social network (see Table 2). “Jackie’s” case did not have secondary participants. She was willing to share her own experiences and expectations, but later became hesitant to ask for further help from her support network. The data was collected and analyzed using an interpretative interactionism approach (Denzin, 1989) and birth cohorts were compared to determine if differences in expectations emerged. With the exception of Jackie’s case, each case averaged 11 hours of interviews.

Table 2. Primary and Secondary Participants in Study (Pseudonyms used) Primary Participant Natalie Jackie Alice

Margaret

Nancy

Name Maria Jackie Fred Julie Chloe Bob Anna Charles Bobbie Danielle Bette

Secondary Participants Birth Cohort Relationship w/ Primary Participant Boomer Friend Lucky Few Friend Lucky Few Romantic Partner Boomer Friend Generation X Friend Good Warrior Friend Boomer Friend, “Sister” Generation X Neighbor, “Son” Boomer Friend, Neighbor Boomer Friend, “Sister” Boomer Daughter

4. Perspectives on “Choice” All of the secondary participants tended to rate the primary participants (their Lucky Few friends, neighbors, and family members) as either “average” or “slightly above average” users of ICTs compared to others in the birth-cohort. This was despite wide variance in ICTs used by primary participants. For example, Nancy had not used a computer in 10+ years but Alice owned 3 computers and a smart phone. What emerges from this data is that ICT use by the Lucky Few is largely seen as a “choice” by those interviewed from other cohorts, however, each cohort held distinct beliefs about the consequences of this choice.

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5.1. LUCKY FEWS’ EXPECTATIONS OF THEIR COHORT AND OTHERS Lucky Few individuals tended to express a lack of interest in setting expectations for their own birth cohort’s ICT use, and considerable tolerance. Jackie indicated her hesitancy to set expectations: “I have no expectations… I use what I want, others should too.” Most often, they would describe their inability to “rate” their peers was due to the vast differences they saw in use. Alice, a relatively sophisticated ICT user stated, “There’s so much diversity. There are people like Fred who teach it, and there are people who don’t own a computer and don’t want one. And that’s O.K.” The Lucky Few were more than happy to speak about their opinions of younger birth cohorts. There was expressed distaste for the over-enthusiasm they felt younger birth cohorts showed for new ICTs, such as social networking and smart phones.

Margaret spoke about her Boomer friend: “She's stressed; just stressed beyond belief all the time… And I'm thinking ‘you just spent six hours of your day going on Facebook’!”

There was also concern expressed that Millennials were “programmed to want the newest things that come off the line!” by advertising and television (Jackie), which was “offensive” (Margaret) to the Lucky Few, who when young, dealt with the Great Depression and a world at war.

While such behavior was seen as distasteful, the Lucky Few were also quick to praise the Millennials’ skills. Natalie spoke about needing a “12-year old geek” to help her, while Nancy – a non-computer user -- commented on how texting was “just natural.” They also emphasized a perception that Millennials had lost vital skills: “We [the Lucky Few] are better at communicating and young people are better at technology” (Margaret).

5.2. BOOMERS’ EXPECTATIONS OF THE LUCKY FEW Boomers expressed expectations that members of the Lucky Few should be using computers and cell phones. Bette felt: “I would be hoping that they would be kind of tech savvy or at least know what a computer is, like how to turn one on. At least that [level of] savvy... They may not know how to send an e-mail, but hopefully some of them do.”

Most of the Boomers felt they co-existed with diverse levels of use among their friends and family who are members of the Lucky Few. “I’ve got friends that won’t even own a cell phone. So it really depends on the personality of the individual and, I think, how much you want to be part of this technological piece,” stated Danielle on her impressions of the Lucky Few. Although being a part of the “technological piece” was seen as a choice, choosing not to use ICTs such as the computer, internet, and cell phone was also perceived as limiting and isolating. Julie shared her thoughts about her own mother and how she felt their relationship could have been strengthened through ICTs: I remember trying desperately to get my mother on a computer…The relationship I wanted to have… There was so much that had changed in technology that I could then share things with my mother like ‘oh look here’s a picture of this’, or ‘here’s what I’m doing today’... I couldn’t have that relationship with my mother because she wasn’t into technology. So it limited my world of expression.

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Not only did Julie feel her mother’s choice limited her mother’s (and even her own) expression, but it was seen as preventing them from having a closer relationship, something which she was immensely sad about.

5.3. GENERATION X’S EXPECTATIONS OF THE LUCKY FEW Generation Xer’s tended to have a nuanced view of the Lucky Few’s use of ICTs, saying that they should be able to use whatever they liked and should not have to use ICTs if they did not want to use them. Charles reflected about the partner of his neighbor, Margaret, “Anything that would make his life more complicated, he doesn't really want to be involved with. It's not that he's an old fart, it's just that his business is fairly well set. And what he does he does and you gotta respect that, you know? It's not stupid, it's a very mature way of looking at stuff.” While the theme of choice is still present in the Generation X’s mind, older adults are not seen as being affected negatively due to their choices, “Probably many of them don’t use it, because why do they need to?” (Chloe)

6. Conclusion But how do these differences in expectations of choice actually impact the Lucky Few? Mitroff (1983, p. 104) once stated “Irony of ironies: the computer, perhaps THE archetype of the impersonal, cold, calculating science and technology, has itself become the projective dumping ground of humanity’s inner psyche.” In qualitative studies such as this, the value of these findings is not statistical significance, but in illuminating older adults’ feelings, stories, and choices regarding ICT’s in their daily lives. This paper shares some early insights on the issue of choice and how people close to these older adults also perceive them.

Some felt that there was clearly a trade-off in skills and opportunities provided by ICT’s, making choice a self-determined one. Others interpreted a clear loss in the quality of the relationship when one party chose not to use ICT’s. Rather than simply a “digital divide”, communication and relationship gaps and even fractures were reported.

The issue of self-determination was also not a clear cut one from the side of the Lucky Few participants. All of them felt that society at large did not realize the difficulties they faced in learning, using, and purchasing new ICTs. While most of these struggles were seen as relatively minor (such as not being able to receive a paper bank statement), all expressed worry that such struggles were “the tip of the iceberg” (Margaret), or a “warning signal” (Jackie) that the time will come when the alternatives they depend on will not exist. Another expressed fear that younger birth cohorts will not understand their struggles.

While the theme of choice permeated all of the birth cohorts’ perspectives on the Lucky Few, the consequences of this choice was viewed differently by the various birth cohorts. Generation X’s view of choice mirrored the Lucky Few’s. The Lucky Few tend to be the parents of Generation Xers and it is likely that these two birth cohorts have had substantial contact in school environments and families. Both represent small birth cohorts who were raised during times of political upheaval, depression/ recession, and

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war (Carlson, 2009). It could be that similar experiences shaped their views on ICTs. Boomer’s, however, seem less sympathetic to the upside of non-use by their older family members or friends. Perhaps this is because they were a generation forced to deal with rampant technological change? It raises the question of whether Millennials will be even less tolerant and hold higher expectations of choices for ICT use in their relationships with others – including older adults.

Several limitations exist in this early study. All primary participants and most secondary participants were female. Much more research is needed to understand if these birth-cohort differences are seen in larger samples and if gender impacts these views. This study has also not interviewed any Millennials to date (and only one Warrior). It is important that future work capture these perspectives and expectations.

Despite these limits, the early findings suggest that perceptions of voluntariness or choice in use of ICT’s may indeed differ by birth cohort and shape expectations of the roles ICT’s should play in older adults’ relationships, therefore being a valuable contribution to literature on the digital divide.

References American Psychological Association. (2008). Why practitioners need information about working with older adults. Retrieved September 8, 2008, from http://www.apa.org/pi/aging/practitioners/why.html Carlson, E. (2008). The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom New York: Springer.

Carlson, E. (2009). 20th-Century: U.S. Generations. Population Reference Bureau, 64(1).

Larsen, R. S. (1993). Technological generations and the spread of social definition of new technologies. University of Oregon.

Millward, P. (2003). The "grey digital divide": Perception, exclusion and barriers of access to the internet for older people [Electronic Version]. First Monday, 8. Retrieved June 5, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue_8_7/millward/index.html.

Mitroff, I. I. (1983). Stakeholders of the organizational mind: Toward a new view of policy making. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rama, M. D., De Ridder, H., & Bouma, H. (2001). Technology generation and age in using layered user interfaces. Gerontechnology, 1(1), 25-40.

Van Dijk, J. A. G. M. (2005). The deepening divide: Inequality in the information society.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Yin, R. K. (2009). Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 199-211.

IN/VISIBLE BODIES On patients and privacy in a networked world MAJA VAN DER VELDEN University of Oslo, Norway majava@ifi.uio.no

Abstract. In the networked world, privacy and visibility become entangled in new and unexpected ways. This article uses the concept of networked visibility to explore the entanglement of technology and the visibility of patient bodies. Based on semi-structured interviews with patients active in social media, this paper describes how multiple patient bodies are produced in the negotiations between the need for privacy and the need for social interaction. Information technology is actively involved in these negotiations: patients use technology to make their bodies both visible and invisible. At the same time technology collects data on these patients, which can be used for undesired commercial and surveillance purposes. The notion of visibility by design may infuse design efforts that enable online privacy, supporting patients in the multiple ways they want to be visible and invisible online.

1. Introduction Many years ago I visited my friend, who was a professor at a university in another country. He had told me he would wait for me at the entrance. He was there when I arrived. We greeted each other and then he told me to hop on his mobility scooter because his office was at the other end of the building. While we moved through the corridors of the university I suddenly realized that people were watching us. What began as a private arrangement between two friends had become a public spectacle – at least that was how I interpreted the way people looked at us. I was reminded of this experience while reading Jeannette Pols (2010) article Breathtaking practicalities: a politics of embodied patient positions. Pols discusses in particular the role of mobility scooters in making people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) visible. Why did people stare at us? Following Pols’ line of thought, I can see how the scooter made not only our bodies, but especially our contrasting bodies visible, as we differed not only in ability, also in age, size, gender, and ethnicity. If I had walked next to the scooter, I could possibly have been a foreign student meeting her professor. The fact that I shared the scooter with my friend changed everything.

Pols uses in her article the terms visibility and invisibility, with invisibility as a metaphor for the absence of disease in any form (p.194). Some of the patients in Pols’

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article felt misunderstood because their disease is invisible. Some thought that using a scooter would make their disability visible, but, as Pols describes, what became visible was the scooter, not their disease. Some patients could walk a bit on some days but needed the scooter on others, but on all days their bodies were not visibly disabled.

For the past two years I have studied how patients negotiate privacy in social media. Patients are active users of the Social Web: they participate in online patient communities, they write blogs, they use patient portals to communicate with health care personnel or to report their medical data, and they meet up with other patients in social networks. Mobility scooters made patient bodies both visible and invisible - what about social media? How do social media make patient bodies visible and how do patients use social media to make their bodies visible or invisible?

In Missing Bodies: The politics of visibility, Casper and Moore (2009) write that the human body has never been more visible than in the first decade of the 21st century.

Our visualized bodies are under surveillance, are digitalized, and processed for analysis (ibid, p.2). But some bodies are invisible, missing, not accounted for. In the context of privacy, the visible body and invisible body are often understood as the public and private body. Invisible bodies are thus not understood as missing bodies, they are seen as private bodies. The idea of the invisible body as the private body fits within a particular privacy understanding: privacy can be read along a privacy-disclosure axis, in which more disclosure means less privacy and vice versa.

In the study of privacy as a practice, privacy is not solely something an individual owns – or has a right to – but an outcome of sociotechnical arrangements. As I will discuss in this article, when looking at the practice of privacy, other bodies become visible, such as the patient body, the regular body, objectified body, exposed body, the quantifiable body, and the protected body. Secondly, it becomes clear that these bodies are situated in time and place. What is visible or invisible at one time or in one situation, can be different in the other. This complicates design efforts: how to design for privacy when we have to take into consideration a patient’s multiple and changing body positions and multiple privacy needs.

The remainder of the article will be as follows. In Section 2 I will discuss the relation between privacy and visibility. In Section 3 I will present my research in the Patients | Privacy | Internet project and present some extracts from the interviews I conducted with patients. In Section 4 I will look closer at the visibility and invisibility of bodies at the intersections of patients, privacy, social media, and information technology. In the concluding section I will reflect briefly on the in/visibility of bodies and technology design.

2. Privacy and Visibility In a world replete with images and representations, who can we not see or grasp, and what are the consequences of such selective blindness? […] questions about optics are inescapable. How is visibility possible? For whom, by whom, and of whom? What remains invisible, to whom, and why? (Haraway, 1997, p. 202)

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The relationship between privacy and visibility has been theorized in different ways.

When Hannah Arendt wrote about visibility and invisibility in the public and private sphere, she pointed out that there was a good way and a bad way to be visible. It was good to be visible in the public sphere, but bad to be visible in the private sphere. Public visibility and private invisibility are complementary: privacy makes visibility in the public sphere possible (Borren, 2008).

Michel Foucault (1977) said about visibility without privacy: “Visibility is a trap” (p.200). Writing about Bentham’s Panopticon, Foucault argues that modern society assures its power and control through permanent visibility of its inmates, patients, insane, etc. Donna Haraway (1997) argues, however, that the adverted gaze can be as deadly as the all-seeing panopticon: “Not counting and not looking, for example in health and well-being, can kill […] as surely as the avid seminal gaze of state security […]” (p.202). Here invisibility does not necessarily means privacy, but implies not to be taken into account, missing.

In social media, such as blogs and social network sites, the relationship between privacy and visibility becomes entangled in new ways. For example, Kim (2008) talks about the private space of public blogs. Boyd (2007), Livingstone (2008), and Steeves (2010) write about teenagers seeking privacy from their parents in social network sites.

The affordances of the technology underlying social media complicate how we think about privacy and how we do privacy (Palen & Dourish, 2003). They also complicate answering Haraway’s critical questioning of visibility: “How is visibility possible? For whom, by whom, and of whom? What remains invisible, to whom, and why?” (1997, p.202).

In order to address this entanglement of technology and visibility, I introduce the concept of networked visibility, Felix Stalder’s (2011) sociotechnical perspective on visibility. Networked visibility “is created by the capacity to record, store, transmit, access communication, action and states generated through digital networks” (ibid).

People become visible in and through the data they share in digital networks. The features of this data are, according Stalder, durability, once recorded it can be available for a very long time; highly transmittable, it can be available at different places and at the same time; and no scale limit, the data is easily aggregated and de-aggregated.

Stalder argues that social action always requires visibility. This visibility is horizontal, such as the visibility in social networks, where people who befriend each other obtain access to each other profile information. Horizontal visibility creates trust and is based on weak cooperation, which explains the ease with which people connect and form groups or cooperate voluntarily. The opposite of horizontal visibility is vertical visibility. The crucial technical factor in vertical visibility, argues Stalder, is that computers produce records of their own states and actions. The providers of these computers, e.g. Google or Facebook, can make everything that’s happening on their systems visible, independent from the privacy policies governing those systems. In addition they sell access to third party applications that aggregate data for commercial ends. These ends are quickly expanding, from targeted online commercials to finetuning medical insurance.1 Vertical visibility makes visible what was hardly ever visible before, but what becomes visible is not necessary public information. These systems, 1

See http://www.celent.com/reports/using-social-data-claims-and-underwriting. Retrieved January 25, 2012.

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Stalder argues, can thus make social dynamics visible and advance or block them, without anyone knowing: “This type of vertical visibility creates new centres of networked power that are, so far, outside any democratic control”. Stalder therefore calls for a politics of visibility, which promotes horizontal visibility and limits vertical visibility. The notion of privacy, he argues, is unproductive in such a politics of visibility: we need infrastructure projects that reverse the trend for centralization and vertical visibility.

2.1. VISIBILITY BY DESIGN Instead of doing away with the notion of privacy, as Stalder suggests, I will argue in this paper that understanding privacy, by studying the practice of privacy, will contribute to infrastructural projects that take the multiple privacy needs of its users into account.

Stalder’s conception of privacy seems based on the idea that privacy is withdrawal from the public. Any disclosure, to increase horizontal visibility, produces vertical visibility.

Research on privacy behavior on the Internet shows that users negotiate privacy within what Stalder calls horizontal visibility, but do not take into consideration what disclosure may mean for their vertical visibility. This phenomenon is often called the privacy paradox, users say they care about their privacy, but they don’t act on that concern (Acquisti and Gross, 2006; Barnes, 2006; Norberg, Horne, & Horne, 2007; Radin, 2001).

The privacy paradox becomes less of a paradox when privacy is understood as multidimensional (Burgoon, 1982; Burgoon et al, 1989) or when privacy is conceptualized as a dynamic and dialectic boundary regulation process (Altman, 1975; Petronio, 2002). Building forth on Altman, Palen and Dourish (ibid) focus on the ways in which information technology disrupts or destabilizes the regulation of boundaries.

These perspectives are more appropriate for addressing Haraway’s critical questioning of visibility. Research taking a multi-dimensional privacy perspective shows that people do care about their privacy, but can not always act on all concerns (van der Velden & El Emam, in press). These insights enable us to contribute to infrastructure projects that are concerned with both forms of visibility. They help us to deal with the risks of vertical visibility, the undesired visibility of our personal information to people and systems unknown to us. They help us to support the multiple and diverse ways in which we seek horizontal visibility, the desired visibilities of our personal information to people with whom we want to socially interact.

3. Patients, Privacy, and Social Media Patients | Privacy | Internet is a qualitative inquiry into how patients perceive and do privacy online. The results of this study will contribute to a larger project in which we study the different configurations of autonomy and automation in order to contribute to new understandings of human autonomy as well as to the design of public sector information systems.

This paper builds forth on research implemented in Norway and Canada. In Norway I have interviewed adult patients active in social media. These patients are

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selected because they maintain a patient blog besides their Facebook account. I follow these patients over a long period. This includes becoming their research-friend on Facebook. In Canada I have interviewed teenage patients in a children’s hospital (see (van der Velden & El Emam, in press). These teens were between 12 and 18 years old and were chronically or long-term ill. The patients had accounts on Facebook, but I did not become their research-friend. In the following sections I present extracts of semistructured interviews with four of the study’s participants.

3.1. “THE HECK WITH PRIVACY” Mari (pseudonym; in her sixties) started her blog immediately after she received her diagnosis. This was the first time she got involved with social media. She had read about it in a newspaper and thought it was a good idea. She knew she needed all her time and energy to get better and to get on with doing things that would give her energy.

Explaining everyone over the phone the bad news did not fall into that category.

Writing a blog was not ideal, but it had one big advantage: “On a blog you write it once and you don’t have to talk about it anymore. I did not want to repeat the negative news over and over again”.

Mari wrote her blog for the people she knew. She used her own name and profile picture. About the idea of not using her name she says: ”It feels like cheating. I feel like I don’t do anything I can’t stand for. That is basically my gut feeling.

How she wrote in her blog developed over time: “Other parts of life tend to seep in. I think that’s what happens. Also, in the beginning I mention everybody by name. […] I try not to do that any more. I have become much more conscious about it.”

Since Mari’s blog was publicly accessible on the Internet, she also started to receive comments on her blog postings from people she didn’t know: “It became as a big surprise for me that other people found it and wanted to read it. I didn’t expect anyone to take an interest in it. Even for the people who knew me it came as a surprise: O, you are so open and you are so [personal]. And I deliberately write it down as neutrally as possible what was going on without ... I did not want to be very emotionally about this. I wanted people to have information. Also, there is another function to that, I realised afterwards, that it helped me to remember what had happened.”

Mari was not concerned about her own privacy. She wrote openly about the different side effects of the therapies she received, discussing how certain parts of her body and their functions were affected. She had strong opinions about privacy in the healthcare sector. In her opinion, Norwegian laws and policies unnecessarily delay the communication between the different hospitals and specialists, because digital technologies are not allowed for patient – healthcare provider communication and medical staff in one facility has no online access to her medical information digitally stored in another medical facility:

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“As a patient I say: the heck with privacy - as long as it works, I don’t have time to wait for all the caution. I am ill, I could die, you know. I want to be treated, I want to live. […] Intellectually I can go above my feelings as a patient and say: Of course privacy is something important. I do see that, but within my patient realm, I am much more impatient”

Mari felt that at least in her blog she had some control over privacy issues: “I developed slowly the way I think about it. I stopped giving names to the people that were close to me, but I started giving the names of the people who were treating me.”

But Mari experiences this control as relative: “For a private person, it seems like a sort of existential dilemma. No one should be on Facebook or have a blog if we think about how the information could be misused. It seems a process you … you can’t stop it by not attending.”

After Mari started her blog, she realized that people would get worried if she didn’t write regularly. This was different with her Facebook account, which she started a year after she started her blog. She uses her Facebook account purely for social things.

She doesn’t feel any responsibility for informing people. She enjoys reading what other people post, often things she wouldn’t know if they hadn’t written it on Facebook.

Mari is not interested in reading other patients’ blogs or Facebook messages: “I am not interested in illness; I just happened to be ill. I am not the illness. It is not me.

When I first became ill, I wanted to see people because I wanted to know what they were doing in the world. I certainly didn’t want to talk about my illness. I have to deal with my illness. I have to deal with learning about it and treatment. It is a job, but it is not a career. It is not what I like to do. […] I met some patients who are very depressed: they feel very sorry for themselves. They make their illness into their career. I wanted to do things that gave me happiness and life quality. […] I try to avoid it because I don’t want to be exhausted from other people’s problems”.

When I interviewed Mari she told me she was very ill and she did not know if she would get better. At a certain point she stopped writing her blog. A few short messages on her Facebook wall brought her life as a patient into her Facebook social network.

Then the sad announcement came that she had passed away. Her Facebook site has now become a place for condolences, mourning, and memories. A couple of months have passed and some of her friends use her wall to communicate with her. They send her s or tell her they think of her. One friend mentions she is glad that her profile is still active as it is like a grave she can visit from time to time. Visibility has now become symbolic.

3.2. “TO HELP OTHERS, YOU NEED TO SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION” Stein (pseudonym; in his fifties) was active on Facebook. He decided that after he had undergone a big operation, he would blog about his recovery. Stein’s blog is written for people he doesn’t know – people who are struggling with the same problem he had and who are contemplating the same operation. Unlike his Facebook account, which is only accessible to his Facebook friends, his blog is public, accessible to every one on the Internet. He has posted photos of himself in which he shows himself before and after

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the operation. More than a year after the operation, he continues to give updates about his recovery, including details about his body, the things he needed to learn, and the joy he still feels of having undergone this life-changing operation: “I am no longer ashamed about myself. I have overcome that feeling. Since my youth I had a very bad self-confidence. I had to work myself through many processes. I am now more self-assured. I feel the need to tell others, who are maybe new to this process, that it is nothing to be ashamed about. That I can help others, that is my great wish. But to help others, you need to share your personal information. You have to be open and honest, so the readers get the message that this is real. If I hide things, readers will be skeptical.”

Stein expresses his newly won self-confidence by being visible, both in words and in photos about his body: “I am no longer shy - I was. By posting it all [on the blog] you overcome an obstacle.”

It is however important for him to stay in control. He doesn’t want people to copy or tag his pictures: “My message is from me to the readers [of my blog], not from one of my readers to a third reader.”

3.3. “NOT ALL MY FRIENDS NEED TO KNOW” Amy (pseudonym; 17 years old) has been in the hospital for the past seven weeks for treatment of a rare disease. She is lying in bed, connected to an IV. Amy is an avid Facebook user, but she also has an account on Upopolis2, a closed social network for young patients in Canada. About meeting other patients in Upopolis she says: “It is a great network to talk to other patients who have the same diagnosis as you. So, since I am new at this, people that are not can explain how they dealt with it.” […] “It was nice to see that you are not alone”

Amy did not write a status update on Facebook when this hospital stay began: “I never wrote something about my diagnosis because it is not people’s … like they don’t have to know. I tell my friends in real life, like when I talk to them in person, but not on Facebook.”

“It is just … if I want to tell someone, I will tell them. Not all my friends need to know, you know.”

But in the beginning she told even less friends: “At first I was more private about it because I didn’t … I was still in the acceptance stage you know, but now I am pretty open about it when people ask me. I am not going to scream it to everyone, I wait until someone wants to know. I am not ashamed of it.”

2

See http://www.upopolis.com. Retrieved February 27, 2012.

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3.4. “THERE IS NO CLUE THAT I AM SICK” The last patient I introduce in this paper is Eric (pseudonym; 17 years old), who has a long-term illness. He has been in and out of the hospital for the past two years. I meet him when he is visiting the day unit where he undergoes some blood tests. He uses Facebook daily, but his favorite thing to do on the Internet is to play the Game. His parents are also playing the Game and they know each other’s avatars. Sometimes they form a team and play together. They also teamed up together when their son was lying in his hospital bed. When they play, they don’t ask him how he is doing: “No, no, they play their role. I am as equal as they are.”

“They know that I don’t like being put down ehhh like be reminded that I am sick. I just want to try to live without thinking about it, you know, like everyone else. I try to be like everyone else, as somebody normal.”

Also on Facebook Eric is not presenting himself as a patient: “No, there is no clue that I am sick.”

But Facebook is handy when you are in the hospital: “It is to keep in contact with my friends. Yeah, it is, it plays a role in helping me because I can’t really go out and play as much as I was doing before I was sick. It is a way of staying in contact with my friends.”

He also uses Facebook to store his pictures, but there are no pictures from the hospital on Facebook: “I mean it is like … I don’t know … showing my weakness. I would not show that to anyone.”

He communicates through Facebook’ private message system which functions as his email. When he has day treatment in the hospital, he uses it to inform some friends: “Yeah a private message always, saying that I am sick ehhh I have treatment. Some people would answer ‘are you joking’ … Someone you know him for a long time and you say, ‘I have [diagnosis]. They say ‘are you serious’? The first time you say it, they won’t believe it, when you say it for the first time.”

Eric is not interested in meeting people who have the same diagnosis: I take my [diagnosis] on my own. I don’t want to talk to other people that have the same thing as I have. I spoke to people that have the same thing as I do. I understand what they are going through, but … I don’t want to talk about it. As I said, I try to live my life without being remembered that I have it. Speaking about it is a way of remembering. That is what I don’t want to do, that is why I don’t want to talk about it.”

4. Multiple Bodies Haraway’s questions about visibility are a call for a feminist inquiry into what bodies become visible and invisible in and through technologies such as Facebook, to whom, and for what. In the four extracts I presented social media - blogs, Facebook, Upopolis,

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the Game – as technologies that co-produce visible patient bodies through their affordances, designs, standards, and protocols.

The extracts show the conscious choices these four patients made when selecting a particular social media. All four patients used their Facebook account to be visible as ‘regular’ persons – Facebook enabled them to separate their social life from their patient life. Regular people have regular bodies, bodies that are not sick or weak or need treatment. For Stein this separation was a practical issue. He was already active on Facebook and chose to start a blog to keep track of his recovery while supporting people in a similar situation. Mari started her blog before she started on Facebook and decided to use her Facebook account to stay up to date about cultural events, friends’ activities, etc.

Both Stein and Mari made a reference on their Facebook wall to their patient blog.

Amy and Eric kept a strict separation between their Facebook life and their patient life.

But while Amy wrote a blog on Upopolis, the closed social network for young patients, Eric did not make himself visible as a patient. He used the online game to give himself a strong and healthy body. Even his parents did not inquire into his wellbeing while he was playing the game with them from his hospital bed.

4.1. HORIZONTAL VISIBILITY Horizontal visibility, such as the profile information in a Facebook account, makes social action on the Internet possible (Stalder, 2011). The extracts make clear that patients actively use technology to manage their horizontal visibility. They make different presentations of their body visible or invisible to their online friends and other users of social media: - Patient bodies All four participants have made clear choices about if, how, where, and to whom to make their patient bodies, the body that is receiving treatment or that is recovering, visible online. Mari, Stein, and Amy made their patient bodies visible in social media because they are actively seeking social interaction with particular people. Mari wants to keep family and friends up-to-date about diagnosis and treatment; Stein wants to keep other patients up-to-date of his recovery; and Amy wants to communicate with kids who have a similar disease. Mari and Stein do this in a very public forum, a blog, while Amy is active in a closed social media (Upopolis), for which the only way to get an account is to be a registered young patient in a hospital in Canada. In contrast, Eric did not make his patient body visible online. Patient bodies can thus be both public and private bodies.

- Healthy bodies Both Amy and Eric use Facebook’s public communications to be part of a group of friends with healthy bodies or regular bodies. They never mention their diagnosis, treatment or hospital stays. Being part of this group enables them to stay up to date about school and friends and their activities, while staying in the hospital.

Even though Mari and Stein did not keep the fact that they were receiving treatment or recovering from treatment from their Facebook friends, they presented only

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their healthy bodies, not their patient bodies in Facebook. They used Facebook as place in which they did not have to talk about their patient bodies. On Facebook they were in touch with friends and relatives (Mari and Stein), stayed informed about cultural events (Mari), and played games (Stein).

- Exposed bodies People make their patient bodies visible online, through descriptions and photos in patient blogs, discussions in patient communities, status updates about a hospital stay on Facebook, etc., in order to seek and find social interaction with peers as well as with family and friends. By seeking horizontal visibility, their bodies become also visible in other ways. A visible body is an exposed body, an unprotected body that can be used for activities that are not considered social. Exposed patient bodies can be quantified, aggregated and made commercially available by the provider to other companies.

Several online patient communities are based on this model. Exposed patient bodies can become quantifiable bodies, they can be measured in pressure, temperatures, weight, insulin, cholesterol, medication use, side effects, etc.

It is possible, as Amy’s case shows, to seek horizontal visibility without having to trade off vertical visibility. Amy has started a blog on Upopolis, which is a secure social network run by a children’s foundation. Through the blog she has come into contact with some kids who have a similar diagnosis. It gives her a connection, which she doesn’t have with her friends on Facebook.

- The protected body While Mari and Stein make their patient bodies visible online, Eric tries to keep his patient body invisible. He is only a patient when he is receiving treatment in the hospital. When he is online, he wants to have a normal body, like everyone else. Both Amy and Eric use Facebook to present themselves as “normal” teenagers. Eric doesn’t want to be reminded that he is sick. Mari expresses this in a different way: she is not interested in meeting patients with a similar diagnosis because she doesn’t want to be “exhausted from other people’s problems”.

4.2. VERTICAL VISIBILITY Patients actively use technology to manage their horizontal visibility towards other social media users. Mari, Stein, and Amy use one technology to be a patient and another to be anything but a patient. When Mari became more sick, she could not keep the two, Facebook and blog, separate and she resorted to one technology for her last messages.

Eric’s patient body is missing online. This is not necessarily because of privacy concerns. His way of dealing with a potentially deadly illness is to make his patient body invisible.

While the patients used social media to make certain bodies visible or invisible to particular groups of social media users, the same technologies makes all patient bodies visible to the social media providers, who can make these data accessible to other third parties. This vertical visibility is invisible to the patients. For example, all four patients have a Facebook account in which they use their real name, profile picture, school or work place. This is a requirement of Facebook and is mentioned in their terms of use.

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All four also have friends-only privacy settings. Amy and Eric do not publicly discuss their diagnosis and treatment on Facebook, but they use Facebook private messaging system and private chat to organize the hospital visits of their family and friends.

By using Facebook, all patient bodies, including Amy and Eric’s invisible patient bodies, are visible to Facebook the network provider. This vertical visibility is based on Facebook’s records, which includes the IP addresses used to access Facebook, copies of private messages sent and received, copies of chats, etc. Facebook organizes the data it holds about a user in at least 57 categories (Europe-v-Facebook, 2012). This data is sold to third parties for targeted advertisement, research, surveillance, etc. Mari refers to this vertical visibility when she mentions that no one should use Facebook or blogs if one thinks of the potential to misuse the personal information that becomes available through these. She calls it an “existential dilemma”, if you don’t use it, you can’t participate in the social interaction afforded by them. The same is true for Amy and Eric. Not participating in Facebook, as ‘regular’ teenagers, would mean horizontal invisibility (see boyd, 2007; Steeves, 2010). The trade-off between horizontal and vertical visibility is not transparent to social media users, making it impossible to oversee the possible consequences of vertical visibility. In the networked visibility of today, all online bodies, public and private, are visible bodies.

5. Concluding remarks One perspective addressing Stalder’s call for infrastructural projects that limit the vertical visibility of personal data is Privacy by Design. The basis for this concept stems from the notion of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), which was introduced in the 1990s (IPC/Ontario/Canada and Registratiekamer/Netherlands, 1995). Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian (2009) has been instrumental in developing a comprehensive Privacy by Design program, consisting of seven foundational principles (ibid 2011) that target the individuals, organisations, and corporations that develop, manage, and control the technologies and structures used to collect, use, and store personal information by others, which we called vertical visibility.

The four interview extracts make clear that users are more directly concerned with, and actively involved in, the control and management of personal (health) information they willingly share with other social media users, which we called horizontal visibility.

The four patients share information selectively, using particular social media technologies and their services, in order to make their multiple bodies visible or invisible. Horizontal visibility, the visibility that makes social interaction possible, thus consists of multiple modes of visibility, including invisibility (e.g. Eric). These modes also change over time, as became clear in the case of Mari, Stein, and Amy. To support a multiple conception of horizontal visibility, the Privacy by Design approach can be paired with the notion of visibility by design. If horizontal visibility is a prerequisite for social interaction, visibility by design can supports users in negotiating their online visibility according to their multiple personal, cultural, and gendered, privacy needs. While Privacy by Design focuses on vertical visibility, visibility by design is about spaces and tools that enable users to design their horizontal visibility,

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the different ways in which they want to be visible or invisible to other social media users.

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Palen, L., & Dourish, P. (2003). Unpacking “privacy” for a networked world. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI ’03 (pp. 129– 136). Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. Petronio, S. S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. New York, NY: SUNY Press.

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IN/VISIBILITY OF LGBTQ PEOPLE IN THE ARAB SPRING: MAKING LGBTQ VOICES HEARD DAVID KREPS University of Salford The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, United Kingdom d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk

Abstract. LGBTQ use of the internet is a growing area of study. However most studies focus mainly on the US and the UK, and none pays much (if any) attention to the experience of LGBTQ people in countries where it is illegal to be LGBTQ. The events of the Arab Spring, significantly, signal the possibility that change may be possible in these countries, yet there seems to be little material on what LGBTQ people in these countries are actually thinking, doing, etc, and in particular what role the internet may be playing in this. This is a research-inprogress paper introducing a project which sets out to make a contribution on these lines, by making their voices heard.

1. Introduction: Homosexuality and the Law In Western countries in contemporary culture, there are a host of different webspaces where LGBTQ people are able to meet, socialise, hook up, and share information and experiences. LGBTQ use of the internet is a growing area of study, too, with three recent books on the subject, (O'Riordan & Phillips, 2007; Pullen & Cooper, 2010; Mowlabocus, 2010) and numerous journal articles and book chapters (Light, 2008; Kreps, 2012). However, these writings focus mainly on the US and the UK, and none pays much (if any) attention to the experience of LGBTQ people in countries where it is illegal to be/do anything but heterosexual. At the United Nations, in March 2011, 85 of the United Nations’ 192 member countries sponsored a new version of the declaration first proposed in 2008, recognizing LGBTQ rights (Jordans, 2011), and followed it up with a report published in December 2011 documenting violations of the rights of LGBTQ people around the world, including hate crime, criminalization of homosexuality, and discrimination. Nonetheless, in many countries in the early 21st century – including those who in 2008 made a joint statement opposing the proposed declaration - the legal status of LGBTQ people is still extremely challenging. With the notable exception of Israel, Turkey, Jordan, (the new) Iraq and the West Bank (in the Palestinian Occupied Territories,) same-sex activity is illegal throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In most countries in this region there is no recognition of samesex relationships or same-sex marriage; there is no legal route to same-sex adoption; gays are not allowed to serve openly in military; there are no anti-discrimination laws

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covering sexual orientation, or laws concerning gender identity/expression. In the Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, homosexuality is punishable by the death penalty (Bruce-Jones & Itaborahy, 2011). LGBTQ people are to all intents and purposes invisible in public spaces in these countries. The internet, however, and in particular webspaces specifically geared toward Arab LGBTQ people, do exist, where they may be visible to each other, if not to the wider population. These webspaces, however, are few, mostly amateur in design and implementation compared to slick Western equivalents, and rarely based in the countries themselves. Global sites lack the regional specificity and reinforce Western ‘typing’.

The events of the Arab Spring, however, signal the possibility that change may be possible in some of these countries. What LGBTQ people in these countries are actually thinking, doing, etc, and in particular what role the internet may be playing in this, seems thus far, however, little commented upon. This research-in-progress paper consists in preliminary notes and positions on a project which sets out to make a contribution on these lines. Of all the countries in the Middle East, these issues are the most complex in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and this research project, in seeking to bring these issues to a wider audience, begins by, in the first instance, seeking to make the voices of Palestinian LGBTQ individuals heard. As the authors of the 2011 ILGA Report enthuse, “the so-called Arab Spring gives reason to hope for significant changes in the legislation of many countries in the Middle East and North Africa in a not too distant future” (Bruce-Jones & Itaborahy, 2011).

The paper begins with a background to the legal situation of LGBTQ people in the Middle East and North Africa in general, and Foucault’s history of how sexual identities were characterised in Victorian Britain and its colonies. This includes a section on the legal position of LGBTQ in Muslim countries in the present day, and a short section on Foucault’s own experience of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. The research project in Palestine is then outlined, briefly, before considering the notion in Western Philosophy of the ‘Other,’ in relation to these issues, and a potential way forward through use of the understanding of the Other offered by French philosopher, Levinas. The final section reviews use of the internet by the LGBTQ people in the region and the relative invisibility of these LGBTQ issues in Western media – apart from when it suits their other, less palatable agendas.

2. Background 2.1. BRITISH CHRISTIAN AND VICTORIAN COLONIAL LEGACY More than half of the countries where homosexuality is still illegal “have these laws because they once were British colonies.” (Gupta, 2008, 5). “Colonial legislators and jurists introduced such laws, with no debates or ‘cultural consultations,’ to support colonial control,” Gupta tells us in his excellent recent report for Human Rights Watch.

“They believed laws could inculcate European morality into resistant masses. They brought in the legislation, in fact, because they thought ‘native’ cultures did not punish ‘perverse’ sex enough.” This was, indeed, not so much a ‘Western’ as a peculiarly Victorian export. As Foucault begins in his celebrated History of Sexuality, “At the

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beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common… Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. Codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth century.” (Foucault, 1990a, 3) Later, Victorian values of prudery gradually changed the British Christian laws against sodomy (first introduced by Henry VIII in 1533, and a capital offence until 1861) into laws against a type of person – the homosexual. The term ‘homosexual’ was first coined by Hungarian sexologist Kertbeny (1869). This notion was taken up by Westphal in a famous article in 1870 as, “contrary sexual sensations” - regarded by Foucault as the “date of birth” of the categorisation, ‘homosexual’ (Foucault, 1990a).

An 1895 translation of Richard von Kraft-Ebing’s sexologists’ bible Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) saw the word’s first appearance in English (Halperin, 1990).

While this change was underway, however, as early as 1860 in India, laws against sodomy were simultaneously exported to the colonies. Clearly, “the colonized needed compulsory re-education in sexual mores.” (Gupta, 2008, 5). Foucault’s main argument, that the ‘repression’ of sexuality in the late 19th century, and its restriction to the ‘parents’ bedroom’, represented, in fact, not a suppression but a veritable explosion of discourse around the subject, created, he argues, through their very prohibition, sexual ‘identities’ which we now take for granted in the West, and for many of which political campaigns have now been fought, and won, granting legal rights and protections. These ‘identities’ moreover, with their brand new sexological terminology, conglomerated sexual acts which, albeit often frowned upon, had been enjoyed by all and sundry from time immemorial, into human ‘types,’ whereby committing particular acts became defining of who one is in a way not seen before in history (Foucault, 1990a).

Despite the contemporary experience of gay, lesbian and other non-heterosexual identities, in the West, this characterisation of such identities rings all the truer when the ‘sexualities’ of individuals in non-Western, non-modern, countries comes into focus. Today, in Western countries, the Victorian ‘types’ are taken for granted, and teenagers discovering their ‘preferences’ are quickly socialised in one direction or another towards self-identifying according to the established schema. Debate around whether consumerism has played a particularly constructive part in this story – at least in the late 20th century (Sinfield, 1988; Green, 2002) - continues amongst academics devoted to this field. On the web, indeed, where Western LGBTQ people often meet, it seems likely that the ‘commodification of difference’ (Light et al., 2008) contributes to establishing such ‘types,’ in line with market segmentation practice, and that such practices reinforce and continue to spread, globally, the ‘identities’ created by Victorian values (Kreps, 2012). Nonetheless, it remains true that in non-Western countries, very different social and cultural settlements around the concept of sexuality continue to make themselves apparent – for example in South America (Fernandez, 1997; Peinado et al., 2007) and in the Arab world.

So in the 21st century we see “sodomy laws throughout Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have consistently been colonial impositions,” (Gupta, 2008, 10) and do not reflect pre-colonial cultural mores. Such laws are, as Gupta titles his treatise, an ‘Alien Legacy’. “No ‘native’ ever participated in their making. Colonizers saw indigenous cultures as sexually corrupt. A bent toward homosexuality supposedly formed part of

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their corruption. Where pre-colonial peoples had been permissive, sodomy laws would cure them—and defend their new, white masters against moral contagion.” (Gupta, 2008, 10).

2.2. HOMOSEXUALITY IN MUSLIM COUNTRIES Both major modern patriarchal religions (Christianity and Islam) share a focus upon procreation as the only legitimate reason to have sex. Yet until relatively recent times a pragmatic permissiveness seems to have held sway, in law, and perhaps, despite changes in the law, in fact in practice still persists. Not only the legacy of British Empire, but also the recent more fundamentalist interpretations of Islam have been responsible for a hardening of official and social attitudes against non-conforming sexual behaviour in Muslim countries. This is a little discussed topic. As Whittaker, former Middle East editor of the Guardian, describes in his ground-breaking 2006 book, Unspeakable Love: Gay & Lesbian Life in the Middle East, updated and expanded in 2011, and including much “face-to-face research… in Egypt and Lebanon,” this is “a subject that Arabs, even reform-minded Arabs, were generally reluctant to discuss. If mentioned at all, it was treated as a subject for ribald laughter or (more often) as a foul, unnatural, repulsive, un-Islamic, Western perversion.”

(Whittaker, 2011, 11).

For some insight into the hardening, during the 20th century, of official attitudes, we need only to look to the implementation, in Muslim countries, of Sharia Law. Although Sharia law is supposed to be God’s law, there are wide variations in what it is supposed to entail. While only a few countries have state-level Sharia law, many others mix it with other systems, some at state, some at regional level. Turning, briefly, to subSaharan Africa, and an excellent report on the impact of the introduction of Sharia Law for Muslims in Nigeria in 1960 in various northern states, we discover, “In Islam, sexual intercourse is lawful only if it takes place between a man and a woman who are married validly according to law” (Ostien & Umaru, 2007, 44) – again, Foucault’s ‘parent’s bedroom’. There are a number of clauses in these laws against what are termed ‘unnatural’ sexual practices. Unlike in the West, there is no generally accepted equivalent of the word ‘gay’ in Arabic, and there is no direct mention of such sexuality – certainly in Nigeria’s Sharia laws. According to Whittaker, “the term al-mithliyya aljinsiyya, literally ‘sexual same-ness’ has become used recently by serious newspapers and academic articles”, (Whittaker, 2011, 16) Popular media, however, continue to use the pejorative term, shaadh (‘queer’, ‘pervert’, ‘deviant’).

As the authors of the report on Nigeria point out, however, “It would be interesting to know whether anyone has ever been prosecuted under these sections of the Penal Code, and if so, for what ‘unnatural and indecent offences’ in particular.

There are in fact communities of gays and lesbians in the larger Northern cities, those in Kano being the most famous. Whether, before Sharia implementation, they ever got in trouble with the law, is unknown to us. As we shall see below, even after Sharia implementation they apparently continue to thrive.” (Ostien & Umaru, 2007, 50) Importantly, however, although since 1960, “in the Sharia States the punishments at least for homosexual sex acts have gone up: rajm [stoning to death] for sodomy in most places; rajm for lesbianism in Kano and Katsina, the saving grace, again, is the

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impossible standard of proof (barring confession). Judging from the recent news, the new laws do not seem to have suppressed the gays and lesbians: Nigeria transvestite handed fine. A Nigerian Islamic court has sentenced a man to six months in prison and fined him $38 for living as a woman for seven years in the northern city of Kano. The judge told 19-year-old Abubakar Hamza, who used his female identity to sell aphrodisiacs, to desist from “immoral behaviour”. Mr. Hamza, who appeared in court dressed in a pink kaftan and matching cap, said he was now “a reformed man”.” (Ostien & Umaru, 2007, 54).

Whittaker, too, in his study of Arab countries, finds this curious mismatch between official attitudes and real life. “Evidence of previous tolerance can be found in Arabic literary works, in the accounts of early travellers and the examples of Europeans who settled in Arab countries to escape sexual persecution at home. Despite the more hostile moral climate today, however, same-sex activity continues largely undeterred.”

(Whittaker, 2011, 11). It seems that, “as with many other things that are forbidden in Arab society, appearances are what count; so long as everyone can pretend that it doesn’t happen, there is no need to do anything to stop it.” (Whittaker, 2011, 11).

Obviously this is hardly a happy state of affairs for those who must live a life of secrecy, fearing exposure and blackmail, and face unwanted marriages, no redress in law against discrimination, and no support from health services for their particular needs. Most Arabs who engage in same-sex activities, indeed, in Whittaker’s experience, do not identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. As with Western societies prior to the Victorian sexologists, (Foucault, 1990a; 1990b; 1992) Arab societies are more concerned with sexual acts than orientations. Arguably, the Western experience in the last 150yrs of creating sexual identities and politicising the personal has created a space in which same-sex activity can take a place in the wider society that is recognised, protected in law from religious and ‘moral’ discrimination, and proud to speak its name. In the Arab world, where sexuality remains more fluid, in similar fashion to the Medieval West, only one ‘orientation’ – the ‘moral’ ideal of patriarchal male and his submissive female counterpart – is recognised, and the law seeks to prohibit sexual acts which fall outside of this ideal.

The vast majority of global websites for the LGBTQ community, however, play quite a prescriptive role in defining the Self. When creating an online profile on one of these sexual social networking sites, along with providing information about one’s physical appearance, demographic characteristics, personality traits, etc, one must tick a box declaring one’s sexual identity, and choose from among a specific (and arguably limiting) set of sexual preferences. Such data, moreover, beyond free text boxes for self-description, is often collected in a multiple-choice format, and then used as criteria to enable the website to offer matchmaking services, linking profiles with similar choices through a variety of search mechanisms. The requirements of the matching criteria asked for by Gaydar, for example, are arguably constitutive of specific – and Western - sexual identities. As Light et al. (2008) point out, “Not surprisingly we find dominant cultural stereotypes reproduced and reinforced through technological design…Although the free text element implies freedom to define oneself as one

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chooses, the presence of menus and tick boxes shapes a pre-defined notion of what may or may not be an acceptable expression of identity.” (Light et al., 2008, 307) Making such choices at the outset, when creating one’s profile, may in fact have the effect of locking individuals into specific roles, prior to meeting, from which they are then unable to escape without admitting online dissimulation once face-to-face, at the risk of losing the connection as soon as it is made. Importantly, though, “the greater level of anonymity provided by the internet, as compared to face-to-face encounters, allows individuals to present aspects of their current perceptions of themselves that they would not ordinarily present to other members of society.” (Yurchisin, 2005, 737). In other words, the options may enable individuals to ‘role’-play at being one of the pre-defined ‘types,’ online, despite reservations regarding such behaviour offline. Anonymity, too, seems likely to be of greater significance to LGBTQ individuals in Middle Eastern countries. Photography and video, used extensively in the West, seem largely absent on the profiles of, for example, those Arabs who have ticked the check-box ‘Single Gay Man,’ to create a profile on one of the most popular global gay male websites, Gaydar.com. A cursory search for residents of Bethlehem, in the Palestinian West Bank, on Gaydar, returns 13 profiles of which only two have photographs.

2.3. FOUCAULT AND THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION The rise of fundamentalist Islam has had a strong impact upon the lives of North African and Middle Eastern LGBTQ people. Looking again beyond Arabic society, to the Islamic Republic of Iran – where state-level Sharia applies - there is an instructive story concerning the very thinker who gave us our understanding of Western sexual identities: Michel Foucault. In 1978-79, Foucault became embroiled in the real-world events of the Iranian revolution. “Progressive and leftist intellectuals around the world,” Afary and Anderson tell us in their excellent guide to these events, “supported the overthrow of the shah… [but were] less enthusiastic about the notion of an Islamic Republic. A major exception to this ambivalence was Michel Foucault” (Afary & Anderson, 2005, 2). Foucault visited Iran during this period on a number of occasions, had private meetings with some of the key political and clerical players – including Ayatollah Khomeini – and wrote a string of articles for the Italian broadsheet, Corriere della sera. Foucault seemed blind to the patriarchal, authoritarian history of the extreme interpretation of shi’ism that had been developing over the course of the 20th century in Iran - a reactionary force at every turn of its modern history. They actively opposed the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11, which made several egalitarian moves; they vehemently opposed the Ataturk-style secularisation of Reza Shah’s regime in the 1930s – especially the banning of the veil; and they opposed every step of the gradual increase in women’s political rights during the 1940s and 1950s. A major factor in the Shi’ite opposition to the Shah’s White Revolution in 1963 was the granting of suffrage to women. All these gender reforms were characterised by the Shi’ite clergy as “nothing to do with true equality ..[but]…instead an example of Western imperialist influence” (Afary and Anderson, 2005, 74). Foucault’s gender blindness with regard to the Iranian revolution included the Shi’ite attitude to homosexuality. In 1998, sociologist Ehsan Naraghi, who had met Foucault during one of his visits to Iran, recalled a conversation he had had in an interview with the well known Iranian

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journalist Ibrahim Nabavi, twenty years previously. Afary and Anderson quote the interview at length, but just the following snippet about a meeting with several devout Muslim revolutionaries is revealing enough: “EHSAN NARAGHI: You know that Michel Foucault was a homosexual, and this issue had an important influence on his ideology and his thinking……..

Foucault was very curious and very sensitive about the issue [of homosexuality], and suddenly he asked, “What would the position of Islam and this future Islamic government be toward those we call minorities?” My wife and the other two said, “In Islam, respect for minorities is required, and several religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrians may exist.”

They did not understand the meaning of Foucault’s question, although I immediately understood what he meant. Foucault said, “I mean the attitude toward those whom society calls abnormal and such other things…” My wife realised what he was talking about…. She got up and brought a French translation of a Quranic verse, placed it in front of Michel Foucault, and said, “Execution!” Foucault was dumb-founded. He was upset and left that night."

(Afary and Anderson, 2005, 143) Perhaps this was one of the first moments upon which Foucault’s understanding of what was really happening in Iran began to counter what he hoped was happening.

Finally, as the true face of the revolution began to show itself, Foucault stopped writing articles, and fell silent – for the rest of his life – on the topic of the Iranian revolution.

One need only look to the very recent case in Derby in the UK, where three Muslims have been imprisoned under new laws against hate crime, for promoting the death sentence for gay men, to understand that radical fundamentalist Islam – the world over – remains adamantly anti-homosexual (Addley, 2012). Clearly, with Gupta, this author believes “Eliminating these [anti-gay] laws is a human rights obligation. It means freeing part of the population from violence and fear.” (Gupta, 2008, 12) Yet it is also clear that gay and lesbian communities continue to exist in North Africa and the Middle East, whether or not they self-identify or can indeed be categorised as such, and enjoy a level of acceptance and permissiveness in the wider communities which they inhabit. The research being undertaken, about which this paper constitutes some preliminary notes, seems so far to bear this out.

3. Research in Progress 3.1. PALESTINE The author has contact with a British humanitarian aid-worker, who I will refer to as ‘James’, working particularly in Bethlehem. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, where same-sex activity has been legal, under the auspices of Jordanian law, since 1951, but where there is no recognition of gay or lesbian relationships, no same-sex marriage or adoption, no anti-discrimination laws covering sexual orientation, or laws concerning gender identity/expression (Bruce-Jones & Itaborahy, 2011). In the other part of the

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Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza, male homosexuality remains illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, but female homosexuality is legal. This is because in the Gaza Strip, the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance, No. 74, of 1936, remains in force and continues to outlaw same-sex acts between men, although lesbian women are not subjects of the code and their relations are thus, technically, not unlawful (Ottosson, 2010). Reportedly, a number of Palestinians self-identifying as gay men have been leaving the Occupied Palestinian Territories, seeking refuge in Israel, which has Western European style anti-discrimination laws and was a signatory to the March 2011 proposed UN resolution, (BBC, 2003; Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008) this, despite the fact that if discovered by the Israeli authorities they are likely to be detained and deported as a security threat. They cite in particular, however, rather than the old colonial laws, the fear of Islamic retribution at home (BBC, 2003; Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008; Whittaker, 2011). Despite extreme difficulties with Israeli law on the subject of asylum, however, (Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008) it seems Palestinian gay men may finally be close to gaining legal protection in Israel Harrison, 2008) (see also below).

The situation seems somewhat more relaxed in the West Bank. James, the Bethlehem based aid-worker, in email correspondence in January 2012, told me “I know some gays in Bethlehem, who quietly go about their lives and hang out. In truth, the majority of people don't mind and are neutral about it.” Asked if he could help with my research, James volunteered to bring an online questionnaire to the attention of the Bethlehem ‘gays’, and their responses will form the core material of the next paper in this research programme. As James says in his emails, “There was more openness in the 1960s-70s, when Arab socialism liberalised social mores, and women were more 'liberated' too, but the Islamist wave of the 1980s on, tightened things.” Interestingly, on the subject of permissiveness despite the legal situation, James affirms that “People have quietly-held personal views that are more liberal, while publicly cleaving to more conservative views - because of their transitional doubts and inner reviewing of Islamic moral codes.”

The two year research project aims to uncover a picture of how LGBTQ individuals in Arab and Middle Eastern countries make use of the internet and newmedia in their lives, and what their hopes and fears of the ongoing Arab Spring may be.

As the issue at stake is in/visibility, the methodology adopted will be interpretive, and grounded theory will be used in as reflexive a way as possible (Urquhart & Fernandez, 2006). Grounded theory is deemed appropriate for this project as it is, firstly, “useful where no previous theory” exists, second, and most importantly, “it incorporate[s] the complexities of …. context into the understanding of the phenomena. Third, [grounded theory methodology is] … uniquely fitted to studying process and change.” (Urquhart & Fernandez, 2006, 457). All information acquired through the research will be collated into the popular research software tool, nVivo, and coded ‘on the fly’ as it is collated.

In the first instance, a pilot project is underway to create an online questionnaire and to invite LGBTQ individuals in Palestine, known to the British Aid worker, ‘James’, to complete it. The first individuals to complete the questionnaire should do so in October 2012. The pilot is being undertaken in Palestine firstly because this is where the primary initial contact to undertake research has been made, but secondly because Palestine presents the most complex set of circumstances the project is likely to

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encounter in the Middle East and North Africa, combining the legacy of the British colonial era, religious intolerance, and an oppressive state machinery that, in the case of Palestine, is not merely funded and supported by the West, (as with many of the dictators threatened by the Arab Spring elsewhere in the region) but constitutes an occupying populace drawn from around the world. Whilst this confers upon Palestine a unique combination of circumstances, as a pilot for the wider research it allows the project the opportunity to encounter and develop appropriate responses to all the circumstances it is likely to encounter in one go. Much may be learnt in Palestine that is not generalisable to the wider region, yet also many issues in the wider region may in turn reflect what the situation in Palestine epitomises.

As the introduction to the questionnaire states, “I want to hear from you about your life, the things that are important to you, what it is like to live as an LGBTQ person in your country, and what your own experiences are of this. In particular I am interested in what part the internet may be playing in your life, and in your experience of the recent turbulence in the region.” The intention is to collate the responses to this initial questionnaire and derive a series of questions for a handful of one-to-one interviews, to be conducted over Skype. The hope is to thus approach a picture of how LGBTQ individuals in Palestine describe their own situation, what use of the internet and new media they are engaged in, and their hopes for the future. Following this initial pilot, it is hoped that a new online questionnaire can be created and opened up to the wider Middle East and North Africa. Eventually, during 2014, it is intended to create a website with the anonymised voices of LGBTQ people, in both English and Arabic, and to thereby make these voices heard.

3.2. GAY PALESTINIANS AND THE OTHER These issues raise particular questions about the notion of the Other in Western Philosophy. The Other as a concept that is defining of the Self has quite a pedigree in Western thought, going back to Hegelian ideas of alienation and resolution, and Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity. But it is the notion of the Other in post-colonial studies, in gender studies, and in the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, that are of most interest in this context. In post-colonial studies, to use the term introduced by of one the founders of the field, the Palestinian academic, Edward Said, the unequal relationship between conqueror and conquered requires an ‘othering’ of the subordinate culture by the dominant empire, which facilitates exploitation, suppression, and the ill-treatment of peoples regarded as less human than the dominant power (Said, 2003). Palestinians, therefore, are arguably historic victims of two successive ‘otherings’ in the 20th century – first by the British Empire, and then by the Israeli state. This colonial relationship of course works both ways, in that, as Whittaker points out, “Cultural protectionism is one way of opposing Western policies…. and so exaggerated images of a licentious West, characterised in the popular imagination by female nudity and male homosexuality, are countered by invoking a supposedly traditional Arab morality.” (Whittaker, 2011, 12) In gender studies, the relationship between men and women is treated (e.g by de Beauvoir 1973) as a Self/Other dynamic, and the ‘othering’ of women by men a source of patriarchal dominance. Similarly, in the work of Judith Butler and others (Butler, 1990; 1993) one can find an understanding of homophobia described as the ‘othering’

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of homosexuality, revealing insecurity about their own masculinity in those for whom homophobia is experienced strongly. Anti-gay sentiment, in this reading, is not merely about people communicating their beliefs about the ‘class’ of gay people, but a means by which homophobes can distance themselves from this class and its social status. The creation of the ‘types,’ in Foucault’s reading of Victorian sexology, is a classic case of gender ‘othering,’ whereby a heterosexual normality was created in opposition to – and domination over – a homosexual abnormality, simultaneously shutting off more fluid sexual behaviour for those for whom the acts associated with either ‘typology’ may have been an occasional indulgence alongside those which were otherwise a preference.

These issues of post-colonial and gender othering are brought starkly into focus by the phenomenon of Palestinian men-who-have-sex-with-men fleeing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel, seeking asylum. Whittaker quotes reports suggesting up to 600 such cases exist (Whittaker, 2011, 41.) Victims of a double Othering, their flight from religious-inspired othering in the Occupied Territories is then confronted by the imperial othering of the Israeli authorities for whom their nationality means they are a terrorist threat and must be detained and deported back to the Occupied Territories. A very recent report on ten such cases going through the Israeli courts is extremely revealing of this double tension. As the authors report, “Their cases presented a series of unusual legal and practical problems. Although Israel has a nascent asylum system, Palestinians are excluded by virtue of their nationality from applying for asylum” (Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008). Undertaking interviews with these individuals whilst they were in custody in Israel, the authors relate how “the interviewees reported that, from an early age, they knew that homosexuality would not be tolerated by their society” (Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008, 9). “A, a young man in his twenties who was interviewed in 2003, told us: ‘Gays have been persecuted in Gaza as far back as I can remember. Until 1993, militias of men with masked faces regularly attacked known gay men’” (Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008, 9). Another interviewee told a harrowing story of the ill-treatment of gay men in the West Bank: “C, who grew up in a village in the West Bank, reported an incident in his village: ‘When I was a teenager, I had sexual relations with other young men from the village. One of them, a young man called M., wasn’t discreet enough and was suspected of being a gay by the villagers. Graffiti was sprayed against him in the village, and at one point he was caught by a local gang. They captured him, set him on fire, and told him it was a punishment for his sins, and a warning to others. He suffered severe burns, especially to his face’” (Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008, 9).

The complexity of the double-othering for gay Palestinian men is highlighted by the testimony of another of these interviewees: “D, a twenty year old from the West Bank said: ‘In Palestinian culture, being homosexual is not only a great offense on the part of the homosexual, but is also a disgrace to his entire family and an abomination against Islam. It is also viewed as an act against the Palestinian struggle for independence. Known homosexuals are presumed to be weak and to identify and collaborate with Israeli Jews’” (Kagan & Ben-Dor, 2008, 10). Whittaker, too, reports this suspicion of betrayal: “‘In the West Bank and Gaza, it is common knowledge that if you are homosexual you are necessarily a collaborator with Israel,’ said Shaul Gonen, of the Israeli Society for the Protection of Personal Rights. Bassin Eid, of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, explained: ‘In the Arab mindset, a person who has committed a moral offence is often assumed to be guilty of others, and it

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radiates out to the family and community. As homosexuality is seen as a crime against nature, it is not hard to link it to collaboration – a crime against nation” (Whittaker, 2011, 41). The legal recognition and protections for LGBTQ people in Israel, “while bolstering Israel’s image as a liberal-democratic society, in the Arab countries… also add grist to the idea that homosexuality is a ‘foreign’ phenomenon” (Whittaker, 2011, 42). This bolstering of Israel’s image in the eyes of the West has come to be known as ‘pinkwashing.’

There seems, nonetheless, to be some hope on the horizon. Shortly after the publication of Kagan and Ben-Dor’s report, Reuters reported that one gay Palestinian man had gained the right to asylum in Israel, perhaps most significantly in order to live with his Israeli lover. (Harrison, 2008) The case spent a good while going through the courts, however. “The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said on its website the Palestinian man had been asking for permission to live with his Israeli lover, a computer engineer in his 40s, for five years. They have been together for 8 years, the paper said.” (Harrison, 2008) It is hoped that the findings of the research currently underway by the author of this paper will add weight to the statement included in this report by “one rights group working with Palestinian gays… [that] there had been few reports of physical violence in recent years.” Gay men in Bethlehem, perhaps, may enjoy a more traditional, permissive, inclusive tolerance than the forthright othering evidenced above. What seems apparent, at least in translation, from these legal cases, however, is that men-who-have-sex-with-men who flee the Palestinian Occupied Territories seeking asylum in Israel, self-identify as ‘gay’ men, in keeping with the Western typology.

3.3. A WAY FORWARD How is such othering to be overcome, particularly in such complex circumstances as those experienced by Palestinian men-who-have-sex-with-men? Certainly not in the short-term, one would imagine. Yet in the medium term the work of Lithuanian-born Jewish philosopher and Talmudic scholar, Emmanuel Levinas, (who was based in Paris for much of his life, and wrote in French) might have bearing in Israel at least, toward promoting a more tolerant and enlightened asylum system. What influence these ideas might bring to bear in Arab countries remains to be seen. Levinas’ contribution to Western Philosophy in the late 20th century derived from his experience of the holocaust, and a profound commitment to and defence – even in the hostile atmosphere of 1960s French discourse analysis and its pronouncements of the ‘death of the subject’ – of Humanism. For Levinas, the Other becomes an ethical a priori, ‘prior to any act’, superior or prior to the Self. The mere presence of the Other, confronting us as ‘face’ (Levinas, 2006) demands of us before any response a fundamental recognition of the limits of the Same. For Levinas, the Other is an ‘alterity’ that is beyond the ‘othered’ subordinates who, by our domination of them, are actually merely the other side of the coin of ourselves – those ‘others’ are actually part of what is Same, and the true ‘alterity,’ the real Other, once recognised, is the absolutely unknowable, true source of a humility that would prompt us to treat our ‘othered’ selves with far greater respect.

In this reading, where a quite transcendent and spiritual appreciation of an altogether more complete Other places ethics before metaphysics, we can perhaps

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glimpse an argument that might hold sway with religious minded moralists in Muslim societies: an argument that stresses that wider reform and adoption of human rights, our responsibility to each other, must come before all other considerations. Whittaker’s main argument is that “sexual rights are not only a basic element of human rights but should have an integral part in moves towards Arab reform, too. Open discussion of sexuality can also bring other reform-related issues into sharper focus.” (Whittaker, 2011, 13). The main argument of this paper, too, then, would suggest that recognition of the ‘othered’ as a part of ourselves, and taking responsibility for them, presents an argument that could be instructive not just for LGBTQ experience in Muslim countries but for wider reforms in the Middle East and North Africa as a whole.

3.4. THE INTERNET AND GAY PALESTINIANS’ IN/VISIBILITY What role the internet might play in all of this also remains to be seen, but there are already signs that it is capable of having a profound effect. Those individuals selfidentifying as LGBTQ people in Middle Eastern and North African countries already have recourse to a wide network of online forums based at GayEgypt.com. Unlike the glitzy, professional web design of Gaydar, GayEgypt.com and its main ‘sister’ web address, Marrakesh.net, present the rather 1990s, home-made aesthetic of the hobbyist.

There are separate forums for each of a range of North African and Middle Eastern countries – including Palestine – and a News page that is packed with photographs and testimony of the events of the Arab Spring. Based in Bahrain and serving mostly the population of the Arabian Peninsula is the new social networking site, Ahwaa.org, which claims itself as the home of debate for LGBTQ issues in the region (LA Times).

But news specific to the ‘gay’ experience is probably best sourced from the regional webzine, GayMiddleEast.com which includes thoughtful – and often rather academic – articles as well as up-to-the-minute news reports. Principal among the online resources for self-identifying LGBTQ Palestinians, however, seems to be AlQaws.org, perhaps the most professional looking of all the websites this author has seen in the region.

Their ‘About’ page begins with the following statement: “alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society is a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning and queer (LGBTQ) Palestinian activists who work collaboratively to break down gendered and hetero-normative barriers. alQaws seeks to create an open space for all its members so that they may be engaged and energized in the struggle for equality and inclusion.” The inclusion of the ‘Q’ – questioning and queer – with the LGBT is perhaps of particular importance in this context, given the comments above about identities, and would seem to be drawn from the growing understanding, in the West, that the ‘Q’ is more common than might appear. Generally used as a label setting queeridentifying people apart from the lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT communities in the West, it is also a term that challenges the Victorian ideologies that created the LGBT identities in the first place.

Members of this Palestinian community undertook a speaking tour of the United States recently, prompting a response on Facebook from no less a luminary that Judith Butler. In her message, she picks out some of the most salient points touched upon in this paper: “As you doubtless know, many people in the LGBTQ community in the United States remain relatively ignorant about the conditions of Occupation. Your joint

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presentations made clear what the daily confrontation with Israeli military power is like, how difficult mobility is, and how important it is that any queer activism commit itself to the struggle against the Occupation - an insupportable subjugation of the Palestinian people that clearly abrogates international law and the basic precepts of equality and justice. Indeed, you made perfectly clear why allying with groups that are not clearly and actively opposed to the Occupation is impossible. At the same time, you showed us how absolutely important it is to struggle for greater freedoms for sexual minorities in Palestine at every level of society, including the movements that are resisting the Occupation and calling for Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment. In this time when Israel is actively engaged in "pinkwashing", that is, advertising its ostensible tolerance for gays and lesbians as a way of deflecting from the illegal and unconscionable subjugation of over two million Palestinians. It is quite monstrous that they seek to use us - gay, lesbian, queer, trans - in order to cast themselves as the beacon of democracy in that region, if democracy implies the equal treatment of the inhabitants of the land, regardless of nationality, origin, religion, race, and ethnicity!” (Butler, 2011).

3.5. ARAB SPRING Alongside the continuing struggle of the Palestinians, however, in other countries in the region 2011 saw substantial and fundamental change, in response to unprecedented popular upheavals. Yet some of the signs for LGBTQ equality and inclusion are not, thus far, particularly hopeful. Despite hopes to the contrary, in Tunisia, arguably the country most advanced along the route of the Arab Spring, things are really not looking good for LGBTQ legal status. Speaking to TV presenter Samir El-Wafi, described as ‘homophobic’ by regional gay news website gaymiddleeast.com, Tunisia’s new Human Rights Minister Samir Dilou attacked Tunisian ‘Gayday’ webzine and agreed “gays need ‘medical treatment.’” (Littauer, 2012) Yet the existence of Gayday, launched in Tunisia in March 2011, is itself a sign that Western sexual identities are increasingly recognized in Arab countries and that young Arabs are seeking legal freedoms to adopt and live them (Gayday, 2012).

So far, the vast majority of what has been discussed in this paper has been largely invisible in the Western media. Yet one story – of a lesbian blogger in Syria – captured the Western press in June 2011, and catapulted the issue of LGBTQ equality in Arab countries to the centre of the debate. It turned out to be quite a storm in a teacup, however, and very revealing of the Western media’s sensibilities. The ‘lesbian blogger in Syria’ turned out to be male, and American, and writing from the comfort of his desk in Scotland. One can come to many conclusions about what the story of ‘Amina,’ the ‘gay girl in Damascus,’ actually means. Her posts, and the CNN article (Davies, 2011) about gay rights in the Arab world which brought her blog to the world’s attention, seem to be concerned about the fate of LGBTQ people under would-be Arab democracies. The implication of this focus, however, seems to be that LGBTQ people “have fared better under Arab authoritarianism and that, given a choice, would prefer to be under a regime that oppresses them politically but “allows” for a minimum of sexual freedom rather than be under a [religious] government that grants them political rights and might be more socially conservative” (Mikdashi, 2011). As the LA Times put it, “While the media kerfuffle continues over the fake Syrian lesbian blogger… gays and

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lesbians in the Middle East are struggling daily to make their voices heard” (LA Times, 2011). The otherwise highly respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – founded in 1910 - who created an ‘Arab Spring’ tracker website in April 2011 to monitor developments across the region, unfortunately produces not a single return on a search for ‘gay’ or ‘lgbt’ (Carnegie, 2012).

4. Conclusion This research-in-progress paper, therefore, although it must await the results of the research before any firm conclusion, finds that the concerns of LGBTQ people in the Middle East and North Africa are historically complex, caught as they are at the nexus of colonial ‘othering’ as well as religious and moral ‘othering’ by both Christian and Islamic hetero-normativity, and that – perhaps unsurprisingly – this ‘othering’ is at its most complex and difficult in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, where the pilot for the research will take place. It is also clear that these issues, aside from some academic interest, remain largely invisible in Western media and political circles, beyond ‘pinkwashing’ attempts by Israeli commentators keen to show their liberalism in comparison to their neighbours, and the widespread Western insecurity in response to the Arab Spring that prompts fears that LGBTQ people might fare worse under Arab democracies than they did under dictatorships.

Yet the anecdotal evidence thus far seems to suggest that the legal status of LGBTQ people in these countries – often simply a colonial legacy no-one has yet seen fit to remove from the statute book – and the often noisy pronouncements of religious bigotry, belie a tolerance within the wider community – (or at least anecdotally in Bethlehem, and by inference from events on the web in parts of Tunisia) that is pragmatic, historic, and – arguably – ongoing. The hope for widespread reform that includes the legal rights and protections enjoyed by LGBTQ people in the West, in the final analysis, will depend, in a newly democratic context in Arab states, on that very tolerance.

The results of the research being undertaken in this project, bringing the voices of those directly affected into the open, promise to be especially revealing in this respect.

The role played by the burgeoning number of online resources for self-identifying LGBTQ Arab individuals in the region, and the eventual augmentation of these with the project’s own website, portraying a snapshot of (anonymised) LGBTQ voices for a more global audience, promise to make this an interesting and important research project.

References Addley, E. (20-1-2012). Three Muslim men convicted over gay hate leaflets http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/20/three-muslims-convicted-gay-hate-leaflets Afary, J. & Anderson, K. (2005). Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. London: University of Chicago Press.

BBC (2003). ‘Palestinian gays flee to Israel’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3211772.stm

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Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2011). Statement on the Queer Palestinian Activists Tour. 24th February 2011 http://www.facebook.com/notes/terrorist-assemblages/judith-butlers-statement-on-thequeer-palestinian-activists-tour/181624171880446 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/04/20/newsfrom-middle-east-and-north-africa/mh4 Conner, R. P., Sparks, H. D., and Sparks, M. (1997). Cassells Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit. London: Cassell.

Danielou, A. (1992). Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions.

Davies, C. (June 2011). ‘Will gays be 'sacrificial lambs' in Arab Spring?’ http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/05/27/gay.rights.arab.spring/ Fernández, M. (1997). ‘Sex Between Males in Mexico and Cuba: Behavioral, Philosophical, and Educational Approaches.’ Journal of Sex Research, 34(4) 417-420 Foucault, M. (1990a). History of Sexuality Vol 1: The Will To Knowledge. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1992). History of Sexuality Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1990b). History of Sexuality Vol 3: The Care of the Self. London: Penguin.

Gayday – ‘About Us’ (Viewed 9-2-2012) http://gaydaymagazine.wordpress.com/about/ Green A. (2002). ‘Gay but Not Queer: Toward a Post-Queer Study of Sexuality’ Theory and Society, 31(4) 521-545 Gupta, A. (2008). This Alien Legacy – The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism, New York: Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/12/17/alien-legacy-0 Halperin, D. (1990). One Hundred Years of Homosexuality London: Routledge.

Harrison, R. (2008). ‘Gay Palestinian gets OK to live with Israeli lover’ Reuters 25/3/08 http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/uk-palestinian-israel-gayidUKL2586865820080325 Jordans, F. (2011). ‘UN Gay Rights Protection’ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/17/ungay-rights-protection-resolution-passes-_n_879032.html Kagan, M. & Ben-Dor, A. (2008). Nowhere to run: Gay Palestinian Asylum-Seekers in Israel Tel Aviv University’s Public Interest Law Program http://www.law.tau.ac.il/Heb/_Uploads/ dbsAttachedFiles/NowheretoRun.pdf Kertbeny, Karl-Maria (1869). Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code and Its Maintenance as Paragraph 152 of the Draft of a Penal Code for the North German Confederation. Leipzig: Serbe’s Verlag http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2008/05/06/1942 (Viewed 9-2-2012) Kreps, D. (2012). Performing the Discourse of Sexuality Online: Foucault, Butler, and Videosharing on Sexual Social Networking Sites. In Warburton, S. & Hatzipanagos, S. (Eds).

Digital Identity and Social Media. London: Information Science Reference, an imprint of IGI Global.

LA Times (19-6-11). ‘An online 'Arab Spring' for region's gays and lesbians’ http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/06/arabian-peninsula-gay-lesbianonline-community-arab-islam-gulf-religion-transgender-internet.html Levinas, E. (2006)[1972]. Humanism of the Other tr Nidra Poller. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Light, B., Fletcher, G., & Adam, A., (2008). Gay men, Gaydar and the commodification of difference, Information Technology and People 21(3) 300-314 Littauer, D. (30/1/12). ‘Tunisia Human rights minister pledges to deny freedom to gays’ http://gaymiddleeast.com/news/news%20352.htm Mikdashi, M. (13-6-11). ‘Gays, Islamists and The Arab Spring: What Would A Revolutionary Do?’ http://www.indypendent.org/2011/06/13/gays-islamists-and-the-arab-spring-whatwould-a-revolutionary-do/ Mowlabocus, S. (2010). Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age London: Ashgate O'Riordan, K. & Phillips, D. (2007). Queer online Peter Lang Publishing Ostien, P. & Umaru, M. J. (2007). Changes in the Law in the Sharia States Aimed at Suppressing Social Vices. In Philip Ostien (ed.), Sharia Implementation in Northern Nigeria 1996-2006: A Sourcebook, Vol. 3 (pp. 9-75). London: Spectrum Books.

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Whittaker, B. (2011). Unspeakable Love: Gay & Lesbian Life in the Middle East 2nd ed. London: Saqi Books.

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M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 228-243.

NARRATIVES COUNTERING THE DEMOCRATISING IDEAL OF DISCOURSE IN AN ONLINE FORUM OF A HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION LOUISE POSTMA School of Education, Faculty of Education Sciences North West University, Potchefstroom, 2520, Republic of South Africa louise.postma@nwu.ac.za ANITA SEUGNET BLIGNAUT School of Continuing Teacher Education, Faculty of Education Sciences North West University, Potchefstroom, 2520, Republic of South Africa seugnet.blignaut@nwu.ac.za KAREN SWAN COLRS (Center for Online Learning, Research & Service) College of Education and Human Services University of Illinois at Springfield One University Plaza, MS BRK 377, Springfield, IL 62703 kswan@uamail.albany.edu AND ERKKI ALAN SUTINEN Department of Computer Science University of Eastern Finland Joensuu, P. O. Box 111, FIN-80101 Joensuu, Finland erkki.sutinen@cs.joensuu.fi

Abstract. This paper describes power inequalities among participants in an online forum at a higher education institution in South Africa. Critical poststructuralist theory informs the study as it investigates how hegemony influences the strategic interaction of participants. An interpretive analysis uncovered elements of a cyclic process of intensified exclusion, inequality and oppression. This took place within a virtual space which is theoretically idealized as an equalizer and promoter of freedom of speech. The process involved in the eliciting of voices is described and the interpretation of subjective accounts tells of the disillusioned experiences of a potential liberating form of technology. Instead of alleviating conflict, the potential of the online forum is subverted and intensifies the alienation of and animosity between participants. Proposals for moderation are made to change the forum to a democratic, inclusive space.

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1. Introduction Some information systems designers and theorists construct an idealistic view of effecting equality and democracy through information technology. They propose that a virtual environment supports and is designed by the principles of an open, free and democratic society (Mcguire, Kiesler, & Siegel, 1987), that it is an equal space where honest opinions can be expressed freely (Fernback, 1997; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) and that because the space is online participants are more likely to speak their minds, as they cannot experience the readers’ reactions face to face (Moor, 2007). According to (O'Sullivan & Flanagin, 2003) reduced social cues can result in greater equality in participation and a reduction of status related differences.

Other experts in the field of information technology maintain that the potential inherent in online spaces can be used in less than ideal ways. Cecez-Kecmanovic et al.

(1999) report how a university brought about organizational change by a seemingly democratic process of consulting faculty through the use of the internet and email, but the eventual decisions were made while expressed concerns were ignored. Consulting through email and the internet, therefore, only appeared democratic and gave a superficial air of managerial care.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) do not escape reproducing discourse domination by making use of internet technology. Information technology is expected to contribute to and be instrumental in the democratization of the university, through such avenues as encouraging and promoting free speech. However, the potential inherent in these technologies can create a lack of transparency, inequality and domination, all of which are not only characteristic of undemocratic management styles, but are also experienced in oppressing interactions amongst employees. The narrative countering the presumed idealism inherent in online discussions is consequently researched in the case study which is here described.

Academic members at an HEI in South Africa established an online forum to voice their opinions about issues such as the impact and expectations of socio-political change on a former mono-cultural university. One of the changes included the merging of two previous independent universities into one institution. Within the larger institution, the three campuses with their distinct and diverse student demographies, provide a fair representation of the different cultures of the country. One campus in an industrialized area became predominantly black and represented students from a diversity of ethnic groups (Zulu, Sotho, Tswana), one campus in the former apartheid homeland of Bophutatswana remained predominantly black and consisted of a large group of Tswana-speaking students, and one remained predominantly white and consisted of a majority of students whose home language is Afrikaans (a language which has developed in South Africa since 1600, mainly from Dutch origin).

Although the forum had been created on the former “white campus�, employees from the larger institution have access to it. Perspectives from opposite sides of the political spectrum appeared in the online discussions. Employees with nostalgic views about the dispensation before the governmental change to democracy (1994) represent a conservative, and often a cataclysmic view of the socio-political transformation of the university and the country. These views are declaratively stated and consequently opposed by liberal participants with pro-transformation views on the forum, while the

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more moderate voices do not have a pervasive presence on the forum. Apart from the fact that the forum eventually featured mainly opposing views, it ideally offered the opportunity for any employee, whether academic or administrative, to share opinions online. It also served as an alternative space where issues could be raised which had no channels for expression elsewhere. The opportunity to practice free speech and interact with colleagues in an equal space ideally provided unlimited potential for free expression.

This paper describes the divergent motivations, perceptions and interactions of participants in this online forum, named “Have your say.” Theory concerning the hindrances and opportunities to change this forum to a democratic space, is built from an analysis of the subjective accounts and perceptions of participants about their interactions on the forum and the offline consequences of their online participation. The objective is to understand the subjective positions of the participants as they interact, as they assume and experience interventions and stances of oppression in their presentation of issues, arguments and experiences through the forum text, and also through their reflections on their participation in interviews with the researcher.

The philosophy inherent in the interpretation and theoretical framework of critical theory is the foundation of the study and also influences the findings and hypotheses formulated at the end of the analysis. The criteria set by critical poststructuralist theory, which informs this study, stress subjectivity, emotionality and feeling (Denzin, 1999) elements which are acknowledged, advocated and regarded as prerequisites by Young (2000) in the attainment of democracy through discourse, as they describe the situatedness of participants and lead to an understanding of their positions.

The paper is divided into three sections: a discussion of the choices in the selection of participants and the considerations which determined the interviews, a presentation of the findings and proposals for the formation of a democratic online forum.

2. The Collection of Data In this section the considerations of the researchers are discussed in their choices of participants, interview style and questions, forum text and offline contextual data.

Online and offline data are incorporated in the study, as these offer a holistic picture of the participants and serve as an “expanded ethnography” (Beneito-Montagut, 2011, p.

717).

2.1. CHOICE OF THE THREAD AND THE INTERVIEWEES The research started with a textual analysis of a thread on the online forum, which a female lecturer introduced and named “Racism, the other side.” This discussion was chosen as it had a considerable number of participations (24) expressing diverse viewpoints and employing different styles of presentation, such as argumentation, relating personal experiences, informative pieces and quotations from newspapers. The participants also comprised people who regularly participated in previous forum discussions, opposing each other in declarative ways, and who had consequently formed prominent identities within the forum.

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The forum text can be viewed as a micro-context, while the interviews are part of a larger context and enable the researchers to understand the power which is exerted within and around the discourse (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak, 1996). The online data are procured by an inquiry into the text (the thread), while the offline data (interviews, observations) provide the real life context of participants. The interviews offered the opportunity for participants to recount, in their own terms, how their context influenced the production of their texts. The online and offline data eventually offer “multiple meanings and experiences” (Orgad, 2009, p. 34) that emerge in and around the discussion forum.

2.2. FORMULATION OF QUESTIONS As the content referred to in the thread and the participants’ reactions on the forum were both of intense emotional quality, the interviewer ensured that the participants did not feel exposed or pressurised to defend their interactions, but rather felt comfortable to reflect on their participation in the forum. The objective was to create a feeling of rapport (Charmaz, 2006) and support in a conversation which resembled a social encounter between the interviewer and interviewee (Packer, 2011). In this sense, the face-to-face environment was quite different from the online environment, being an opportunity for the participant to react more spontaneously than when they constructed their messages on the forum, which ultimately proved to have a competitive and moralistic context. The situations in which the participants expressed their opinions differed in spontaneity and instead of having a reader for their “performance text” (Denzin, 1999; Van Doorn, 2011), they had a face-to-face interviewer which encouraged the spontaneity of the interaction.

If certain consequences to their participations were important enough, participants were asked to relate those incidents. In this respect, the study focuses on narratives as a method of inquiry (Webster & Mertova, 2007).

The participants are referred to by pseudonyms, John, Susan, Stephen and Francois. The first three participants offered their views in the interview on the specific discussion, “Racism, the other side,” while Francois did not participate in the specific thread but his role in the forum is considered to be relevant in exploration of the research question.

3. The Analysis The structure in Figure 1 shows the strategy of interaction as the central phenomenon in this analysis, as it describes what all the categories relate to. Figure 1 indicates the motivation of a person and the consequence of interaction equally influence the interaction strategies they employ. The interaction strategies are articulated around the identity formed online, the choice of a certain style in which to interact, the perceptions formed of other participants and the role of offline institutional interventions. The motivation for forum participation was defined by a person’s expectations of the forum, personal convictions and personal history. The consequence of participation could be

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either to eventually end any interaction online or to pursue participation and to stay involved in the discourse.

Expectations of the forum

Perceptions of others

Termination of participation

Motivation

Strategy of interaction

Consequence

Convictions

Forming an online identity

Continued participation

Choice of style, ability to formulate Online and offline moderation

Figure 1. Interrelationship of the categories In the following section, the paths shown in Figure 1 are applied to the discussion of four participants’ online and offline interactions. Participants’ titles in the paragraph headings serve as an indication of the identity they constructed for themselves in the forum.

3.1. JOHN: THE CHALLENGER 3.1.1. Strategy of Interaction: Choice of Style Online Moderation John adopts a strong confrontational and declarative style in his forum participation (as seen in Table 1, which mirrors the strategy of using oppositional language (you-us, white-black) of the person he addresses and which mirrors the same strong criticism used by the person in her introductory post, titled “Racism, the other side”: With your bitter racist remarks and quasi academic references, Beth, you are opening a can of worms about your and other white colleagues’ similar ideas about us, your black colleagues. Your research and convictions do now prove that black people are of a lower cognitive ability than white and Asian people. Your stream of logic (very dubious I have to add) lead me to the conclusion that black colleagues therefore 1. have to be very thankful that we are tolerated on your white, Western piece of pride of a university, 2. are not of the same intellectual ability as white and Asian colleagues 3. must not complain about the racism and other unwanted spin-offs of the western framework of thinking.

The criticism of Beth’s “stream of logic” is indicative of John’s own online criticism of Beth’s participation. This conforms to the forum’s context of high internal

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criticism and the imposition of own norms, something which Stephen introduces in the thread “Racism the other side” in response to Beth’s post. A certain standard is expected from academic participants, which Beth fails to meet. As Stephen prefers argumentation, he especially expects his opponents to conform to his style of participation, and those who support his line of argument, such as John, also conform to the same form of criticism he practises.

3.1.2. Strategy of Interaction: Online identity Perceptions of Others Termination of Participation John also stresses his political identity as being black and defines the dominant culture of the campus as politically white. John is quite honest in the identity he creates in the forum. He sees himself as a challenger, someone who problematises life and raises issues. He also appreciates strong reactions to his views instead of polite silence which he attributes to members of the dominating culture on the campus: John:

I just went in with who I am, and I think the impression which people could now get of the identity which they could contribute to me, uhm might be one of an angry person who do not understand the whole...uhm...context of the pace, and not the traditions and culture and not the necessary respect for what is going on here, as a troublemaker, I think that identity could have been formed in the minds of some.

Researcher: And would you be able to live with that?

John: No, I am not a troublemaker, I do not see myself like that, I see myself as someone who goes about with life in a critical way, and who troubles things which people find too comfortable, because real life is not such a untroubling, deadening existence.

John equates the white culture to hegemony and regards his white colleagues, in this sense, as representatives of the hegemony he wishes to oppose. When his white colleagues did not meet his expectations by supporting his views on hegemony on the forum, John risked a negative identity attributed to him, as a troublemaker.

The analysis of the quotation which follows, offers a glimpse of the interrelatedness of the categories as shown in Figure 1. John’s offline identity corresponds to his online identity: he perceives himself as a black man in confrontation online and offline with the hegemonic character of the university. He experiences himself to be excluded in two ways, by way of his race, and by way of his opposition to hegemonic practices on and off the forum. He opposes these practices alone and runs the risk of being identified with causing trouble and creating conflict on the forum. He opposes hegemonic practices without the supportive participation of his white colleagues on the forum. His expectations of his colleagues offline are therefore not met online and he consequently ends his participation: I saw that my colleagues, who share verbally with me the stuff that I am writing, but they do not participate themselves...and I told them, how will I, who carry the mark of an outsider, although I am an insider here by virtue of my employment here, how will I as outsider ever touch people in their deepest being with the stuff I am writing, because I can be brassed off as a bitter, young black little man...not part of the dominating Afrikaans culture, culture is a dirty word, let’s say hegemony...so I started writing less,

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because I saw that personally the hegemony, which they say they do not support, the oppressive and exclusionary types of practices and declarations, that they do not write, and well, let me stop writing, let the Afrikaners [white descendants of mainly Dutch and other European settlers sic] fight among themselves...and the lone Englishman, Stephen, let him, he has time to write, I did anyway not have that much time to write.

The hesitance of John’s colleagues to support him online might be ascribed to the style of interaction he employs in his participation. He does also not seem to be critical of the style he employs.

3.1.3. Motivation Strategy of Interaction This category groups the data which relate to John’s convictions, which inform his participation in and expectations of the potential of the forum, e.g. as a rectifier of wrongs, as a mouthpiece for social justice. John describes his grounding in and experience of social justice and his sensitivity to political oppression as his motivation for protesting instances of the condoning and practice of hegemony on and off the forum: What incited me specifically, was when I saw some people, who write on the [forum sic] in a way which is not respectful to others who are not of the same religious background, of their educational level, of their social stature, mmmm yes things like that incited me and, as I came from a strict...not totally strict, good grounding in social justice, and worked and lived before I came here, could not remain quiet, it was like a red rag in front of a bull.

It is a logical deduction that John’s history of participation and his personal convictions lead to the choice of a declarative strategy. The “red rag in front of a bull” aptly describes his choice of interaction with Beth, whom he addresses in the thread.

3.2. SUSAN: THE SHARER 3.2.1. Motivation Choice of Style Consequence Susan’s style is cautious and corresponds to her motive for participation: she wants to share an experience to test whether her view of an incident which could be interpreted either as racist or rude, is acceptable. Her motivation for this specific interaction is to have clarity about her experience of the incident: Researcher: Your motive was, you just wanted to throw your story in the pool?

Susan:

Throw it in the pool and see what people say, do they experience it too? I wanted an answer, I wanted to see if there are other people who have the same experience and if they...uhm would have reacted the same as I did, and if they would have seen it differently, and what would have been their reaction, was my reaction normal or not?

Susan attributes a therapeutic role to the forum, as the reaction to her telling of the incident also supports her own interpretation. She absolutely resists expressing judgments about racism on the forum as she experiences the topic as very sensitive.

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3.2.2. Expectations of the Forum As her demeanour is being marked by cautiousness, Susan does not expect much of the forum other than being a dumping place and outlet for daily frustrations. In her opinion, great expectations of influence on a management level will only undermine the success of the forum: There are certain things [on the forum] which should be taken seriously [by management sic], but uhm does top management of the university really have time to look around on the [forum sic]? No, they don’t.

Having the status of an administrative position, she acknowledges the limited power given to people in her position for alerting management to issues of importance or danger on the forum: My opinion is, is that, when there is something really important which becomes serious, which one say, almost becomes scary, uhm then it is the administrative staff which brings those things under the attention of managers, so, yes...top management does not have the time to read [the forum sic], but I think administrative staff tell them, go and have a look, go and read quickly…but it is not the forum’s place to force decisions, yes, it is not the forum to cause decisions to be made, it will never be a success if that is what people expect [of the forum sic].

Even in her assigning a therapeutic role to the forum, one can intuit the frustration Susan has about the lack of influence the forum has on management: Susan: Researcher: Susan: Researcher: Susan:

It is literary so, stand in a soundproof room and shout…

Do you see the forum like that, as a soundproof room?

Yes Where you can only shout?

Yes, a stuffed pillow and hit it, have a pillow fight, get rid of that which...how shall I say, make you angry in a sense, uhm…make you bitter later on, things which you can not...Get it out, get it over with...

In spite of the disappointment she experiences because of management’s disregard of issues presented on the forum, Susan has not terminated her participation.

3.3. STEPHEN: THE “LIBERAL” 3.3.1. Motivation Strategy of Interaction Consequence Stephen sees the forum as a space where arguments can be practiced and tested. His style is generally informative and impersonal, except in his confrontational interaction with Beth where he employs a declarative style and uses rationalistic devices to minimalize her arguments. He sets the stage in his reaction to her comments on the thread by criticizing the quality of her arguments and evidence. His informative sociological insights are appreciated and praised by male participants (such as John and Francois). Susan does not share the appreciation and refers to Stephen’s participation as difficult to grasp. One can conclude that a community is created for the informed by Stephen and those who do not follow his arguments (like Susan) or do not construct arguments in the way he condones and prefers (like Beth), are excluded.

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Stephen does, in retrospect, view his participation as dissenting and describes it in the initial stage of his interaction on the forum as “trolling,” in which he identifies certain aspects of the university’s culture which he finds unacceptable and strange. His opinion is that the motive for using this technique was to raise participants’ consciousness, leading people to question the status quo. He views his trolling in the forum as contra-productive, leading to the intolerance of readers. He concludes that his trolling stereotyped his online identity as being disruptive and dissenting which makes him unpopular, something which he now would rather avoid: I think in some ways it was sort of slightly more a sophisticated form of trolling, really, it was at first then I pop up and say this prayer stuff is terrible, all this religion is crap, we should get rid of it and people immediately I think see that as an extremist position and you know, that coloured the rest of my commentary, and if I can do things over again, I possibly wouldn’t be as hard about, hard core about as when I started...

3.3.2. Online Identity Perceptions of Others Contributing to the negative effect of his trolling, Stephen feels that other participants view him as unmoving, someone who does not engage personally with issues and who does not have room for opinions different from his own. In contrast, he sees himself as a reasonable person, willing to listen to other people.

Stephen sees his main opponent (Beth) as someone who does not engage with opposing arguments because she does not interact, learn or change her attitude. He views her postings as voicing a populist view without any original thought of her own, which is on the one hand useful for conducting a debate, but on the other hand demonstrates her courage - and in a way her naïvety. She presents old evolutionary ideas in her explanation of the development of races and her contributions are therefore seen as academically naïve. Her presentation of cases, which can be interpreted as racist, are criticized as unconvincing because of the lack of information she offers.

Stephen criticizes another female participant as she, like Beth, unconsciously accepts a grand racist narrative. Stephen regards race as an easy explanation for her feeling of victimization because he believes that encounters with black people and the ensuing feelings of victimization are informed by racial stereotyping.

Stephen realizes that his attitude towards Beth is patronizing and he playfully refers to his treatment of her as “hermeneutic bullying.” He is aware of the power play between John, himself and Beth. He acknowledges the advantage that powerful normative positions on human rights and academic discourse allow participants such as himself, although Stephen does not seem to care that Beth is insulted in various ways as a result of their moralistic positions.

3.3.3. Expectations of the Forum Stephen’s wish was to move the consciousness of forum participants to the left. This wish concurred with his initial idealism that an online forum could bring about change.

His opinion is that serious discussions on the forum could attract management’s attention and could result in structural changes. His view at the time of the interview was that popular discussions, where everyone can make a contribution, are not seen by management as serious, and that it seems as if the influence of serious discussions on a structural level is undermined by the “democratic” characteristics of the forum. Stephen

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believes that any discussion therefore, however serious, is disregarded rendering the forum itself powerless.

3.3.4. Online and Offline Moderation Stephen feels that censorship of forum contributions by management weakens the notion of free speech. The intervention of the institution shuts conversations on emotionally uncomfortable issues down and narrows the topics to be discussed on the forum. He also considers other discussions on the forum (such as religion, hostel culture) to have racial undertones and thinks discussions on these topics might be threatened and participants in these threads prosecuted institutionally. He therefore prefers discussion not to be censored, and preferably on uncomfortable issues. He is, however, not conscious of the negative effect of his online arguments nor of his prescriptiveness.

3.4. FRANCOIS: THE “PROVOCATEUR” 3.4.1. Motivation Francois’s initial aim was to provoke debate on the forum. Religion is his first entry point of interest relative to which he starts questioning some conventions. His first arguments were directed against theologians and radical Christians: I remember the first topic I ever tackled, and that was back in 2000 I think or 2001, was this bunch of radical Christians, uh, petitioning against the advertisement of ice creams, the seven deadly sins, the Ola ice cream, the Ola people came with this commercial slogan, eating this ice cream would be like embracing the seven deadly sins, and so a bunch of people at the faculty of theology uhm, petitioned and ultimately you know, got their way, and this to me, you know, was a provocation to common sense and what we stand for as a university, because we are a university, we’re not a church, and at the time you know, the difference was unclear, because we were still the Christian university, and so the lines were fairly blurring.

Francois holds the opinion that the radical views of the participants in the forum (such as the support for creationism and a negative view of humankind) undermine the potential universal tone of the forum. These factors make the forum unfit for reasonable debate, in his opinion. He wishes for moderate voices which he thinks can make the forum more representative of the majority.

3.4.2. Choice of style Perception of others Online Identity Eventually Francois takes the position of provocateur, as he does not believe that common ground for reasoning and debate can be found. He further regards the university as a fertile field for provocation. His motive in adopting the role of provocateur is to mock and ridicule people, not foreseeing that this style provokes attacks and bad reactions. In retrospect, he does not see the provocations as the best way of interacting, and acknowledges that this type of discourse becomes emotionally challenging. He states that his ultimate aim was to antagonize and to be obnoxious, and finds the identity constructed around these two characteristics inevitable. He feels his forum ego was built as a result of the context he had to deal with, finding no alternative

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to engaging in debates which seem archaic and “insane,” and thereby exposing himself as the provocateur.

Francois finds himself in a culture which is in conflict to his own, which he views as marked by critical discourse. He sees his outsider status as fortunate and does not feel bound by the morality of respect which he considers to be exercised locally. In this sense, he uses profanity and finds reactions to it entertaining.

3.4.3. Offline and Online Moderation Consequence Francois uses the forum to declare his disassociation with the culture of the university’s residents, which he believes violates students’ rights and inhibits their emancipation and learning. He uses the forum space to charge the residential manager with passively allowing a negative culture to develop, irresponsibility and undermining the development of a culture of learning. Francois was forced to make an official apology to the residential manager on the forum and had to revise his initial apology when management regarded it as a stubborn restatement of his adversarial position and not an admission of guilt. Only his second apology remained on the forum, his other “uncomfortable” posts were deleted. As his offline relationship with the rector was of a friendly nature, Francois was amicably forced into an apology which management accepted: Yeah, the rector back then, who is Cathy, who is a close friend as well, uhm and she tried to mend the pieces, and she asked me, maybe I was the more flexible person in the whole equation I guess, but I think she also,…I think she, I wouldn’t say she emotionally blackmailed me, but, you know, there wasn’t any other solution for me…

After this intervention from the university’s management, Francois is convinced that his participation from there on has been fruitless. The power of control management has, he believes, hinders conversation and deprives participants of the opportunity for argumentation. Consequently, Francois’s participation diminished. This incident had a traumatic impact on both him and his family: You know back then it was taking a toll on my family as well, as it was the subject of conversations for a while and obviously because of the emotional affect that you derive from such a situation, so, after this episode, I saw that, well, what can you do anyway, you can use the forum as much as you want, but it is obviously controlled in many ways, and, and you can’t convince the people of your point.

In retrospect, Francois believes that his reaction to the hostel incident and the consequent action management took, was not strong enough. The position he initially took on issues did not change through his participation, and the act of participation strengthened his convictions and the directions he took over the time.

3.4.4. Personal History Online Identity Francois feels that his foreign status creates a distance between himself and the culture in which he works; he does not feel fearful about what he says on the forum. He does not care about others’ estimation of himself. He does not feel compelled by the morality of respect which he feels is exercised locally:

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I rushed to my computer and logged into the forum and obviously wrote the first that you probably read, and so I wasn’t of afraid of anyone because I was a foreigner I don’t really care about what people think about me, because anyway I am branded as a foreigner.

4. Findings The following proposals are formed, based on the analysis of the text and the interviews. Although only four participants’ data were analysed, the proposals are based on the analysis of all the data: 4.1. THE FORUM AS AGENT OF CHANGE When participants experience alienation from and dissatisfaction with the dominant culture on campus (based on their convictions, personal history, race, colour, language), they use the forum to express their discomfort with institutional practices.

If the expectations of the forum are focused on the forum as an instrument of social justice and agent of change, the forum acquires a moralistic and rationalistic character, the level of conflict becomes higher and participants find the forum does not meet their idealistic expectations. Such participants’ style become pervasively declarative and even aggressive and is frequently experienced by readers as a verbal assault. Potential forum participants are deterred from participating, as its interactions seem disrespectful and the public exposure seems potentially harmful.

If the forum is viewed as an agent of change, then the perception is that its populist and democratic character is undermining its influence on management. The fact that everyone can participate, leads to a lack of serious discussions and the lack of seriousness leads to management generally ignoring all discourse in the forum. Even those messages that are serious and voice legitimate criticism are not acknowledged.

The populist and democratic character of the forum is therefore viewed as negative.

This sentiment supports the exclusive characteristic of the forum.

4.2. NORMALISTIC AND RATIONALISTIC CHARACTER If the forum acquires a normalistic character, then participants expect the style and content of participations to meet certain formal ideal standards. Preference is given to rationalistic arguments, and relating personal experiences becomes less convincing. It also follows that the idealistic expectations of content and style lead to an intolerance of certain voices and ways of expression, and undermine the democratic potential of the forum.

If participants find that the discourse on the forum represents views they regard as disrespectful, hegemonic, non-universal and subjectivist, then they resort to rhetoric which marginalizes others’ discourse. Some participants aim to oppose and ridicule those people who practice “absurd discourse” which does not allow constructive participation. These participants eventually find the forum frustrating and terminate their interactions on it.

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4.3. EXTERNAL MODERATION If participants feel especially discriminated against by the opinions and views expressed on the forum, stronger preference is given to external moderation, and management is expected to intervene. When management approves the views which echo their own, they offer support and encouragement to those expressing them and encourage them to pursue their writing on the forum. Management interferes, however, with participants whom they regard as insensitive by forcing them to acknowledge their mistakes publicly on the forum.

4.4. THE FORUM AS PLACE TO SHARE If participants are using the forum to share an experience, their identity is not criticized and they continue their participation. The forum does not frustrate their expectations, as they do not expect it to change anything. Participants who share an experience are more sympathetically responded to by other female participants, while male participants tend to question the legitimacy of the meaning attached to the experience.

4.5. THE FORUM AS A PLACE OF GROWTH AND REFLECTION If a participant realizes that s/he has been intolerant of opposing views, then minimal credit is given to the participation of their opponents. If a participant rethinks his/her interactions with opponents at all, the only positive reflection on the opponents’ participation is that they provide an opportunity to be contradicted.

If participants view their opponents as unmoving, it can be ascribed to the fact that forum participations are read without taking the context of their opponents into account.

A misjudgement of online identity then follows.

5. Conclusion In contrast to their idealistic view and great expectations of the potential of the forum to equalize and be the rectifier of wrongs, participants who dominate the forum prove themselves to be the new oppressors, as they construct new opponents in various ways, of which moralistic condemnation forms the prevalent strategy. By labelling their online opponents as politically and socially deviant and academically inferior a new inequality is formed.

It is through sensible moderation that the forum can reach its potential as a place of growth and an agent of change. It could also invite the participation of more moderate voices, lending a balance to the forum. Certain opportunities in building an emancipatory space are discussed in the following paragraphs: 5.1. VISIBLE, IMPARTIAL AND PARTICIPATORY INTERNAL MODERATION As the current moderator is invisible, partial and intrusive, a moral incoherence (Sokolowski, 2001) is created. The moderator should be visible, should stand as a moral judge outside the debate between participants and should assume the role of a co-

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participant and not be someone whose presence is only made known by negative interventions.

5.2. NORMALISTIC AND RATIONALISTIC CHARACTER The normalistic and rationalistic character of the discourse leads participants to assume moralistic roles and eventually to become hostile, disrespectful and alienating. Sensible moderation could rectify this by acknowledging the person behind the statement. The moderator can set an example by stating the need to know more about the person and the motive for taking a certain view of issues. In addressing participants, the moderator can also employ, as a strategy of interaction, the rhetorical devices Young (2000) proposes, such as to greet and to compliment the participants, something which is absent in an online forum. The issue often takes priority and the participant is ignored by those who build the thread. The practice of greeting and complimenting acknowledges the person behind the statement and lends a humane and a positive emotional element to the discussion. By doing this, the linguistic act does not serve to be the only representation of who the person is. Readers construct online identities and these constructs might be a misrepresentation of the real identity. Participants who are not eloquent and do not express themselves in their first language have a disadvantage and might represent themselves inadequately. Instead of creating moral incoherence by assuming the moralist position of the majority of participants, the moderator must aim to bring opposing parties to a better understanding. This intervention might also serve to build reciprocal respect among participants which is one of the tenets of the ideal speech situation of Habermas (1990).

5.3. THE FORUM AS PLACE TO SHARE AND ENGAGE The moderator can encourage the sharing of personal experiences to clarify certain positions. Linguistic acts can obscure meaning and the telling of life stories might bring more understanding to specific situations (Young, 2000). The focus on debating might also be broadened to include sharing. If the practice of certain styles, such as trolling and ridiculing, serves the purpose not to engage in social interaction, then a moderator can facilitate moving participants beyond those styles. The moderator can acknowledge the linguistic act and move on by asking what motivates the specific choice of style.

In this specific case study, sensible interaction between participants is absent. This can be seen in the choice of declarative style in the majority of cases. The choice of ridicule, trolling and flaming also does not lead to meaningful and engaging discourse, although some of these might provide comic relief for likeminded readers.

Acknowledging the humour is certainly a way to start, but the motive of the participant has to be clarified for proper understanding. Linguistic acts in the forum mostly cloud less eloquent participants’ true meanings and lead to the misconstruction of online identities.

5.4. THE FORUM AS A PLACE OF GROWTH Participants can, within an inclusive, non-competitive, friendly and accepting online community, reach more. Aristotle held the view that morality cannot exist or be

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developed without a community of friends: “With friends men are more able both to think and act� (Sokolowski, 2001).

One needs friendship to grow and to realize one’s potential. The forum can offer the opportunity for people to reach something they are not able to reach themselves (such as the truth), as a friendship enables a person to attain something more (Jacquette, 2001; Sokolowski, 2001).

An acceptance of styles and divergent perceptions of situations leads to more understanding and respect. A community which supports rather than divides could also encourage more voices, and not be characterized by the declarative styles of polarized voices only.

5.5. THE FORUM AS AGENT OF CHANGE AND REFLECTION If a moderator assumes an equal, visible co-participative rather than an unequal, invisible intervening position, emancipation is possible within the forum. The participants can become motivated to become engaged and reflect on their own positions as the moderator as co-participant sets an example of amiable engagement and reflective interaction.

The role of the invisible, detached and punitive moderator is replaced by a visible, involved co-participant who co-defines and is ultimately co-responsible for the creation of a friendly, inclusive space of mutual trust.

The ideal would be that sensible moderation of the forum would change oppressive practices within the forum and also have a democratizing effect on the institution. As participation is motivated and articulated by the thought of what the space potentially can effect, such as to be a restorer of justice and to address oppressive practices, a critical consciousness is needed not to turn these ideals into oppressive practices.

Eventually a careful moderator acknowledges that the space offered by the forum belongs to and is defined by the employees. The moderator and participants are however part of a larger context of potential undemocratic demands, such as that the forum should uphold and create the ideal image of an institution. Functioning within an institution which is defined as being educational, one should hope that space is allowed for deviant, dissentient and possibly unemancipatory views. By allowing the expression of these views in an inclusive forum, they can constructively be challenged and changed.

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Denzin, N. K. (1999). Cybertalk and the method of instances. In S. Jones (Ed.), Doing internet research: critical issues and methods for examining the Net (pp. 107-125). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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COLLECTIVISM AS POTLATCH IN THE NETWORK AGE TOSHIKAZU IITAKA Faculty of Economics, Kumamoto Gakuen University Oe 2-5-1, Chuo-Ku, Kumamoto 862-8680, Japan Abstract. This paper is about collectivism in the network age. Many previous studies about network society consider collectivism to be an important factor for innovation in the network age. However, a few studies about seken focus on the negative effects of collectivism. Both approaches focus on the tradition of exchanging or giving gifts, called potlatch or gift culture, often observed in premodern communities. This tradition is considered a significant aspect for frequent networking, including innovative action on the web. This paper works to confirm this function of potlatch.

1. Introduction Many studies on the information society indicate that collectivism is becoming more prominent than individualism, and this paper adds to this research by exploring the influence of collectivism.

Studies have referred to flexible network systems in Japanese society and open source communities as good examples of innovative collectivism (Fukuyama 1995).

However, we must also analyze the negative side of collectivism, because such analysis can predict future problems in a network society and may help us effectively deal with such problems. Iitaka (2010a), for example, provides such an analysis. Iitaka’s study critically focused on the Japanese collectivism named seken, and focused on the positive role of individualism for the progress of science. The data analyzed by Iitaka (2008) suggest that individualism is necessary for network innovation and that seken has a negative impact on this innovation. Iitaka’s (2010a) analysis provides the background for the relationship between seken and innovation using networks (participation in open source projects). The data showed us that seken relates to the frequent use of networks, so we can guess that such frequent use mediates the relation between seken and network innovation.

Iitaka (2010a) estimated that Naoki Sato’s seken analysis is helpful in examining the relationship between seken and use of networks. Sato (2008) pointed out that seken contains what we call “potlatch,” a trait that makes the exchange of gifts in Japan have some magical significance, and potlatch thus motivates frequent networking among the Japanese. This paper presents the results of the surveys and gives evidence of potlatch’s effect. Section 2 will briefly discuss previous studies on collectivism. Section 3 will present the research questions created about potlatch, and Section 4 will detail the surveys employed. Finally, Section 5 will analyze the research questions. This analysis may give us insight into how a better system can be created for Internet communication.

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2. Previous Studies 2.1. CONTRAST OF SEKEN STUDY AND POSITIVE EVALUATION OF COLLECTIVISM Bell (1960), the pioneer in information society research highlighted the importance of collectivism. Collectivism in local communities is considered an important foundation of American democracy. In addition to the political influence, collectivism, according to Fukuyama (1995), has economic and technological influence. According to Fukuyama, inflexible regulation is a major barrier to innovation, which needs to use networks that enable the free flow of information. Mutual trust is a significant characteristic of collectivism and helps us avoid relying on inflexible regulations. The lack of mutual trust often results in an inflexible bureaucratic system. Despite technology that realizes flexible networks and innovation, we cannot make use of it while under the influence of an inflexible system.

Fukuyama (1995) also refers to examples of such collectivism in modern society.

This paper focuses on two of those examples: one is based on the communities of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, and the other, on Japanese collectivism.

Fukuyama indicates that people can make use of a networking system in these organizations. Lessig (2004) provides details the OSS movement and copyrights in the network age. Like Bell and Fukuyama, Lessig (2004; 2008) focuses on the role of collectivism in supporting the democratic system in a network society. According to Lessig, strict regulation of the web can be a threat not only to democracy but also to innovation. Lessig (2004) also evaluates attitudes of Japanese creators toward copyright.

He deals with the example of doujinshi-a comic in which authors often borrow characters or stories of other major comics. Lessig refers to a major Japanese event, the comic market in which many doujinshi authors come together twice a year. In addition, world famous comic authors like Akira Toriyama often describe comical characters that are parodies of other famous comics or movies. Even when there is little regulation on using another creator’s content, many Japanese manga authors are modest enough to not pirate the content. In other words, a mutual trust, or collectivism allows the creators to share useful content. In fact, the success of manga artists in Japan is a product of this cultural background. A literature review will show that previous studies on the information society have focused on the positive side of collectivism. Moreover, they often refer to Japanese culture and the OSS community’s culture as proper examples of such collectivism.

In spite of the positive evaluation of collectivism, a few Japanese researchers like Abe (1995) and Sato (2004; 2008) point out that the modern social system is based on Western individualism and the negative side of collectivism. Abe (1995) calls the negative collectivism seken. Seken is used here to mean the concrete relationships between people that we find in pre-modern communities.

Iitaka (2009) asserts that the concept of seken in previous studies is too vague and Iitaka (2009) tries to find a concrete trait of seken that clearly has a substantial influence on innovation. The trait that Iitaka (2009) focuses on is the decision-making process within Japanese organizations. According to Sato (2004), people influenced by seken tend to make important decisions based on seken. Japanese people often make a

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decision based on the general feeling among other people and not on the will of the individual. When trying to analyze the Japanese decision making process for serious matters, there is often no rationally understandable reason because the decision is not based on the will of individuals.

According to Sato and Abe, the tradition of confessing is an important aspect of modern individualism. Confession compels people to prepare for explaining the basis of their decisions to a priest who lies outside of the concrete relationship (seken).

Therefore, Iitaka (2010a) states that it is natural that Western people tend to prepare a rationally understandable motive for the important things they do. He named this the confession model. The confession model encourages people to explain to others the reason behind an important decision and the Western trait of being responsible for decision making is supposed to be based on this model.

Iitaka (2009) first pointed out the significance of the confession model for scientific progress and innovation. He compared seken’s trait with the confession model from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science. According to this line of thinking, scientific progress takes place when open critical discussion replaces an older false theory with a newer, more comprehensive one(this is called open model). In this case, the new theory has to comprehend the accurate parts of the old theory and explain more aspects than the old one. This means that the new theory has to explain why the old false theory appeared to be true. Hence, researchers must explain the reasons behind their decisions to support the old false theory from the viewpoint of the new theory when they change their opinions and support the new one. In the absence of this decision-making process, progress is theoretically impossible if we define scientific progress as the increased comprehensiveness of shared systematic information. This assures us of a strong bond between individualism and modern science, which can progress rationally.

Confession Model

Open Model of Scientific Progress

Old Self Decided to Commit a Sin Criticize Oneself

By Confession Reflection Build a New Thought Premise of Old Thought New Self

Old System Criticize Theory

by Open Discussion

In both models, people have to make the reason of decision making clear.

Discard Old False Theory Build a New Theory New System

Premise of Old Thought

Figure 1. Open Model of Scientific Progress and Confession Model.

People influenced by seken do not make their decisions according to the confession model. Their decisions are often made based on the mood of seken, so we can easily estimate that the lack of individualism and the strong influence of seken have

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an adverse effect on scientific progress and innovation. Though many studies on information societies emphasize the importance of collectivism, the problem with individualism, and the necessity of sharing information, individualism is theoretically necessary for the progress of science and innovation because of the need to share information.

2.2. SURVEYS ON COLLECTIVISM AND NETWORKING Iitaka (2008; 2009; 2010a) has tried to investigate the effects of individualism and seken on innovative action within network. This research considers the sharing of information and participation in OSS communities as innovative actions as do the other studies on information societies. These papers refer to a questionnaire survey administrated to software researchers and developers. They examine the influences of individualism and collectivism on the sharing of information and participation in OSS projects.

Many questions about collectivism are intended to measure attitudes towards decision making and concern for others to facilitate smooth discussions. Iitaka (2008) and others have defined two different collectivisms. One is named “criticism and politeness” and is the trait in which people try to be polite in order to realize smooth scientific communication, though they try to make the reason for their decision clear at the same time. The other is named “seken,” whereby people tend to not be responsible for their decision making and instead follow the general mood of seken. This variable is also composed of others-oriented attitudes and tendency to neglect the importance of explaining one’s own opinions and decisions. Furthermore, a factor analysis indicated that there is a common background factor behind these attitudes and tendencies. This variable is used in the analysis discussed in Section 3. Therefore components of this variable are similar to what is shown in Table 2 in Section 3. We also measure what is defined as the positive side of individualism in seken studies. This is called “independent” and is distinguished from “egoism.”

Iitaka (2008) investigates the relationship between individualism and collectivism, their influences on information sharing, and participation in the OSS project. Three different types of participation (starting up an OSS project, modifying documents or source codes and reporting bags) are measured in the surveys. seken

Individualism

Collectivism Criticism and Politeness

Independent

Clear Decision Making Reason Positive correlation

Information Sharing Positive relation between “seken” and OSS Participate in OSS

Negative correlation

Figure 2. Relationship between Variables.

Figure 2 shows us that the relationships between the variables of collectivism and individualism were just what the theoretical studies expected. “Seken” related

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negatively to “criticism and politeness” and “independent,” which were expected to measure the trait of clear decision making. Variables of clear decision making related positively to information sharing, which is considered to be a major foundation for innovation in the network age. However, counter-intuitive results were also received: “seken” related positively to participation in OSS projects. There is little difference between the three different kinds of participations. Figure 2 shows the three kinds of participations using single item “Participate in OSS.” Seken is expected to have a negative effect on innovation, so we have to be wary of its negative influence on innovative actions using networks such as OSS. We investigate the background of this counter intuitive relationship. When the partial correlation coefficient between “seken” and participation in OSS is controlled by the frequency of network use, there is little correlation between the two, and is thus not direct. “Seken” relates to the frequent use of the network as does participation in OSS and they seem to relate to each other. Despite this, based on the results of a multiple regression analysis, we estimated that the trait of hiding the reason of decision making itself does not have a direct influence on participation in OSS. This result shows us that we can try to avoid the negative effects of seken, because the relationship between seken’s poor decision making and innovation on the web is not direct. Though the relationship between seken and participation in OSS is indirect, this relationship may cause serious problems because the data shows that the seken’s way of decision making actually tends to be found in network development, this indirect relation therefore must be analyzed and a way to avoid negative effects needs to be identified.

Iitaka (2010a) implied that Sato’s (2008) study helps in analyzing this indirect relationship. People in Japan tend to greet each other by exchanging letters or gifts, even if they have nothing to talk about. Gifts or letters have a magical meaning. Sato (2008) pointed out that Japanese people are compelled to do it because they are excluded from seken if they do not. This practice is defined as a component of the culture of seken. Iitaka called this practice potlatch. A typical example is when, on Valentine’s Day, Japanese women often distribute chocolates to each of their male coworkers including those with whom they seldom interact. Sato (2008) says this tendency leads to Japanese heavy net users exchanging many meaningless messages.

Seken in general Seken as decision making manner Potlatch

Indirect relation

Use of network Participati on in OSS Direct relation

Figure 3. Relationship between Seken’s Components and Innovation on Web. Hence, the relationship illustrated in Figure 3 is to be expected and analyzing this relation will give us further insight into avoiding seken’s negative influence.

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3. Research Questions As the last section indicated, the effect of potlatch on networking has to be examined.

Before this can be done, the influence of seken on general net users also has to be shown because potlatch seems to affect frequency of Japanese networking generally, though Iitaka (2010a) only showed data from engineers and researchers. Next, the correlation between potlatch and seken must be analyzed to confirm the validity of the variable “potlatch.”

Two surveys were conducted. The first targeted software engineers and researchers, and the second targeted general Japanese net users. The results of the surveys were briefly introduced in Iitaka (2010b; 2011), but this paper will focus on the influence of potlatch in detail. Before we began analyzing the survey results, the following two research questions were prepared: RQ1 How does seken correlate to general net use?

RQ2 How does potlatch correlate to networking?

First, we develop hypotheses related to RQ1. To investigate seken’s overall effect, we need to check the influence of seken on general net users. Therefore, we need to verify the following hypothesis in order to confirm seken’s effect.

H1 “Seken” relates positively to the frequency of general net users use such as exchanging messages on a web site.

Second, we develop hypotheses related to RQ2. According to Sato (2008), potlatch is a component of seken. Thus, seken must include both potlatch and seken’s manner of decision making defined as a variable, “seken,” in this paper. If this assumption is correct, “potlatch” must positively relate to “seken.” If Sato’s (2008) argument is correct, the main background for a positive correlation between “seken” and networking is “potlatch.” Thus, the following hypotheses must be verified.

H2 “Potlatch” relates positively to frequency of network use.

H3 If correlation between “seken (seken’s way of decision making)” and frequent use of network is controlled by “potlatch,” there would be little correlation. (the partial correlation coefficient would be under 0.2).

Frequency of networking in H2 and H3 will be measured from multiple perspectives using the same questions as in the surveys of Iitaka (2009). In addition, new questions have been added in order to measure the frequency of participation in innovative actions described by Lessig (2008), among other.

4. Description of Surveys Before analyzing the results, this paper describes the survey process and presents the survey results. These surveys were performed twice. The first survey targeted engineers and researchers and was performed on July 22- 24, 2010. The second survey targeted general net users and was performed on September 14-15, 2011. The distribution of the surveys is as follows:

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Table 1. Gender Distribution and Age Distribution.

Female Male

Survey 1 67 (13.4%) 433 (86.6%)

Survey 2 219 (43.8%) 281 (56.2%)

10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60+

Survey 1 4 (0.8%) 52 (10.4%) 210 (42%) 188 (37.6%) 44 (8.8%) 2 (0.4%)

Survey 2 2 (0.4%) 58 (11.6%) 155 (31%) 169 (33.8%) 75 (15%) 41 (8.2%)

From Table 1, we can see that the distribution for Survey 1 is similar to that of the surveys conducted by Iitaka (2009; 2010a); for example, there are many more men than women and more people in their 30s than any other age group. The distribution of Survey 2 is slightly different. Among the sample of Survey 2, there are also more men at (56%) and more respondents were in their 40s than in any other age group.

Table 2 shows the questions used in the surveys. However, this paper uses the same groups of questions as that in Iitaka (2010a). Hence, we omit descriptions of these groups (the components of “seken” in Survey 1). However, Survey 2 tries to measure “seken” among Japanese net users in general, so Survey 2 asked two groups of questions not related to software development, but which corresponded to the questions in Survey 1 about attitudes toward software development (the questions are for measuring “seken”). The first group is “about attitudes toward criticisms and arguments” and the second group is “about attitudes toward work.”

In addition, the surveys also include new questions that examine the research questions for both surveys. We first need to measure the frequency of net use by general users. We asked questions about the frequency of exchanging messages on forums and other types of communication. We categorize this group of questions as the third group. Among the questions of the third group, Q10 and Q11 are what Lessig (2008) refers to as typical innovative actions on the web. Second, we asked questions for examining potlatch; we categorize them as the fourth group “questions about everyday life.”

Table 2. Questions.

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6

Text Not to ask anything and to pretend to agree is a good way to avoid trouble.* It is burdensome to answer the question about my work (a project).* If I do not work hard, other members will cover for me.* I think explaining my work to a nonprofessional is unproductive.* When nonprofessionals ask me many questions, it is because they do not trust me.* To explain the reason for failure in detail is irresponsible.*

Abbreviation Not to ask.

Group 1st

Burdensome.

1st

Cover for me.

1st

Unproductive to explain.

Distorted professionalism.

Explaining is irresponsible.

1st 2nd 2nd

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The damage to my reputation because of failure Too much regard 2nd is more important than damage to the project.* for reputation.

Q8 Provide information in forum or mailing list Provide business 3rd about business. information.

Q9 Ask questions in forum or mailing list about Business 3rd business. question.

Q 10 Create original image file and distribute it on Original image.

3rd web.

Q 11 Create original audio file and distribute it on Original audio.

3rd web.

Q 12 Start up OSS project** Start up OSS 3rd Q 13 Write or modify document and source code of Modify OSS 3rd OSS** Q 14 Report on the bugs etc to the OSS forum or OSS bugs 3rd mailing list** Q 15 Agreeing to the idea that to distribute chocolates Distribution of 4th on Valentine’s day is common sense for women. chocolates.

Q 16 Send many new year’s greeting cards with little Little content 4th content. greeting.

Q 17 Being worried about alienation because of not Worries about 4th sending new year’s greeting cards. not sending .

Q 18 Sending meaningless emails or letters because of Meaningless 4th worries about alienation. messages.

Q 19 Being worried about making others feel Respond 4th uncomfortable by not responding to letters or immediately. emails immediately.

Q 20 Agreeing to the idea that users have to send some Respond to online 4th response to messages on the web immediately, message even when they have nothing to write. immediately.

Q 21 Agreeing that the idea to not respond some No response 4th person’s message means criticizing or denying means denial. them. *Asked only in Survey 2, but similar correspondent questions are asked in Survey 1. **Asked only in Survey 1.

Q7

The responses to questions in Table 2 and in Iitaka (2010a) were measured on a 4 or 5point scale. The data are presented on an interval scale and analyzed using SPSS.

5. Examine Research Questions 5.1. VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY To ensure that potlatch really exists as a component of seken, we need to test the validity and reliability of “potlatch” variables, and factor analysis is the best way to achieve this. After the analysis, the reliabilities of each factor are measured. The correlation between “potlatch” and “seken,” which is created the same way as Iitaka

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(2010a), described. Here, “Seken” refers to the tendency to make decisions in an irresponsible manner by following the mood of the community and not necessarily having rationally understandable reasons.

Before we check the validity and reliability of potlatch, we have to verify that the same tendency of seken that Iitaka (2010a) confirmed. The reliabilities of seken in both surveys are measured and confirmed to be sufficient (Survey 1: = 7.61, Survey 2: = 7.16). The components of seken in Survey 1 are identical to those in Iitaka (2010a), but the latter only targeted software engineers and researchers.

Survey 2 includes general net users, so the questions in Survey 2 are slightly different from that of Survey 1, even though the former is similar to the latter and measures the same traits. The variable “seken” in Survey 2 is the average of the answers to Q1 -Q7.

Because these questions are slightly different from those in Survey 1, we have to check the validity of “seken” in Survey 2.

The validity of “seken” in Survey 2 is confirmed the same way as in Iitaka (2009), by measuring the correlation of individualism and responsibility for decision making (see Figure 2). The correlation coefficients between “seken” and these variables are negative. Though there were no clear negative correlations (-0.2 < r < -0.1), the results were statistically significant (p < .05).

In addition, the software engineers and researchers who were the targets of Survey 2 are extracted and compared with the targets of Survey 1. We cannot find any statistically significant difference between “seken” in Survey 1 and that in Survey 2 (F(1,547) = 0.318, n.s.). Therefore, this paper considers the variable “seken” to be valid in Survey 2.

Now we can try to describe “potlatch.” We try to examine the factors from the fourth group. As the first step, we perform a factor analysis on the fourth group, and we identify two different factors. One factor is estimated to be the basis for the “distribution of chocolates,”“little content greeting,”“worries about not sending,” and “sending meaningless messages.” The other is the basis for the “worries about not sending,” “meaningless messages,”“responding immediately,” “responding immediately to online messages,” and “no response means denial.” The two factors are similar to each other, but the second seems to be more influential in online communications. Thus, we call the first factor “potlatch offline,” and the second, “potlatch online.”

We thus determine the reliabilities of potlatch offline and potlatch online. The reliability of potlatch offline is considered to be sufficient (Survey 1: = 0.797, Survey 2: = 0.722). The reliability of potlatch online is also sufficient (Survey 1: = 0.85, Survey 2: = 0.845).

We then create two different variables. The first variable is the average of the answers to “distribute chocolates,” “little content greeting,” “worries about not sending” and “meaningless messages.” The second variable is the average of the answers to “worries about not sending,” “meaningless messages,” “respond immediately”, “immediate online response” and “no response means denial.”

We have to check the validity of these two variables and the best way to examine the validity is to verify the positive correlation between “seken” and both the online and offline “potlatches” because both “seken” (seken's manner of decision making) and potlatch are components of seken in its most complete meaning.

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Table 3. Correlations between potlatch and seken.

Survey 1 Mean SD Potlatch 2.465 offline Potlatch 2.615 online Seken 2.714 *** p <.001

Seken

Survey 2 Mean SD

0.571

Potlatch online 0.740***

0.524***

2.448

0.558

-

0.433***

0.352

-

-

Seken

0.448

Potlatch online 0.758***

2.548

0.485

-

0.351***

2.715

0.242

-

-

0.335***

Table 3 shows that “potlatch” correlates positively to “seken,” and thus, we verify the validity of the “potlatch” variables. In addition, skewness and kurtosis of the variables (“seken,”, “potlatch online,” and “potlatch offline”) were all between -2.0 and 2.0.

5.2. RESEARCH QUESTION 1 In order to check RQ1, we have to analyze the relationship between “seken” and general net use. The result of the analysis in Survey 1 is similar to the results found by Iitaka (2010a) and other researchers, because the targets and contents are the same (see Table 4 and Figure 3). The results of Survey 2 are more important for RQ1, because the targets of Survey 2 are actually general net users.

When we analyzed the data from Survey 1, the result was as expected. We got almost the same result as that of Iitaka (2008; 2009; 2010a). There are weak but clear positive correlations between “seken” and the frequency of participation in open source movements and networking in general.

Table 4. Correlations between “seken” and networking.

Seken(Survey1) Seken(Survey2)

Start up OSS 0.292*** -

Modify OSS 0.325*** -

Business question Seken(Survey1) 0.238*** Seken(Survey2) 0.122** * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001

OSS bugs 0.266*** Original Image 0.273*** 0.134**

Provide business information 0.268*** 0.113* Original Audio 0.307*** 0.163***

We have to analyze the results of Survey 2 in order to verify H1. From Table 4, we can see that the tendency is similar to that of the analysis of Survey 1. There is no clear positive relationship between “seken” and the frequency of networking, but there are statistically significant positive correlations. The results show that the tendency of positive relations between “seken” and networking is not particular to software developers. It is a tendency of Japanese net users in general. Even when the correlation is controlled by whether the respondents are software developers, the positive

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correlation between seken and the frequency of networking is still statistically significant. H1 is not perfectly verified, but we can get the result that may support H1.

5.3. RESEARCH QUESTION 2 As Iitaka (2010a) mentioned, “potlatch” is expected to mediate the relationship between “seken” and the frequency of networking. This will be verified by examining RQ2. H3 is especially adequate for verifying the effect of “potlatch.” We have to check if “potlatch” itself really has the effect that Sato (2008) mentioned by verifying H2.

According to H2, “potlatch” must relate positively to the frequency of networking.

Table 5. Correlations between “potlatch” and networking in Survey 1.

Start up OSS Survey1

Potlatch off line Potlatch on line Potlatch off line Potlatch on line

Survey2

0.392*** 0.304*** -

Modify OSS 0.361*** 0.305*** -

Business question 0.244*** 0.219*** 0.291*** 0.230***

Survey1

Potlatch off line Potlatch on line Survey2 Potlatch off line Potlatch on line *** p < .001

OSS bugs 0.309*** 0.245*** -

Original Image 0.312*** 0.260*** 0.170*** 0.230***

Provide business information 0.271*** 0.247*** 0.267*** 0.265*** Original Audio 0.393*** 0.329*** 0.268*** 0.264***

As Table 7 details, both “potlatch online” and “potlatch offline” relate positively to the frequency of networking in both surveys. Therefore, we can say that H2 is verified.

Next, we precisely check the influences of “potlatch online” and “potlatch offline” on the frequency of networking by using the multiple regression analysis.

R2=0.16

Distribute chocolate Little content greeting Worried about not sending.

Meaningless messages.

0.132** 0.101* 0.038n.s.

0.224***

Start up OSS

Distribute chocolate Little content greeting

R2=0.164 0.143** 0.112*

Worried about not sending.

Meaningless messages.

0.005n.s.

Original Audio

0.239*** *p<.05, **p<.01,***p<.001

Figure 4. Influence of “potlatch offline” on action on web in Survey 1.

COLLECTIVISM AS POTLATCH IN THE NETWORK AGE

Worried about not sending.

Meaningless messages.

No response is denying.

Worried about not sending.

R2=0.145

Meaningless messages.

0.076n.s.

0.275*** Respond immediately. -0.063n.s.

Start up OSS Respond to online 0.03n.s. message immediately

255

R2=0.151 0.035n.s.

0.269***

Respond immediately.

-0.018n.s. Original Audio

Respond to online -0.033n.s. message immediately No response is denying.

0.108*

0.168**

*p<.05,**p<.01,***p<.001 Figure 5. Influence of “potlatch online” on action on web in Survey 1.

Though this paper does not have enough space to describe the full analysis, typical cases are shown in Figures 4 and 5. When we review the results of the analysis, we can estimate that both “potlatch online” and “potlatch offline” have positive influences on the frequency of networking in general including innovative actions such as working with OSS and distributing original audio files because the regression functions are statistically significant(p < .001).

Though R2 tends to be higher in Survey 1, the outcome of Survey 2’s results are similar to those of Survey 1 and so we can guess that potlatch has a general influence on networking. Among the components of “potlatch online” and “potlatch offline,” “meaningless messages” consistently has a positive influence on networking.

Now we verify H3. According to H3, the relationship between “seken” and networking must be mediated by “potlatch.” In order to check H3, we have to control the correlation between “seken” and the frequency of networking by potlatch.

Table 6. Correlations between “seken” and networking controlled by “potlatch online” and “potlatch offline.”

Seken (Survey1) Seken (Survey2)

Start up OSS 0.109* -

Business question Seken (Survey1) 0.129** Seken (Survey2) 0.013n.s. *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001

Modify OSS 0.167*** -

OSS bugs 0.126** -

Original Image 0.132** 0.060n.s.

Provide business information 0.149** 0.010n.s.

Original Audio 0.103* 0.067n.s.

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When Table 6 is compared with Table 4, we can easily see that potlatch mediates the positive correlations between “seken” and networking because the correlations get weaker when they are controlled by potlatch. All controlled correlations are all under 0.2 (no relation), so we can say that H3 is verified.

After we check RQ2, we can estimate that Sato’s (2008) argument was correct.

Potlatch is an essential basis for networking in Japan; therefore, we need to investigate how to deal with potlatch if we wish to promote innovative actions on the web.

5.4. ADDITIONAL ANALYSIS From Tables 4 and 6, we can see that the correlation between collectivism and networking in Survey 1 tends to be stronger than that in Survey2. We can thus estimate that people who are proficient in networking are influenced more by collectivism in terms of innovative action using networks. This section tries to show the probability of this estimation by briefly checking the interaction between proficiency (when the respondent is a software engineer or researcher, he or she is defined as “high proficiency”) and collectivism. Therefore, we perform a two-factor ANOVA on the data from Survey 2.

Before we perform an ANOVA, the independent variables of collectivism need to be modified to simplify the analysis. Three variables of collectivism, “potlatch online,” “potlatch offline,” and “seken,” are all averages of answers to 5 point scale questions in Table 2. Therefore, scores between 1.0 and 2.5 are defined as a low score; scores between 2.5 and 3.5 are defined as a middle score; and scores over 3.5 are called high score. This analysis considers “Original Audio” in Table 2 as a typical innovative action on the web, because Lessig sometimes referred to sharing MP3 files as an example of this kind of action.

The effect of the interaction between collectivism and proficiency on innovative action using networks is then checked by an ANOVA. The analysis shows no statistically significant interaction between proficiency and “seken” (F(2,494) = 1.931, n.s.). On the contrary, significant interaction between “potlatch online” and proficiency is confirmed (F(2,494) = 3.383, p < .05) and also significant interaction between “potlatch offline” and proficiency is confirmed (F(2,494) = 3.333, p < .05).

Finally, we analyze how the interactions affect “Original Audio.”

Figure 6. Interaction between “potlatch online” and proficiency.

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We first check the “potlatch online.” Respondents with a middle score for “potlatch online” tend to create and distribute original audio, when they are in the high proficiency group (F(1,494) = 8.029, p < .01). Furthermore, respondents with high scores tend to create and distribute original audio when they are from the high proficiency group (F(1,494) = 9.590, p < .01). Among respondents with low proficiency, people with a middle score for “potlatch online” tend to create and distribute original audio more often than people with a low score for “potlatch online” (F(2,494) = 12.962, p < .001). Among respondents with high proficiency, people with a high score for “potlatch online” tend to create and distribute original audio more often than people with any other score of “potlatch online” (F(2,494) = 6.192, p < .01). The last result must be the most important, because the effect is very significant, as shown in Figure 6. Therefore, “potlatch online” may reinforce the innovative action on the web for people with high proficiency.

Figure 7. Interaction between “potlatch online” and proficiency.

We then check the “potlatch offline.” Respondents with a middle score for “potlatch offline” tend to create and distribute original audio, when they have a high proficiency (F(1,494) = 19.285, p < .01). Respondents with low proficiency tend not to create and distribute original audio, when their score for “potlatch offline” is low (F(2,494), p < .001). Further, among respondents with low proficiency, people with a low score for “potlatch offline” tend to create and distribute original audio less often than people with a middle score for “potlatch offline” (F(2,494) = 8.433, p < .001).

In my opinion, people with a high proficiency can potentially contribute more to innovation using networks than people with low proficiency. The results of this analysis may indicate that “potlatch online” in particular reinforces the effect of proficiency on innovative actions on the web. However, the analysis of the interaction may not be convincing enough, because Survey 1 is not designed to examine this kind of interaction. Therefore, a new survey that can determine the interaction between potlatch and proficiency is needed. The new survey will check the relation between proficiency and contribution to innovative actions on the web from various perspectives. I hope that the analysis in this section will help create a new and more adequate survey in order to determine this interaction.

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6. Conclusion: Influence of Potlatch This paper attempted to provide convincing data on the influence of potlatch on innovative actions using the web. The data provided supports the arguments of Sato (2008), who implied that the trait that makes people feel a magical significance in the exchange of gifts or messages is an important motive for the use of networking and for innovation on the web. We call this trait “potlatch,” and it is proven to mediate the positive correlation between seken and networking. Previous studies have indicated a negative influence of seken on innovation, so the result of this paper was important in order to identify a way to avoid such negative effects. Further research on potlatch and networking will help us find a good way of promoting innovation on the web.

References Abe, Kinya (1995)."Seken" Towa Nanika, Tokyo:Koudansha Publisher.

Bell, Daniel (1960). The End of Ideology, Illinois: The Free Press of Glencoe.

Fukuyama, Francis (1995). Trust, New York: The Free Press.

Iitaka, Toshikazu, (2008). On influence of Japanese interdependencies to open source software, Journal of Information and Media Studies, 6(1), 1-17.

Iitaka, Toshikazu (2009). Network Jidainiokeru “Kojinsyugi” to “Syuudansyugi”, doctoral dissertation, University of Tsukuba.

Iitaka, Toshikazu (2010a). Open Source, Collectivism and Japanese Society, The Conference Proceedings for CATaC2010, Murdoch University, pp. 357-371.

Iitaka, Toshikazu (2010b). On Japanese Interdependency and Innovation Using Network, The 31st Conference of JSIM. Iitaka, Toshikazu (2011). Research and Analysis on the “Potlatch” in the Open Source Community, The 28th Conference of the Japan Society of Information and Communication Research.

Lessig, Lawrence (2004). Free Culture, New York: The Penguin Press.

Lessig, Lawrence (2008). Remix, New York: The Penguin Press.

Lih, Andrew (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution, New York: Aurum Press.

Popper, Karl R. & Nagao, R. (Eds) (1994). HirakaretaSyakaiNoTetsugaku: Tokyo, MiraiSha. Raymond, Eric S. (1999). The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond, Eric S., The Cathedral and the Bazaar, O’Reilly, pp. 19-63.

Sato, Naoki (2008). Bousou Suru "Seken", Tokyo: Basilico Publisher.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 259-269.

THE LIMITATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES OF CO-CREATION IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OF ROTTERDAM LEVIEN NORDEMAN AND EVA VISSER Research Center Creating 010 Rotterdam University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract. A group of undergraduate bachelor students engaged in a project that focused on finding new co-creation methods for the public domain in Rotterdam.

This paper describes the context in which the students worked, the findings they made and the solutions they proposed. Their working process is compared with the work of the Freehouse foundation, a professional artist-run organization that focuses on empowering locals, socially and economically, by enlarging their involvement in the public domain. Subsequently the specifics of the discussed public domain, Rotterdam South, are pointed out. This is required because a very specific context is created by the combination of working class pride, lack of involved citizenship and severe social issues in the area. To conclude, the effect of the co-creative methods employed by the students and Freehouse on the redistribution of power is compared with more traditional forms of citizen participation.

1. Introduction The public domain is nowadays a widely contested territory and concept. Which spaces - both digital as non-digital - count as public and open, and which ones count as private and closed? What are the (common) values and practices that are manifested and negotiated in public space? And how does this relate to semi-public urban spaces, for instance shopping malls? We took these urgent questions as a starting point for an innovation focused learning lab, referred to as ‘I-lab’. Rotterdam University has hosted a variety of I-labs, all of which have focused in on Rotterdam and most specifically, societal issues. The students partaking in the I-lab 'Co-Creation in the Public Domain' came from several courses from both the art school Willem de Kooning Academy and the school of Communication, Media and Information Technology. The I-lab took place during the first semester of 2011-2012. Its goal was to research opportunities, limitations and different models of the public domain in addition to its relation with urban space and digital media.

The students' projects had to include co-creation as a working method or strategy, and they had to discuss, critically engage and propose innovative solutions for a specific part of the public domain. The students had to include a specific method for approaching the public domain, namely ‘co-creation’. First primarily used in the context of business and marketing strategy and customer relations, in the past ten years

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co-creation has become a widely used term to denote a new way of consumer participation. In their article ‘Co-opting Consumer competence’ (2000) Prahalad and Ramaswamy introduced the notion of incorporating consumers’ competence and experiences into organizations: the consumer takes the stage. During the 2000’s onwards the concept was widened and got intertwined with notions and practices like participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006) and crowd sourcing (Howe, 2006). But what happens when you apply co-creation to a non-commercial and non web-only environment, namely the public domain? This leads to our main question: what are the limits and possibilities of co-creation in Rotterdam? As a starting point for discussing this question, this paper will examine how students approached both concepts and how these relate to a traditional artist practice. Based on these cases, we will then focus on the peculiarities of the Rotterdam context and then critically reflect on both ‘cocreation’ and the ‘public domain’ in an urban environment.

2. Rotterdam: The public domain Before we sketch both the web-oriented approach and the artistic approach to cocreation in the public domain, we will provide some background information on the specific context, namely Rotterdam.

Rotterdam used to be described as a ‘harbour with a city’, rather than the other way around. And although the harbour has been moved bit by bit towards the North Sea coast during the last few decades, the spirit of the harbour labourers still largely coincides with the self-image of much of the inhabitants of Rotterdam. In the three decades after 1880, the population almost tripled to around 425.000 people (currently it is around 610.000). Rotterdam became the working class city of the Netherlands and its working class self image was further ingrained during the after war period of city and harbour reconstructing [‘wederopbouw’]. The reconstruction of the harbour went swiftly and in 1962 Rotterdam became the world’s largest port (this status was lost to Shanghai in 2004). The rapidly increasing mechanization of the harbour, in particular the containerization that started in the 1960s, sharply decreased the demand for labour from the 1970s onwards. At the same time, the industrial sector, also a big employer in the Rotterdam area, was either moving away or becoming more labour extensive. The shift towards the service sector and, currently, the creative industries, proved especially harsh on Rotterdam, since the average level of education has traditionally been relatively low. The economic changes resulted in increased social tensions and rising unemployment. The growth of the nationalistic and populist side of the political spectrum since 2000, which has taken place in the Netherlands as a whole, has been especially significant in Rotterdam, culminating when the right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, murdered in 2002, started his political champagne here.

Both the I-lab Zuidplein project and the Freehouse project took place in Rotterdam South. This is a very racially mixed area, with a lively atmosphere and many small businesses, with approximately 200,000 inhabitants. Rotterdam South is an area of Rotterdam whose population is comprised of relatively low educated people, low incomes and a low employment rate. Many immigrant workers settled in this area when they first came to Rotterdam, and in 1972 the locals rioted against the increasing

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amount of boarding houses in the Afrikaanderwijk. Most housing today consists of small scale rented apartment buildings with 4 to 5 floors, with apartments that are often small, with sub-par building standards, poorly isolated. Crime rates are relatively high in the neighbourhoods on the south bank and many people don’t feel comfortable being outside, in the public domain, after dark.

The problems in Rotterdam South are considered exceptional within the Netherlands. Therefore, the national government has, during the last years, set up a special programme for Rotterdam South, first called 'Pact op Zuid' ['Pact for South'] and now 'Nationaal Progamma Kwaliteitsprong Zuid' ['National Program Quality leap South'], and has invested a lot of resources into the area: housing and infrastructure have improved and policing has intensified. The aim of the program is to lift Rotterdam South to the average level of the four biggest cities in terms of education, employment and income level.

However, the top-down, hard-on-crime approach has also resulted in the curbing of civil freedoms in Rotterdam. An example is that in many places it isn't allowed anymore to form groups of more than three people, thus curbing the right to associate.

Also, Rotterdam was the first municipality in the Netherlands where the local police started to search people randomly. The ease with which the majority of the people of Rotterdam have accepted these invasive measures seems to collide with the local attitude of taking things on without further ado.

The self-image of the inhabitants of Rotterdam still reflects an emphasis on physical labour, masculinity, and a no-nonsense attitude. This attitude is best worded in the slogan of the biggest local football club, Feyenoord: ‘Actions speak louder than words’ [’Geen woorden maar daden’]. Generally speaking, people came to Rotterdam to work and to better their material circumstances; they did not come to Rotterdam to think, reflect or debate. The downside to this ‘attitude’ is that if it does not change, then the city will continue to have a poor track record when it comes to active citizenship.

The middle class, who is most likely to be politically involved, has always been relatively small, especially amongst a population where the medium level of education remains low, even though the city has several institutions for higher education, it still remains that most students move away after graduation and Rotterdam risks becoming a transitory city of people passing through. This is why the lack of a tradition of involved citizenship in Rotterdam formed an extra challenge for the co-creation projects described in this paper.

3. Co-creation and the Public Domain The conceptual framework of the I-lab consisted of the combination of two concepts: ‘co-creation’ and 'the public domain'. To appropriate both the concept of co-creation and the public domain, the students discussed the meaning and significance of those concepts during a three-day session of so-called ‘pressure cooker’ discussions, presentations, brainstorms and screenings. The students themselves then defined the public domain as following. First, the public domain consists of different layers, from less to more to ‘most’ public. Second, the public domain governed by laws. Third, scale should always be taken in account. Fourth, you can access the public domain both

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virtually and physically. Fifth and lastly, beside laws, the public domain consists of more implicit social rules or norms of behaviour. When it comes to co-creation, the students decided that first, there always has to be an initiator of this process, but sharing access to this process (co-authorship) should always be possible. Second, co-creation consists of simultaneous participation. Third, there might be unequal interests of participants. Fourth the partaking of participants is intentional. Fifth, the final result of the co-creation process is not determined in advance and sixth, the co-creation process as a whole should have added value for the participants. In their projects, students were free to choose whatever aspect of the public domain they wanted to enquire about, but co-creation was a required and added value part to the research. For the students, the definitions as described above functioned as a framework for their further investigation and design activities during the I-lab.

4. The Zuidplein Shopping Mall: A web-oriented approach to co-creation About fifteen students participated in the I-lab. They formed small groups, researching an array of different topics such as: open source recipes for drugs, the search for common denominators in the public domain of Kralingen-Crooswijk (an neighbourhood in the north of Rotterdam with an affluent and a more deprived part), and the necessity to heighten awareness amongst children about the risks of sharing personal data online. For this article we will focus on one group of students in particular, the so-called ‘Zuidplein’ group, because this group’s methods and projects give rise to comparison with the methods and projects Freehouse developed. Their project incorporated both new digital methods for co-creation as well as including a strong focus on the current problems and challenges of the (semi) public domain. The main goal of this student group was to come up with innovative and co-creative solutions to improve the social interaction between visitors of the 'Winkelcentrum Zuidplein', a large shopping mall, located in the southern part of Rotterdam. The shopping mall was built in the early 1960's, based on a rather utopian and functionalist architectural approach of an 'all in one shopping experience', consisting of an inward architecture, thereby lifting the main shopping area a few meters above the ground.

Zuidplein and the surrounding area, which holds a theatre, a pool and other facilities, functions as a city centre for the south area of Rotterdam and surrounding towns.

The students were assigned to develop a product or concept that incorporated cocreation and was aimed at, or would question the public domain. While doing their research, the students were confronted with a lot of questions regarding Zuidplein.

These questions concerned legal aspects (is it a public or a private space?), social (interaction between visitors, problems with youth), and cultural (different ethical backgrounds) issues. Their initial research strategy was to conduct interviews, based on a questionnaire, with visitors to the Zuidplein shopping mall and surrounding areas. The interviews gave the students useful insights into the visitors’ experiences with the area, as well insight into the main problems and concerns as described by the shop owners and visitors. The practice of conducting interviews is an oft-used strategy of companies and organisations wanting more information about their customers. But, based on the criteria of the co-creation process, as defined by the students themselves, this method of

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conducting interviews cannot be regarded as co-creation, because there is no clear indication of ‘co-authorship’.

By using the method of the interview, Zuidplein visitors and shop owners became ‘interviewees’ rather than participants in the co-creation process, and responded accordingly, performing as an interviewee. But the students wanted to know more about the Zuidplein visitors’ motivation to visit the mall, and their encounters while shopping.

Therefore the students decided to recreate an interface for the ubiquitous social network site Facebook on a large poster (figure 1).

Figure 1. Facebook wall in Zuidplein shopping mall They wrote down statements on the so-called 'wall' to get input from visitors. The students also provided stickers with the ‘like-button’ and felt-tip pens so visitors could express their opinions. The session took about two hours and it turned out that Facebook was well-known and recognized by visitors from different age groups and cultural backgrounds. By using the design of the Facebook wall, the students created a

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cross-cultural and recognizable environment for research. The Facebook interface created a real physical space for a certain type of mostly online performed action, namely reacting, writing and using the ‘like’ button. By bringing the Facebook interface into an actual physical space, the students created a familiar space for (semi) public interaction and co-creation. Combined with the results from the interviews, the Facebook-wall approach produced a lot of insight into the motivations to visit Zuidplein, for instance to meet acquaintances, or to relax and to experience the shopping mall’s design.

After they had completed this research phase, the students worked together to develop a concept that was aimed at improving the social interaction of the visitors. The students were interested in what ways they could use and influence emotions, to create a friendlier atmosphere in Zuidplein. The students wanted to know how Zuidplein’s cultural diverse group of visitors would react to ‘positive emotions’. So they decided to do another intervention, that they called 'love bombing'. During late night shopping, a group of five students entered the Zuidplein shopping mall, wearing heart-shaped sandwich boards, tossing heart shaped candy about through the mall and shouting ”Liefde” [”Love”]. Every few minutes the students circled small groups of visitors and invited them to participate in a so called ‘group hug’. If the visitors agreed, they were hugged by the student group. The 'love bombing' intervention was inspired by the free hugs campaign, which originated in 2004 when the Australian male, Juan Mann, was filmed giving people free hugs in the streets and in other public domains. In 2006 a film of the ‘free hugs campaign’ was uploaded on YouTube, where it gained widespread attention and went viral. The students combined this notion of giving free hugs to strangers in the public domain with a ‘interactive flash mob’, as described by Molnar (2009) where people suddenly gather in a public or semi-public space to perform a certain action, for instance, dancing, singing or freezing. Almost all visitors reacted positively to the ‘love bombing’ and a local newspaper even wrote an article on it (Daamen, 2011). The positive feedback strengthened the group and encouraged them to continue their research with new concepts for co-creation.

Both the ‘love bombing’ and the research with the Facebook wall resulted in the realization of a final concept, a technologically enhanced artificial tree that would enable people to exchanges messages and stories by using the telephone horns that dangled from the tree. The tree, partly covered with LED’s would be placed in the main square of the shopping mall, surrounded by benches. The content of the messages and stories people told would automatically be analysed by speech recognition software. Depending on the emotional content of the stories (determined by analysing certain words in the stories), the tree’s colour will turn to either green (positive) of red (negative), thereby enabling the visitors of the Zuidplein shopping mall to become ‘owner’ and feel responsible for the overall atmosphere of the shopping mall. During the course of the project, the research phase turned out for the students to be the most challenging period. The method (co-creation) as the subject (public domain) was viewed as interesting and challenging, especially for the students in digital media, who had never before worked on a project in physical space.

The Facebook wall and the ‘love bombing’ flash mob are closely related to the criteria for co-creation, which the students defined earlier in the process during the pressure cooker session. The students put small pictures of themselves on the Facebook

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wall, presenting themselves as initiators in the co-creation process, and therefore the Facebook wall enabled simultaneous participation. While visitors of the Zuidplein shopping mall were commenting and discussing the statements that were posted on the Facebook wall, they could look at each other's contributions. When comparing the process described above with the definition of co-creation mentioned in the fourth paragraph, it becomes clear that not all participants had the same interests during the initiated co-creation process. For instance, the students were focused on improving the overall ‘atmosphere’ of the shopping mall, while the intentions and goals of visitors partaking in this co-creation process might not be clear, and were no subject of enquiry.

The research or co-creation process of the students must also be understood from the perspective of the public domain, especially the urban public or semi-public space.

The students are trained to become online communication specialists; the psychical space with its social interactions and legal restrictions required them to take a different approach to co-creation and the public domain. The methods as used by the students can be described as a web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain: it uses form, language and practices based on or made popular in the World Wide Web to cocreate experiences and knowledge in collaboration with citizens in public space. The web-oriented approach is clearly visible in the so-called ‘love bombing’ strategy, which has its origins in two known practices within public space (free hugs and flash mobs) that gained widespread online popularity. Molnar stresses the importance of flash mobs because ‘they provide insight into the intersection and interaction between new communications media and physical space’ (Molnar, 2009). When we take a closer look at the web-oriented approach as conducted by the I-lab students, we can discern two methods to interfere or to change the daily routines and social norms of semi-public urban space and the public domain. The Facebook wall creates the opportunity for citizens to voice their individual opinions and concerns regarding the Zuidplein shopping mall. It stresses opinion, expression and individuality. The flash mob strategy was focused on the performance of togetherness and cross-cultural sameness; confronting visitors with what Molnar describes as the ‘taken for granted, principally middle class norms of urban public space use’ (Molnar, 2009).

One of the reasons of success of this web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain might be the average age of the inhabitants of Rotterdam. Rotterdam is the only large city in the Netherlands where the average age of its inhabitants doesn’t increase, thus going against the national trend. In 2009 it was European Youth Capital of the year. Because in a co-creation process there has to be at least an initiator and participants, it clearly helped that the context of Rotterdam provides people in both categories that can initiate and participate in the web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain. To deepen our analysis we now will look at another approach to co-creation in the public domain.

4. Freehouse: An artistic approach to co-creation in the public domain The Freehouse foundation is an organisation that helps people create their own environment. The core figure within Freehouse is professional artist Jeanne van Heeswijk. Central in her work is research into the meaning of art for the society at

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large, and how it can be best articulated and implemented. Van Heeswijk has received much recognition for her work, including the Europrix and recently the Leonore Annanberg Prize for Art and Social Change, and her work was included in the 2003 Venice Biennale. Freehouse focuses on the co-creation of the public domain, on engaging the local community with the shaping of their socio-economic surroundings, and attempts to design strategies to connect education, economy and culture with the aim of stimulation in transforming Rotterdam from a working class city into a postindustrial city. On their website they state their mission as such: ‘Freehouse ... [engages itself in] developing and transforming the public space mostly on the basis of and with the help of this public space itself... It shifts the focus from the art object to the art objective. It sees art as a tool in a process of communication, making visible and enhancing cultural production. As far as Freehouse sees it, cultural production is the whole of activities with which people express their identity and with which they attempt to come to grips with their environment’ (Van Heeswijk, 2012).

Since 2008 Freehouse has worked in the Afrikaanderwijk [Afrikaander neighbourhood] in the Feijenoord district in Rotterdam South. The central square in the neighbourhood is the Afrikaanderplein where many shops and eating places are located, and where twice a week a big market is held, where products from around the world are sold. On days the market is not held, the Afrikaanderplein was usually unused and uninviting. In Van Heeswijk’s vision, squares and markets play a very important role, that of an agora, a social, cultural and economic meeting place for people. Van Heeswijk didn't see the residents of the Afrikaanderwijk as consumers of her work, but as co-producers and experts on the neighbourhood’s needs and desires. Therefore, Freehouse took on the challenge of making the square livelier and more relevant for the surrounding neighbourhood by creating ways for artists, designers, local shops/ stall owners and other inhabitants to work together on creating new products and services.

The strategy employed by Freehouse was to carry out a series of focused small interventions, to see what resonated with the locals and would be effective to turn the Afrikaanderplein into 'De markt van morgen' [‘Tomorrow's Market’]. One example of an enthusiastically welcomed intervention was the initiative to support local women to sell home cooked food at the market of which the ingredients were bought at the market as well. After that a successful catering service was set up with the women who ran their own kitchen, the Neighbourhood Kitchen, ‘Wijkkeuken’. In order to stimulate the economical independence of the co-workers of the Wijkkeuken, who often didn't have much working experience or formal training, a co-op is currently being set up. One of the women that worked in the kitchen gained enough self-confidence to realise she had a marketable talent and started her own cake shop. Also, cloth bought on the market is being turned into garments that are sold at a shop in the neighbourhood that was started to sell local products. The garments were put on display for the neighbourhood to see during a runway show on the square, where locals were the models. The women also started a clothing repair service and have their own workshop, the 'Wijkatelier' (Van Heeswijk, 2011a &2011b).

The strategies Freehouse employed made the potential skills and knowledge of people, who often didn’t feel involved in decision making, more visible, thus empowering them. Although Jeanne van Heeswijk's was the initiator and her ideas were necessary to get Freehouse started, she, or Freehouse, did not by any means dictate, or

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even anticipate, what the end results of the initial interventions made in the socialeconomical fabric of the neighbourhood would be. They worked with people who were unaccustomed to articulating their thoughts on how they would like their neighbourhood to be; or with those who were unaccustomed to be heard by local officials and who were often economically deprived. But because people felt their input was taken seriously and their talents and possibilities were emphasized, instead of their problems being emphasized, many welcomed the Freehouse project and their political awareness grew. Freehouse worked with the locals, instead of for them (Van Heeswijk, 2011b). The city administration and the national government seem to do just the latter.

Although the intentions of the national program for Rotterdam South are good, it runs the risk of alienating the locals even further by focussing strongly on what is bad and what needs to be improved by importing resources from elsewhere, e.g., the new envisioned housing developments are often not aimed at the social climbers from the area, but at a wealthy middle class that currently doesn't live there.

The interventions initiated in the public domain of the Afrikaanderwijk by Freehouse, based on Van Heeswijk’s strategies for co-creation, are considered very successful and fortunately the city administration and other stakeholders have generally been supportive of them, and continue to help so as to enlarge and prolong this success.

Some of Freehouse’s interventions were a violation of the strict regulations that the local administration imposes on the Rotterdam public domain, but these were often exceptionally tolerated in order not to frustrate the project.

Vital to the positive impact Freehouse could have in the Afrikaanderwijk is that they were visibly present in the neighbourhood and showed commitment to it by moving into several footholds close to the Afrikaanderplein and working on their projects for a few years. This way trust was gained, enthusiasm evoked, co-creation became possible and some of their interventions had unforeseen but welcomed spin-offs that added value. Therefore, the results Freehouse obtained match the criteria for cocreation formulated by the I-lab students.

5. Comparative Analyses Given Rotterdam’s context of relatively low income, low education, high unemployment rate and the top down approach of the local government, we now can scrutinize the conditions of successful co-creation processes in the public domain in Rotterdam by analysing both the artistic and the web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain. To do this we first need to question the very notion of ‘cocreation in the public domain’ itself: given the Rotterdam context has co-creation actual more impact than other forms of participation? To take a closer look at this question we will use Sherry R. Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation (1969). Arnstein remarks that ‘there is a critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power needed to affect the outcome of the process’ (Arnstein, 1969). For Arnstein the redistribution of power is the main criterion that distinguishes the ‘empty ritual’ from real participatory practices. She states that ‘participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless. It allows the power holders to claim that all sides were considered, but

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makes it possible for only some of those sides to benefit. It maintains the status quo’ (Ibid.). Given Arnsteins perspective and based on the criteria for co-creation as described earlier, co-creation cannot have political aims because of the unequal interests of participants and because in the co-creation process the final result is not determined in advance. This creates an imbalance in power with regards to the people participating, and it lacks a clear orientation when it comes to achieving political goals.

With Arnstein’s critique in mind, the web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain as conducted by the I-lab students can be regarded as a depoliticized form of bringing people together to achieve a certain form of togetherness without a clear goal in mind. The Freehouse project stimulated people that are usually not involved in political processes to formulate their thoughts about the public domain, act upon those and lose their inhibitions about taking charge. Freehouse went beyond consulting the locals, but instead offered those that were interested a true partnership. Arnstein ranks ‘partnership’ as one of the forms of active citizens’ power in the ladder of participation of citizens in social and/or governmental institutions (Arnstein, 1969). Therefore, it can be said that the strategies Freehouse employed to achieve co-creation in the public domain had excellent results.

We can reformulate which conditions determine successful co-creation processes in the public domain in Rotterdam, when we shift our focus from the goals (of participation) of the co-creation process to the methods used, and the time, skills and resources needed to initiated and participate in the co-creation process. We will call this ‘co-creative capital’. The artistic approach to co-creation in the public domain can be successful, but it requires a considerable time investment from the initiator(s). The weboriented approach to co-creation in the public domain might have potential because it makes use of forms, languages and practices that are performed on the World Wide Web. These are instantly recognised by the participants and can therefore by readily applied to the co-creation process. The web-oriented approach is less confined to a specific physical public domain and it that sense more ‘mobile’, depending on the role and the aim of the initiators. Although the scale of the students’ project was much more limited, they managed to provoke positive responses in their target group. Both approaches have in common that the co-creative capital of initiators and participants is not only used to perform an array of co-creative practices in the public domain, for instance commenting or ‘liking’ on Facebook, organizing a runway show or working in a kitchen, but that it also enables the participants to envision for themselves how the public domain could or should look like. This means that co-creative capital for the public domain is aimed at co-creating new possibilities: different uses, practices and definitions of the public domain itself.

6. Conclusion We argued that the effectiveness of a web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain is based on its recognizably and could be considered as a potentially highly accessible method to organize participation. The concept of co-creative capital can be used to argue that both the artistic and web-oriented approach to co-creation in the public domain can not only contribute to successful co-creation, but can also help

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the participants redefining what the public domain means to them and what characteristics it should ideally have. From this perspective, new critical factors come in to play, for instance the amount of Facebook users and their connectivity might be an indicator of the potential success of co-creation processes. Therefore, it can be argued that in a city like Rotterdam with a lot of young people, a web-oriented approach to cocreation might be more effective than more traditional forms of participation in the public domain, such as town hall meetings or questionnaires. We therefore suggest further research on the relation between web-oriented co-creation processes and the physical urban public domain. We hope to continue our research in the next I-lab, starting in September 2012, which will be entirely focused on the Zuidplein mall.

References Arnstein, S. R. (1969). Ladder of Citizen Participation, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216-224.

Daamen, M. (2011, November 30). Wij brengen liefde. Havenloods, p. 15.

Heeswijk, J., van (2011a, January 11). Interview with Hugo Bongers and Eva Visser.

Heeswijk, J., van (2011b). Inclusive urban strategies for radicalising the local. On Air, 3(2), 21-26.

Heeswijk, J., van (2012). Jeanne Works. Retrieved April 27, 2012, from http://www.jeanneworks.net Howe, J. (2009). Crowdsourcing. How the power of the crowd is diving the future of business.

New York: Random House.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. New York: NYU Press.

Laar, P., van der (2000). Stad van formaat. Geschiedenis van Rotterdam in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw. Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders.

Molnรกr, V. (2009). Reframing public space through digital mobilization: Flash mobs and the futility(?) of contemporary urban youth culture. Retrieved from http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic497840.files/Molnar_Reframing-Public-Space.pdf Prahalad, C.K.& Ramaswamy, Venkatram (2000). Co-opting Consumer Competence. Harvard Bussiness Review, 78(1), 79-87. http://www.freehouse.nl

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 270-283.

BUILDING AN ONLINE COMMUNITY IN THE CONTEXT OF AN EXISTING SOCIAL NETWORK SITE CYNTHIA WITNEY, LELIA GREEN, LEESA COSTELLO Edith Cowan University 270 Joondalup Drive, Joondalup, WA 6027, Australia AND VANESSA BRADSHAW Breast Cancer Care WA 1034 Wellington Street, West Perth, WA 6005, Australia

Abstract. This paper compares the characteristics of the Purple Boot Brigade, a social network for supporters of Breast Cancer Care WA, with the characteristics of Breast Cancer Click, an online community. Whereas online communities might be conceptualised as relatively flat structures, in which membership is developed as a result of time spent online and in communication with fellow members, a social network can be seen as hierarchical, where members invite their face-toface colleagues and friends to join with them in online activities. In the case of this research it was hoped that the two environments would offer different benefits and exhibit complementary and mutually-supportive characteristics. The Purple Boot Brigade is a well-established social network site which espouses consciousness-raising, education and sponsorship to develop knowledge and awareness of breast cancer in its many forms. However, this social network had a number of drawbacks when it came to supporting people with breast cancer.

Hence it was decided to establish Breast Cancer Click as an online community where people with breast cancer could seek support. This paper interrogates the contemporary challenges of building an online community, even with the benefit of a pre-existing social network site.

1. Introduction Although online communities have a significant history, the context in which they are built and used is continuously changing. This paper examines the challenges faced in 2011 while creating an online community for people affected by breast cancer, even though there was a starting point for community recruitment in the shape of an existing breast cancer-related social network site, the Purple Boots Brigade (PBB).

The heart of the actual research project, which will only be touched upon here, centres upon the role of the professional advice-giver in an egalitarian, flat-structured, online community. The project has two stages: firstly Breast Cancer Care WA, a charitable organisation, sought to establish an online community to support people

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affected by breast cancer. This has been done, and the development of an online community with a strong research component, Breast Cancer Click (‘Click’), is the subject of this paper. Subsequently, and this is the stage of the current research, Breast Cancer Care WA seeks to create opportunities within the operation of Click to provide health-related professional advice to community members on request. While investigating and recording the provision of such advice, the research project will analyse the change of dynamics in community interactions (if any), and subsequently develop a set of guidelines to help other organisations and professionals in equivalent circumstances to introduce the services of advice-givers with minimal disruption to the effective functioning of an online community.

Breast Cancer Care WA have already had award-winning success (AMI 2008) in setting up a social network site, the Purple Boot Brigade, to support “national awareness and education” about breast cancer (PBB 2012). The PBB project, created by safety boots manufacturer Steel Blue, manufactured a product line of purple safety boots as a talking point to raise the subject of breast cancer between wearers and those with whom they interact. People joining the PBB network can test their knowledge of breast cancer in terms of signs, symptoms, risks etc as part of their engagement with the site. This equips PBB members to talk about the illness when asked questions as a result of their wearing purple safety boots. The site is not set up to provide support to people with breast cancer or those that care about them. Whereas Breast Cancer Care WA does offer such support, these services had previously been provided in person or via the phone. Aware that some people were attempting to use PBB to access support for their breast cancer journey, Breast Cancer Care WA decided to set up an online community to meet the needs of people affected by breast cancer who chose to access services online. As part of their service provision they were keen to offer professional advice from a breast care nurse experienced in counselling people with breast cancer and their families. When looking for guidelines as to how best to introduce and integrate such advice-giving, it became clear that such guidelines were yet to be written.

This is a future priority of the research discussed here.

2. Research Methodology The methodology adopted in this research combines perspectives from media and communications studies, online ethnography (‘netnography’, Kozinets 2010) and cultural studies. The media and communications studies work is mainly drawn from audience studies, including debates around the domestication of technology and technology uses, and the integration of technology into everyday domestic life (Silverstone & Hirsch 1992). It also engages with the concept of “the user as an agent in the field of technological development” (Bakardjieva 2005, p. 7). One example of how this methodology was used was when a number of people affected by breast cancer were interviewed in order to determine the kinds of features they would like included in the site to be built. This phase of the research involved identifying target users and working with them as they navigated prototypes of the Click site, interviewing these potential users about their current online behaviours, and the features they would like to

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have as part of the Click service. The research has also used surveys as a means of determining, for example, good time-slots for line chat sessions.

Online ethnography, or netnography, is the term used for the application of ethnographic principles to web-based online community research. It aims to achieve the scientific description of the customs, symbols, beliefs and practices of individual peoples and cultures. In this instance, the individuals concerned are breast cancer patients and their supporters, i.e. family, friends and carers, and the culture to be investigated is that which is developed by, and expresses, the Breast Cancer Care WA online community, Click. According to Kozinets (2010, p. 1), netnography is “a specialized form of ethnography adapted to the unique computer-mediated contingencies of today’s social worlds”. One example of the use of netnography to research an earlier online support community is HeartNET, a community for heart patients and their supporters, developed and researched by Costello (previously Bonniface), Green and others (e.g. Bonniface et al. 2005; Bonniface et al. 2006; Green & Costello 2009).

One aspect of conducting ethnographic research online is that the process of community construction leaves digital trails which are themselves accessible to analysis. As Kozinets notes, “the term persistent world has been coined to refer to the persistence of virtual worlds online, and changes made to them by users.” (2010, p. 72).

Where due ethics processes have been undertaken, and a site is clearly labelled as being for research, the development of an online community can be investigated from inception to autonomic operation. Thus, as well as using netnography to examine the details of community development, it is possible to examine the texts through which the community develops. In this way the netnographic element of the methodology shares practices with textual analysis from media and communications studies. Additionally, as indicated previously, the project also includes face to face interviews and smallnumber focus groups in the form of prospective user-gatherings.

Like cultural anthropology, netnography emphasises full participation of key researchers in the community under investigation. This element of participant observation is a cornerstone of much cultural studies research (Gray 2003, pp. 79-106).

It is through interacting with the community that the netnographer becomes a community member. Membership allows community members to feel confident that the researcher truly understands their circumstances and can accurately interpret what they say. This knowledge builds trust, and that in turn allows people to share personal and, in some cases private, feelings. The netnographer in this project, Witney, combines being a community member and a moderator. It is because of this dimension of participant observation in a community, and the trust engendered, that Click is clearly signposted as a research community. All community members are guaranteed that any identifying details about them will be obscured in materials cited from the site and through the use of pseudonyms when their posts are directly quoted.

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3. Literature Review and Definitions 3.1. SOCIAL NETWORK SITES boyd and Ellison (2007, p. 210) describe social network sites as being “web-based services that allow individuals to: (a) construct a public or semi-public profile within a set system, (b) show a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (c) see and move through their list of connections and those made with others within the site”.

This complements Lin and Lu’s (2011, p. 1152) rather more prosaic description of the ‘social networking site’ as offering “an important social platform for computermediated communication […] employing computers as a collaborative tool to accelerate group formation and escalate group scope and influence”.

The terms social networking site and social network site are often used interchangeably, or without discrimination. Whereas boyd and Ellison give Facebook as an example of a social network site (2007, p. 210), Lin and Lu (2011, p. 1152) use it as an example of a social networking site. Ahmad says: “Social network sites are also called ‘social networking sites’ to emphasize relationship initiation, often among strangers” (Ahmad 2011, p. 522). Chen argues that, in addition to using online communication to maintain existing offline networks, “An equally important function of social network sites is networking, i.e. expanding one’s online social network beyond existing offline relationships” (Chen 2011, p. 14, original emphasis). boyd and Ellison argue that there is a valuable distinction to be made between social network sites and social networking sites, however. They say that: What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal […] On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily ‘networking’ or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. (boyd & Ellison 2007, n.p.)

Naturally, what might be designed as a social network site, in which people who are already bound by strong ties offline also connect with each other online, can also be used for the purposes of networking (Harrison & Thomas 2009, p. 120), and weak ties can be transformed into strong ties through extended communication and emotional investment (Granovetter 1977; Verbrugge 1977).

Under boyd and Ellison’s definition, PBB is a social network site. As one of its originators commented, when asked about its inception and history, its initial purpose “was to encourage people to support PBB and invite their existing social networks to view educational content, purchase boots and sign up as members.” The idea had been that members would post stories about their fundraising, and about how useful it had been to have the additional knowledge and information about breast cancer. However, that was not quite how it worked out: “Being a PBB member was like a ‘badge’ to show support for people touched by breast cancer and to be an active member [in] sharing breast cancer education and information within [a person’s] own social circles” (Personal communication, email, 23/04/12). One aim of the research was to use PBB as

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a way of seeding Click, so that the online community could start life with a critical mass of members.

There is reason to believe that a social network recommendation can be an effective spur to action. Pintado (2009, pp. 123-4) conducted a test whereby he sent personal invitations to his 200 Facebook friends, inviting them to become fans of a particular website, to see if over a seven day period he could increase the number of fans on this site. The number of fans increased from 34 to 116 during this time, showing that there is considerable power in an individual’s personal recommendation and there is also the ability for a group to be formed quickly and efficiently through a social network site suggestion. However, a recommendation is not sufficient to guarantee engagement, and Pintado’s experiment was not designed to develop a community on the site he recommended.

3.2. ONLINE COMMUNITIES While a community used to be thought of as a group of people who live in a specific geographical location, and have similar local concerns, this is no longer the case.

Instead, the definition more commonly used focuses upon shared social exchange where “people come together to get and give information or support, to learn, or to find company” (Preece 2001, p. 347). Online communities formed soon after the inception of the internet and burgeoned with the development of the World Wide Web. Whereas the first social network site is judged by boyd and Ellison (2007) to have started in 1997, with the launch of SixDegrees.com, the formally-recognisable online community was already well into its second decade at that point. Rheingold’s book about The Virtual Community, first published in 1993, contains his definition of how a digital environment is transformed into an online community, where people feel they belong.

He said online communities are “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyber space” (Rheingold 2000, p. xx).

This definition makes it clear that it is time, intensity and commitment that underpin the transformation of a group of interacting people into an online community.

As social network sites and communities mature, however, so the differences between them seem less. Further, Rheingold’s definition of community operates independently of any overarching digital environment: a community can form anywhere that ‘personal relationships’ are built. Pintado’s view (2009, p.116) is that social networks offer “a platform for building online communities of people who share interests and activities and who may also want to explore other’s interests and activities”. Sethi (2010) combines the terms to talk about how “Online social communities have made it easier for us to connect to, and stay in touch with people who are either important to us or share similar experiences to ours, or both”.

The two terms, ‘social network site’ and ‘online community’, are not interchangeable however, and this implies a continuing differentiation. One perceived difference is with the separate structures of these online environments. Social network sites assume the primary role of importing existing relationships into the online environment, whereas online communities assume the building of new relationships online. Such relationships would usually form around a shared community of interest

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which might be geographical, demographical or topical (Hagel & Armstrong 1997). In the case of Click, the shared interest is in the topic of breast cancer, although there is also a demographical dimension since most people diagnosed with breast cancer (although not all) are women, and most of the women engaging with Click are also in their middle years.

Essentially, the purposely-built online community begins as a flat social structure which seeks to attract members and encourage them to interact. Status online reflects a community member’s engagement with the community, rather than a person’s status offline. It is not dependent upon who invites whom to join, or related to the people with whom someone interacts, but is instead driven by time and investment in communitymembership (Lampel & Bhalla 2007). Apart from moderators, the online community starts off with all members joining as newbies and collaboratively developing a shared sense of belonging. Community lies in communication and in company: in the construction of shared social capital.

3.3. SOCIAL CAPITAL There has been intensive interest in what makes a network or community thrive (Howard, 2010). Arguello et al (2006) contend that the survival of an online community depends on whether or not it provides the benefits and experiences that members seek.

Posts and emails are still the main means through which members communicate online, although the use of voice over internet protocol networks is growing. Either way, to gain any benefit from this medium, the member must attract others to respond to, and share, a conversation. Members’ responsiveness to posts and blogs is an essential element of any successful online community. This assumes a critical mass of engaged members which can prove a challenge in the early stages of building a community: people will only interact if there are others to engage with, and others only engage when they see people interacting.

According to Putnam (2000) the core idea of social capital theory is that social aggregates have value; that social capital is the connection among individuals, along with the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. This is sometimes called civic virtue or a ‘public good’ (Pruijt 2002, p. 109), but it is only powerful when embedded in a network of reciprocal relations (Putnam 2000, p. 19; Wellman et al 2001; Best & Kruger 2006). While online community members create social capital through their interactions; the more frequent the interactions, the more likely it is that a norm of generalised reciprocity and trust will be produced. Putnam describes this as “I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road”, and argues that this trust in others “lubricates social life” (2000, p. 21).

There are two different dimensions to social capital, notes Putnam (2000, p. 23), bridging or inclusive and bonding or exclusive. Within communities and networks alike, the social dynamics are such that some people are invited into a conversation through a bridge that links them with others who are well-established members, while other people are excluded by the close bonds that already connect those who are involved, and the cost of acquiring sufficient social capital to gain entry to the communicating circle. Networks can help in these circumstances since being linked

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with someone who already has membership in a social setting can serve as an introduction, and allow the sharing of established bona fides on the part of the newcomer.

The internet is increasingly a site for the building and use of social capital, through networks and communities. This became particularly evident in the week of March 13, 2010, when Facebook overtook Google as the most visited website on the internet (Dougherty, 2010). At this point, arguably, the desire of people to use the internet for social and networking purposes overtook the desire of people to use the internet as a place to search for information or do business.

4. Case Study: Using a Social Network Site to Seed an Online Community The Purple Boot Brigade (PBB) was set up in 2007 as a social network site by Breast Cancer Care WA (previously Breast Cancer Foundation of Western Australia) in conjunction with Steel Blue, a leading safety footwear manufacturer also based in Western Australia. As part of their sponsorship of the site, Steel Blue began making purple boots for workers who were willing to pay a few extra dollars to support people with breast cancer. Community take-up was so enthusiastic that an initial ambition to raise $30,000 (AMI 2008) was dwarfed by the eventual income generated for Breast Cancer Care WA, currently around $500,000 (Personal communication, email 30/04/12), leading Steel Blue to introduce men’s and women’s boots in an everyday boot style as well as the originally-planned men’s and women’s safety boots. With the slogan “these boots were made for talking”, purchasers were encouraged to use the PBB website to educate themselves and others about the facts of breast cancer, and to work with people in their networks to overcome ignorance and misinformation. The exceptional outcomes of this association between Breast Cancer Care WA and Steel Blue resulted in the two organisations receiving a 2008 Australian Marketing Institute Award for Excellence in the Sponsorship category (AMI 2008).

As is the case with most social network sites, PBB recruits new members through the active engagement and recommendation of existing members. It also benefits from the support of Steel Blue, and hotlinks are provided from Steel Blue’s website and from the Breast Cancer Care WA website. People who wish to become members of PBB apply via completion of an online form and providing a personal profile. Administrative sign-off is required before a person is accepted as a member. Membership of the site is available to everyone apart from people who might wish to promote or sell merchandise or services on the site. Once membership is established there are facilities to email other members and to post a message on the individual’s ‘my page’. Members can post videos and photos, and some start blogs on the site. They can also ‘friend’ other PBB members. The site is regularly monitored by an administrator in order to avoid offensive content or language, sales advertisements, copyright infringements and to determine if the content posted is relevant to the PBB’s general theme: The objective of the Purple Boot Brigade is to support education and awareness programs across the nation, with our first project supporting the great work of Breast Cancer Care WA (formerly the Breast Cancer Foundation of WA) as they target youth to make the younger generation breast aware. With the number of

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women being diagnosed with breast cancer increasing from one-in-eleven to one-innine over recent years, the need for breast awareness education from a young age is vital. (PBB 2012, ‘Our story’)

The PBB site is very much focused on awareness-raising to support the work of Breast Cancer Care WA and the majority of blog posts, or ‘boot stories’ as they are known, refer to the members’ reasons for purchasing their purple boots, or their experiences at fund-raising events. The following from the Our Story section of the site is one example.

My mum recently passed away following tragic accident. The first thing that springs to all our minds when thinking of our mum’s particularly wonderful style is her Purple Boots - which she’d only had for a few short months - but already the whole town knew about them. Now I have found where she got them I will recruit all my friends and family to the Purple Boot Brigade! What a fabulous way to support a fabulous cause! (PBB post, 2009).

The PBB site has a Breast IQ section featuring a breast awareness quiz which asks questions about breast cancer signs and symptoms. The score achieved by a member is an indication of whether or not they know as much as they think they do about breast cancer. The site also advertises fundraising events with a purple theme, which raise money for Breast Cancer Care WA. Purple Bra Day is the major community-based fundraiser for the organisation with men as well as women joining in the fun (Perth Now 2010). While Breast Cancer Care WA provides a range of counselling and other support service for people with breast cancer, PBB was not designed to reach out to patients and their friends and family in that way. Even so, there were occasions when people experiencing breast cancer would post to the PBB site and be supported through referral to the phone and in-person services provided by Breast Cancer Care WA. Ultimately, it became a Breast Cancer Care WA priority to build a community in which people affected by breast cancer could support each other, leading to the blueprint for Click. The hope was that the existing network on the PBB site would seed the online community, kick-starting the kind of engagement and exchange required to fulfil Rheingold’s recipe for a community: enough people carrying on public discussions long enough, and with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships (2000, p. xx, paraphrase). Click was developed in 2011 to be “A new Australian support site for those with breast cancer and their supporters, friends, family and carers. This is a place for you to connect with others, share your experiences in a safe environment and know you are not alone” (Click 2012). The site was engineered from the ground up by the same IT professional who had designed PBB, to be compatible with the existing social network. People who knew their way around the PBB site would also feel at home on Click.

Since Click was established to provide a support site for people who have been touched by breast cancer, to help them gain advice and share support with others in the same situation, the site is a closed or ‘members only’ website, and provides resources and information about breast health. Membership is restricted to people who have had a diagnosis of breast cancer and their supporters or health professionals. As well as creating a community to offer online support, Click was set up to be a research website, funded through an Australian Research Council Linkage partnership between Breast

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Cancer Care WA, supported by sponsors Steel Blue, and Edith Cowan University. One aim of the research was to build an open-entry, non-hierarchical community around the experience of breast cancer and then establish guidelines for integrating professional information-giving from a health specialist such as a breast care nurse or counsellor.

This meant that the researchers hoped to build a vibrant and viable community prior to introducing the services of an online health professional. In this way the research could establish whether the communications dynamics had been altered as a result of introducing an expert into a flat-structured online community.

To become a Click member, an applicant must provide key demographic details i.e. name, postcode, birth date, and select the type of membership category they belong to: a person with breast cancer, or a supporter; and indicate where they heard about Click. The prospective member must also read and agree to the terms and conditions of the site and the code of conduct; read the research project details, and consent to participate in the research project. People are also asked to provide a current indication of their distress level, where 0 equals nil distress and 10 equals extreme distress. This latter indicator gathers data which will eventually help assess whether communicating in an online community helps with some of fear and uncertainty sometimes associated with experiencing breast cancer. In the early stages of the community every membership application was independently checked prior to the member being accepted, but this procedure meant that there was a gap between application and enrolment and a number of would-be members never returned to the site. Eventually it was decided that people needed to be able to access the site at the point of need and desire, and anyone completing the online requirements was accepted immediately, the view being that ‘undesirables’ could be handled after the event. A ‘captcha’ system for authenticating human engagement with the website was deferred pending more funding.

The Click website was launched as a trial in April 2011 to ensure all the features worked correctly and to allow the Click team, which consisted of the netnographer, research supervisors and the web designer, to become familiar with the site and their respective roles. PBB members were emailed an invitation to join Click at the beginning of May 2011. The indications of activity (below) demonstrate that people joining the site was necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure the development of community. The jump in membership in May was associated with a flurry of posts, page views, comments and blog entries, but these then tailed off to a low point in September until the introduction of live chat sessions in October 2011.

BUILDING AN ONLINE COMMUNITY IN THE CONTEXT OF AN EXISTING SNS 279

Table 1. Month by month Click membership activity

New members Sign-ins

Apr 11

May 11

Jun 11

Jul 11

Aug 11

Sep 11

Oct 11

Nov 11

Dec 11

Jan 12

Feb 12

Mar 12

11

80

22

17

9

10

15

17

9

4

12

21

913

216

103

177

90

158

337

266

255

315

313

9788

5088

2571

3931

3119

5448

6265

6698

6748

13139

10799

464

127

59

119

66

104

159

92

75

148

170

Page views 3715 Posts Comments 78

36

24

22

20

66

128

82

86

73

101

Blog entries

176

3

4

2

1

3

2

4

3

3

11

Forum posts

34

10

2

6

2

12

6

1

4

15

9

Click membership started with an influx of members over the first month, as a result of the publicity on the PBB network, but the majority of members did not post anything on the site. Those that did post were generally responded to by the Click team members, rather than by community members who had personal knowledge of the concerns and problems faced by people with breast cancer and their families. This situation continued for the first four months of operation, and whilst new members joined the site they were not active posters.

In October, the research team decided to instigate live chat sessions or ‘Click Chat’ on a fortnightly basis, at a specific, advertised time, to be hosted by members of the Click research team. While the numbers of members joining the Click Chat sessions increased from two members (plus the Click team) at the first Click Chat, to anywhere between six and ten members (plus the Click team) at more recent Click Chat sessions, the effect of bringing members together in a specific time and place was galvanising.

The live chats were originally scheduled to run for a three hour period, but they occasionally over-ran, and during that time members were able to engage in Rheingold’s (2000, p. xx) “public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling” to create personal relationships with each other and with the Click team. As a result of these live chats, members who have joined in the sessions have carried over their chat engagement to post on the forums, and to message those they met during chat.

The Click Chat session is now weekly, in response to member requests, and there are burgeoning signs of community growth.

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Table 2. PBB and Click membership at the end of the first 11 months of each websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s operation

Table 3. Click membership categories

the Click Member Type 250

200

Person with a breast cancer diagnosis

194

Supporters 150 Health Professional 100

50

Click Team Members BCCWA staff

32 9

0

4

3

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5. Discussions and Conclusions While the authors had some success around the construction and operation of online communities in the mid-2000s (e.g. Bonniface et al. 2005, Green 2010, pp. 152-8), the take-up of Click proved problematic, even though it started with the benefit of a thriving social network as a lead-in source through which to recruit Click members. An online community needs to offer more than the potential of ‘community’ to thrive. It needs to offer a real opportunity for connection, and to demonstrate the potential benefits of community membership. Notwithstanding the influx of members as a result of PBB-based recruitment, it was hard for the site to present a vibrant and viable community to first time users without there being regular online activity. In the absence of a critical mass of online engagement, what community there was withered away.

The circuit breaker in this dynamic was the introduction of Click Chat. These live chat sessions might seem to be undermining the benefits of a self-sustaining online community in that they are staged ‘events’ unlike those that might seem ordinarily associated with the everyday operation of a digital community. In particular, they tie up personnel resources in terms of team members, who make themselves available for Click Chat, which occurs outside normal working hours. Such events do have precedents in terms of the everyday, however. They operate as a get-together, or a coffee with friends. Such events are very much a part of everyday communities and are a major means through which people meet new acquaintances and possibly develop new friendships.

For those involved, and as the data indicate, there is no question that Click is now a success. As envisioned, membership combines access to both a supportive network of people with experience of breast cancer and also to caring moderators and health care professionals. Click needed more than awareness and an unmet need to get started, however. It needed to prove itself to potential members before people would trust it enough to share their thoughts and feelings in a way that builds community.

Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Breast Cancer Care WA, Steel Blue and the Australian Research Council who provided the funding for this research.

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LIPDUBS AS AN INSTRUMENT TO OVERCOME INVISIBILITY IN THE MASS-MEDIA A study of four enthusiastic cases recorded in Quebec, USA, Catalonia and the Basque Country TXEMA RAMIREZ DE LA PISCINA Assistant Professor of Journalism University of the Basque Country (UPV / EHU).

Abstract. This paper summarizes the principal conclusions of an investigation into lipdub as an instrument used by social movements in order to get more social influence. Since its creation in 2006, the phenomenon of lipdubs has increased considerably. This research presents an analytical model for this type of video, providing general data, figures about the number of participants, characteristics of the song used and information about the profile of the audience. The work highlights the main hypothetical features and components of a good lipdub. Four videos with high impact on Youtube are analyzed. This work claims that, at this time, a good lipdub can be a crucial tool for social movements in order to overcome the invisibility with which the mass-media often punishes any expression which challenges mainstream tendencies.

1. Introduction Nice to watch, easy to spread and fun to make. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the lipdub, a modern communication phenomenon which has been increasing unstoppably since its birth in 2006. Lipdub or lip-dub is a type of music video that has had an impressive development on the net thanks to websites like Youtube or Vimeo. Maybe, as happens with all events that become popular on the Internet, sooner or later, their popularity may decrease, making them 'out of fashion'. But now lipdub is the newest. This tag triumphs in our society, the newest. Although it seems extremely simple, everything labelled as such continues creating a particular atmosphere that becomes attractive to important sectors of public opinion. Even though the phenomenon is becoming unfashionable, it is evident that its value needs to be examined. That is the reason for the following questions: What exactly is a lipdub? Where do they come from? What are they for?

How are they made? Who makes them?

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2. Main Objectives, Methodology, Hypothesis and Research Questions The main objective of this research is to investigate the principal features of one good lipdub and determine the keys to getting a successful video on the net. Apart from that, the researcher wants to study the values which are socialised through this phenomenon and check if the quality is a sine quanon condition in order to get the maximum audience. Also, the work has explored the profile of the typical audience of this kind of music video.

The methodology used in this work is based on an analysis chart made by the author which summarizes the principal features of each lipdub, all of them brought together in three main categories: General figures: Title, link, upload date, total hits and hits per day, duration, languages used in the video, opinions (I like it / I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like it), category, main tags, number of commentaries, socialised values.

Participants: Number (approximately), profile, authors of the video, reasons for the video.

Song: Name, author, kind of music and language used.

Taking into account this model of analysis, the research began from the following hypothesis and research questions: 1. Hypothesis The success of phenomena like lipdub on the net is due to the growing desire for wider social sectors to create new spaces in the public sphere, using new instruments of social communication in which the subjects are common citizens and not political, social, cultural, artistic or sporting elite.

R.Q. What is the profile of the protagonists of these videos?

R.Q. When do these videos get their "peak" audience?

2nd Hypothesis Lipdubs are part of the artistic expressions socialized by post modernity and, as result of that, they often glorify hedonism, individual freedom and the myth of eternal youth.

R.Q. What are the most shared values transmitted through this type of communicative expression?

R.Q. What kind of music is most used?

R.Q. Which category prevails?

R.Q. What are the languages most used?

3rd Hypothesis.

More and more different social groups use new instruments such as lipdub in order to raise public awareness or social agitation. This kind of method is specifically appropriate to try and catch the attention of young people or other sectors which are traditionally reluctant to be convinced by conventional methods.

R.Q. What is the profile of the audience?

4th. Hypothesis.

The Internet audience rewards the quality in the production of this type of artistic expression.

R.Q. What is the image definition?

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R.Q. What is the production quality (technical resources used, the work of actors, lighting, photography, etc.)?

RQ What type of complementary information does it supply (subtitles, credits at the end)?

2. Origin and Definition of lipdub The term lipdub, in fact, means lip dubbing. It is a type of video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing to make a music video. It is made by filming individuals or a group of people lip synching while listening to a song or any recorded audio then dubbing over it in post editing with the original audio of the song. Lipdubs can be made in a single unedited shot (shot filmmaking) that often travels through different rooms and situations within a building in a travelling style using a steadicam. Lipdubs have become popular with the advent of mass participatory video content sites like Youtube or Vimeo. While the video is being recorded, the attention goes from person to person, one by one. Lipdub needs the complicity of extras (non-professional actors or participants), in order to project an image of strength and cohesion. Successful videos require methodical preparation, for example thinking in advance about all possible camera movements. The people involved in the video recording sing in playback or lip sync. They hear the song performed on a portable audio player. The quality of the audio they are hearing does not matter, because the original song will be inserted later in the final edition of the video. The fashion of the phenomenon is, undoubtedly, a consequence of the development of the net. All kinds of groups, associations, universities and companies have used this instrument to spread their ideas or concerns throughout the world. Teamwork is essential in this kind of music video, and an atmosphere of complicity and entertainment among participants is crucial. Teamwork, creativity and a participatory environment are the necessary tools.

References to current actors or criticisms of popular people are very common in lipdubs. The Spice Girls Wannabe's (1996) video clip is considered a pioneer in lipdub (in fact, today it would not be considered as lipdub). In truth, the term lipdub was born on 14th December 2006. The author of the term, Jakob Lodwick (founder of Vimeo, the video social network) created the lip dubbing expression through the edition of this video: Lip Dubbing: Endless Dream. He explained its occurrence as the following: I walked around with a song playing in my headphones, and recorded myself singing. When I got home I opened it in iMovie and added an MP3 of the actual song, and synchronized it with my video. Is there a name for this? If not, I suggest "lip dubbing".

3. Viral Culture As post-modern French philosopher Lipovetsky Guillen said (Lipovetsky, Hernandez, & Lopez, 2002; Lipovetsky, Vinyoli, & Pendanx, 1995), mass consumption has revealed an entirely new way where new forms of socialization and individualization appear in all their fullness and this formula breaks the prevailing pattern which was the

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model in the XVII and XVIII Centuries. We live in a flexible society, where the needs of stimulation, sex, the human factor, spontaneity, humour, sympathy are essential.

Hedonism is everywhere. Personal liberation, relaxation, freedom of expression, honesty ... will become the new gods. Society wants to live here and now. The logic of individualism dominates everything, and the right to personal development has been made sacred by human beings. Narcissistic values are the mirror in which our society tries to finds its authentic model. We have gone from personal individualism to a total individualistic pattern.

Nowadays, communication has become a god, often without paying attention to the content. Express something by the simple fact of doing so. As Lipovetsky says, “we live in an empty age” (Lipovetsky et al., 2002). The flow of messages is constant but communication speed makes sustainable social conscience difficult. Nothing is permanent, everything is ephemeral. Fascination with new technologies, fashion seduction... the new attraction fascinates all sectors of society and classes. Hedonism has become the backbone of modern culture.

In that context, short, fun audio-visual messages have a good chance of being successful, because citizens are continuously looking for “something different”. That is more evident nowadays when the technological paradigm is king. Websites like Youtube or Vimeo are the perfect speakers for new phenomena such as this. Lipdubs use viral marketing and viral culture's techniques (Del Pino, 2008). Lipdubs manage social networks in order to sell products or spread services, ideas and messages. Their echo is expanded like a virus. The Internet hugely amplifies the extension of their influence. If the video is good, it could get a great audience in a short time. A large number of videos often get enormous audiences thanks to “word of mouth” communication. Even this way -in certain contexts- could be more effective than the mass-media. But is all this really something new? Or are we reinventing the wheel?

In a strict sense, it is not possible to say that this phenomenon is something new. In fact, this occurrence has a connection with important artistic trends, like performance art, which began developing in the decade of the 60s, in the USA and in Europe (especially in France). On the other hand, experts coincide in saying that the real pioneers of performance art were really troubadours and poets of the Middle Ages (although that term was not used then). Later, in the 60’s and 70's, an important group of artists like Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and others such as Joan Jonas, used this label performance art- to denote this expression. During these decades of the 20th century, political left wing and artistic movements used a wide range of these techniques in their urban actions or in their concerts, in order to express their emotions and statements.

They were the voice of the artistic currents of the vanguard. In those performances, improvisation, creativity and collective participation were fundamental.

The mechanisms used in viral marketing and flashmob influence the expansion of lipdubs. These techniques have been used since ancient times in the world of advertising. Mattelart said that “these strategies are old stories” (Mattelart, 2000). This is very clear and evident in the case of viral marketing. In short, they are old techniques applied to new media (Del Pino, 2008). The viral effect adds novelty and grandeur to the phenomenon. Alfonso Mendiz says more (Mendiz Noguero, 2007, p. 57): Novelty is not a consequence of media formats; it’s a result of the use of them. Anyway, according to the majority of authors, it is evident that to transform the essence of a message its

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forms need to be revolutionized (in the words of Del Pinop, revolucionar en las formas para evolucionar en los fondos) Viral marketing creates viral culture. Technique is very useful and valid in several contexts, not only in the business world, but also among social movements. Thanks to the Internet, the cost to individual broadcasters is very low and allows communication person to person (one to one). Furthermore, it is necessary to add the “sneezer effect”.

This term is used by Godin to illustrate the contagion effect provoked by someone when he or she sneezes (Godin, 2001, 25-31). People have the tendency to assimilate new ideas quickly. It is not only that: people fascinated by this media behave more actively in the expansion of new ideas. They participate in the communication process as volunteers, both actively and spontaneously. Sneezer is a key element; it is essential for viral culture. In Godin’s opinion, these people are the heart of the idea-virus because the complicity and identification with new ideas is the key to the seduction process and to the articulation of them. There are different kinds of sneezer (Del Pino, 2008: 68): experts, sellers, collectors, obsessive fans and amateurs. All of them are necessary for viral dissemination of ideas. Godin distinguishes only two categories of sneezer: promiscuous and powerful. The first are always open to new ideas, the dissemination of virus. In fact, they are not opinion makers; their opinion is not always taken into account, but they are very present on social networks. Sometimes they can work in exchange for money. In fact, multinational companies such as Amazon, for example, have hired promiscuous sneezers to expand its ideas through the net. Powerful sneezers, however, are pure opinion makers. They are very creative people but do not work in exchange for money. As a result, their credibility and objectivity are very highly regarded in important circles, and obviously, their opinion has a greater impact on society.

4. Features and Components The following reflection is attributed to Federico Fellini: A good video is like a good wine. It lasts just a moment, leaves a taste of glory in your mouth and creates and recreates the same experience with each new taster. The quotation varies depending on its user. Some authors put film in place of video. Anyway, it is, without a doubt, an interesting thought.

It is now time to introduce another point about the necessary features and components of a good lipdub. Summarizing the principal contributions made by experts (Bosch Dols, 2011, Johnson 2011, Del Pino, 2007) we could say that there are seven essential features necessary for making a successful lipdub. These characteristics need another seven key components in order to achieve the main goal: social influence.

Features and components are not so directly related as the table below could suggest.

However, it is advisable, when editing a lipdub, to conveniently mix these components, always thinking about the following features:

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Features Cost free

Click friendly

Gratifies the user

Spontaneous

Authentic

Participatory

Fun

Appropriate duration

Wide social difusion

Components Specific, powerful and imaginative message

Enthusiastic activists

Well Known song

Adequate direction

Minimum technical resources

Successfull Lipdub Figure 1. Features and components of successful lipdub It is important to state clearly at the outset: Making a good lipdub means hard work, involves a lot of people with minimum technical knowledge and, above all, engages people who are very clear about the message to be sent. Let us now analyze the principal features of a good lipdub: free cost, click friendly, gratifies the user, spontaneous, authentic, participatory and fun.

Cost free. The message transmitted by lipdub must be free of charge. Otherwise, the receiver would reject it. The opposite is impossible to understand today in the era of the Internet. This culture is widespread around the world and it would be ridiculous to try to oppose it. Nowadays, the most usual and normal thing is to create free e-mail accounts, using free software and enjoying other free services on the Internet; access to the net is even free in more and more public spaces. So it would be totally crazy to think that somebody would be prepared to pay to download a lipdub.

Click friendly. Complex systems are destined to failure. Today, being on the net means being fast and easy. Time is crucial. Websites, audio files, videos, posts, must be easy to download. It is the same with lipdubs. Easy download ensures rapid extension of the message. It would be totally unthinkable to force somebody to fill in a form or a survey in order to view a video. Click friendly means few mouse clicks to achieve fast and fun results.

Gratifies the user. Crisis, negative messages and bad news are all too present today in the media, so the user of the net really appreciates pleasant sensations, good moments and relaxed atmospheres. Citizens rarely hear / read / see this kind of message in the mass media. Therefore they are necessary messages which draw a smile or generate

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complicity. Users of the Internet also value debate issues, reflections to share in groups; easy messages to carry around and easy messages to transmit fast. New technology users do not accept passive attitudes.

Spontaneous. At least that is the image which a good lipdub should transmit. It is like, suddenly, someone had a brilliant idea and he or she has been able to put it on a video; or as if someone took a video camera and began recording images spontaneously; or if someone convinced a group of friends to sing a well known song in playback. This is not true. In spite of the image of freshness suggesting the contrary, there is normally a lot of hard, quality work behind a good lipdub. An example of spontaneity was the first lipdub done by Jakob Lodwick, a self-recorded playback of the song Flagpole sitta.

Authentic. People who are involved in the video, who are performing, who are making the video have to spread an image of truthfulness, because the sensation of authenticity is essential for the success of the message. For that, it is decisive that participants are very clear about what exactly is the main purpose of what they are doing, what is the key of their â&#x20AC;&#x153;performed madness". In short, they need to believe in the project. Otherwise, too much time and a lot of energy and resources will be wasted.

And today, nobody likes wasting time.

Participatory. Today, the average number of participants in a lipdub is around 200 people. This is a lot of people. A project like this requires a large number of accomplices. But, although quantity is important, more important are the people's mood and attitude. While the project is being carried out the harmony and good feeling among participants are essential.

Fun. People who are taking part in the lipdub have to enjoy the situation. This atmosphere has to be reflected in a natural way, without over-acting. If, during the recording, participants feel good, if they are really having fun, it is much easier to achieve the main objective. Then, the circle is completed.

These characteristics are not sufficient to create an attractive and successful lipdub. Based on these features, it is necessary to consider the following components in order to achieve the perfect video. These are the following: Specific, powerful and imaginative message, enthusiastic activists, well-known song, adequate direction, a minimum of technical resources, appropriate duration and wide social diffusion.

Specific, powerful and imaginative message. Before making the lipdub, it is essential to know what it is being made for, what are the objectives and values being spread, who is the potential target group and how far the promoters want to go with this initiative. The message should be clear, not complex, without needing additional interpretation. As mentioned above, current society requires everything â&#x20AC;&#x153;here and nowâ&#x20AC;?.

At the same time, the message should be powerful and clear. If it is vague, indirect or difficult to interpret, the possibilities of achieving success are ridiculous. Imagination, creativity, humour, intrigue, irony and complicity are also welcome. In addition, if the message is emotive and touches the heart, all the better to achieve the aim much more easily. The rules used in advertising are also useful here. The leaders of the project could have a brilliant idea, but if they do not do the work with the correct format, the result could be a complete disaster. It is essential to respect the features and the idiosyncrasy of the promoter group.

Enthusiastic activists. This type of video is not improvised. Although when people view the video a sensation improvisation is transmitted, the reality is quite different. It

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is necessary to have the complicity of an enthusiastic activist group, a team ready to work hard; people able to share ideas, human beings who believe in concrete projects, in teamwork. Making a good lipdub means a lot of meetings and many contacts. Voluntary work is normally the rule as there is no money for activists. They are citizens working in favour of an idea or in defence of a specific project. For that reason, it is very important that the pioneers are actually a sneezer team, a group of entrepreneurs, and enthusiastic people capable of overcoming difficulties and beating possible setbacks.

Well-known song. The song selection is determinant. The song is the driver of the video, the axis around which everything pivots. It is a crucial piece. The song will mark the profile of the target group and will define the seduction strategy of the audience. If the selected song is well known, the possibilities of seducing a massive audience will be greater. The songs used in lipdubs are usually very popular. The objective is to invite the viewer to take part in the performance, to feel the same sensations that the participants are experiencing in the video. The most used styles are pop and rock, but they are not the only ones. The minimum characteristics of a successful song should be the following: well-known, great rhythm, appropriate melody and a chorus which is easy to remember. With these components, success will be easier to obtain.

Adequate direction. There are important differences among lipdubs. Nowadays there are companies dedicated to producing lipdubs professionally. In spite of the majority of the work being voluntary, usually the technical resources are insufficient.

Every lipdub needs a director with a minimum experience in the audiovisual world. At least, the director should have some knowledge of art, image, sound, edition and photography. The team manager has many tasks to guide and coordinate related with pre-production, production and post-production of the film. The director cannot manage everything. Each task needs one or more people responsible for it. The director has to reach a consensus on a timeline with the rest of the work team. This is very helpful and necessary.

Minimum technical resources. A minimum of technical resources is essential to make a lipdub. For example a steadicam, a portable music system and video-editing programme. The last two can be very cheap or free. The first one, however, is more expensive. Steadicam is a brand of camera-stabilizing-mount for motion picture cameras that mechanically isolates it from the operator's movement, allowing for a smooth shot even when moving quickly over an uneven surface. During the recording of the video, the direction team has to carry with them the portable music system, close to the steadicam. While the song plays, participants walk through the designated itinerary and practice lip sync as best they can, following the lyrics of the song. In theory, lipdubs have to be done in a single unedited shot (shot filmmaking), but this requirement is often not fulfilled. It is advisable to record the video at least twice. In this way, any problems in the performance can be corrected later. After recording, a video editing process is required.

Appropriate duration. As Fellini said, a good video lasts just a moment, but it has to be a 'taste of glory' moment. How can we measure that moment? The most successful lipdubs on the net last between three and ten minutes. There are exceptions, of course; videos that last more than 10 minutes, but they are special cases. It is much more difficult for those videos to maintain the attention of the receivers. It is very easy to escape from them.

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Wide social diffusion. The work does not finish with the editing of the lipdub, or with the uploading of it to Youtube or Vimeo. After that, the communication plan to make the video visible on the Internet begins. All the techniques related with the promotion of the product, connected with the tools of web 2.0 and with e-marketing are essential. That supposes a variety of tasks; for example the immediate uploading of the video to the organizer's website, a strategy designed to place the lipdub in a good position thanks to the correct use of the net's browsers, the use of social networks to improve the relevance of the video until it achieves the category of favourite lipdub. On the other hand, there are other interesting techniques available: the sending of a press release about the work to the media interested in it because the issue is close to them, or the massive distribution via e-mail of a short message announcing the uploading of the video to potentially interested organizations and/or individuals.

5. Analysed lipdubs Having outlined the features and components of a good lipdub, we can now examine four examples that, for different reasons, obtained significant notoriety on the Internet.

Mainly, the criteria used for this selection were three: the impact on the net (visits on Youtube), number of participants in the video and a nationwide viewpoint (the most successful lipdub in the Basque Country until 2012,). This research has only taken into account videos categorized as lipdub. That means that other kind of expressions, like flashmobs, or music-videos havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been examined here because they were outside our main objectives, and because that research would suppose the implementation of a different methodology.

The research provides two different data in terms of number of visits: total visits and visits per day. The study was carried out on 5th January 2012. In accordance with the criteria mentioned above, the four lipdubs analyzed were as follows: Table 1. Analysed lipdubs Lipdub

Origin

Uploaded on

Visits per day

Participants

Duration

10/09/2009

Total visits (05/01/12) 9,757,435

I Gotta Feeling (UQAM) The Grand Rapids LipdubIndependència Lipdub Kukutza

Quebec

11,520

172

04:55

USA

26/05/2011

4,467,630

19,944

5000

09:49

Catalonia

27/10/2010

1,613,387

3,709

5,771

06:36

Basque Country

02/07/2011

199,130

1,065

Hundreds

10:15

5.1. I GOTTA FEELING (UQAM) This work systematizes the analysis through the use of a chart for all cases. Some videos showed more data than others due to the editors putting their statistics on-line.

Thanks to that, it was possible to know, for example, the profile of receivers and which were the most popular areas where the video was watched. The proposed chart of

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analysis shows different data gathered in four sections: general data, participants, features of the song and other interesting information. The first analyzed lipdub is I gotta Feeling (UQAM). It was the most visited lipdub on Youtube on 5th January 2012.

Table 2. I Gotta Feeling

Address Uploaded on Total visits (05/01/2012) Visits per day Duration Language(s) used by the author of the video.

Received assessments Category Tags Number of comments Transmitted values Number of participants Profile of participants Author of the video Reasons for the video Name Author / group Type of music Language used in the song

I Gotta Feeling (UQAM) General data http://www.Youtube.com/watch?v=-zcOFN_VBVo 10/09/2009 9,757,435 11,520 04:55 French and English Likes 41,382 (97.53%). Dislikes 1045 (2.46%) Entertainment lip dub UQAM, initiations, Black eyed peas, I gotta feeling, Quebec 19,495 Enjoy the night, enjoy life Participants 172 Young students, girls and boys, around 20 years of age.

Students of Communication at UQAM Université du Québec à Montréal “Initiation week” (New Students of Communication) Song I gotta feeling.

The Black Eyed Peas Pop English, except a little bit in French at the end

The video was made on 10th September, 2009. 172 new young students of the Faculty of Communication at UQAM (Université du Quebec a Montreal) took part in the shoot. The reason was to show “Initiation week”. The filmmakers, Luc-Olivier Cloutier and Marie- Eve Hébert, needed two hours and fifteen minutes to make the video recording. It is unknown how much time was necessary for the preparation of the video. At the beginning of 2012, the video had registered almost ten million visits only on Youtube. The key reasons for that could be the following: the frenetic rhythm of a well-known song, the implication of the participants, and especially the young, informal and festive atmosphere which surrounds the whole event. The resources used are not especially relevant. The lip sync of the participants is not particularly good, but what is very evident is the desire of all of them to enjoy the party. In other University lipdubs, the presence of teachers was discreet. Here if it does exist it is not noticeable. Most of the protagonists are young girls. It is evident that during the recording of video all the participants had a great time.

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The chosen song makes everything easier. The Black Eyed Peas is a very famous US group that plays American hip-hop, rap, R & B, pop and electronic music. They formed in Los Angeles in 1995 and have won six Grammy awards. In two years, the official music video of the song I Gotta Feeling had 107 million visits on Youtube (January 2012). When the students of Quebec uploaded their work the official video was not on Youtube. It was uploaded on 22nd December 2009. Therefore, it can be said that the students of UQAM were pioneers. The official video is not a lipdub; it is a music video, made with good resources.

Turning to the lipdub, the video of the students of UQAM had 19,495 comments on 5th January 2012. They were written in English and French. The majority were in favour, but not all. The language often marked the profile of the comments. In spite of the original song being in English, at the end the participants repeated the song's chorus (that tonight’s gonna be a good night), but in French (que cette soir sera une bonne soirée). It seems like some of the Anglo-Saxon population of Canada disliked this detail. In fact this was the origin of some xenophobic and/or sexist comments (in English and in French), such as the following: French Canadian? Even worse; Ugh, French Canadians; Les Québécois, vous êtes incroyables!! Les Francophones d'Afrique saluent ceux d'Amérique!; There are some hot women at this University. Too bad they're French. These comments reveal that the identity of Quebec is difficult to accept for some Anglo-Saxon people. Other comments criticise the defence of alcohol consumption that the video players seem to make. This lipdub had an important echo both on social networks and in the Canadian media (Anglophone and Francophone).

Even a year later the video continued generating reports in the media. The stars of The Black Eyes Peas also praised the work done by the students of UQAM. 5.2. THE GRAND RAPIDS This Lipdub is a landmark in the history of this kind of video. At the beginning of 2012, it held the record for number of visits per day (nearly 20,000). Both the resources used and the participation were really extraordinary. It was made on 22nd May 2011 and four days later was uploaded on Youtube. In spite of holding the “New World Record” due to, according to their data, more than 5,000 people taking part in the video recording, in fact this is not totally exact. The World Records Academy recognizes this title as belonging to the Catalonian video Lipdub Independència in which 5,771 people took part. However, all the details of The Gran Rapids video are very impressive and well done. Table 3 shows the principal data.

Grand Rapids is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It has a population of around 200,000. Kent County is the administrative centre. Newsweek weekly magazine published on its website a report titled Grand Rapids dying city. The report illustrated the theoretical decline of the city based on data extracted from the census. The work made the citizens’ blood boil. It provoked a lot of negative comments and criticism on social networks and mobilized social actors against it. The lipdub was the result of this anger. Aware of the sensation created by the report, Newsweek had to give explanations.

They said that, in fact, it was not a work done by the magazine’s journalists, but by professionals of the website mainstreet.com. However, Newsweek accepted the publication of the report based on the agreement that they had with the mentioned

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website. In any case, they accepted that the published work did not really reflect the atmosphere of the city. They even applauded the initiative and declared they were in love with the lipdub.

Table 3. The Grand Rapids

Address Uploaded on Total visits (05/01/2012) Visits per day Duration Language(s) used by the author of the video.

Received assessments Category Tags Number of comments Transmitted values Number of participants Profile of participants Author of the video Reasons for the video Name Author / Group Type of music Language used in the song

The Grand Rapids General data http://www.Youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI 26/05/2011 4,467,430 19,944 09:49 English Likes 36,861 98.07(%). Dislikes: 722 (1,92%) Entertainment Lipdub, grand rapids, Michigan, rob bliss 10,718 Grand Rapids city's pride, fun, community, energy Participants 5000 more or less All kinds of people.

Thousands of citizens under the direction of Rob Bliss.

A report in Newsweek entitled Grand Rapids dying city Song American Pie Don McLean Folk-Rock English

The whole city was mobilized by this lipdub, from the mayor of the town to the fire brigade. The city centre came to a standstill for some hours. Throughout the video, different cultural and sports groups show their complicity with the initiative, making very visual demonstrations and fashionable performances. The aim of the project was to demonstrate that Gran Rapids was synonymous with fun and energy and not a dying city. Four factors were the key in this work: the implication of the participants, the art direction and production of the video, the selection of a well-known song and the support of important sponsors.

The implication of the participants. This factor was crucial. It was the necessary spark to light the fuse. People were upset with the report and wanted to express their opinion. But they considered their reaction carefully. They did not want to organize a reactive answer; they preferred a pro-active reaction, charged with positive energy.

Today our society is overcome with negative energy, therefore the receivers are grateful

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for messages with other connotations. Thanks to this lipdub, now we know that in this US state, apart from the lakes of Detroit and Michigan, there is a city called Grand Rapids, a creative and active town capable of reaction against a misinformed report.

Without a doubt, this initiative helped to put this city on the map.

Art direction and production. The director, producer and editor of this video were Rob Bliss, Scott Erickson and SEF video company respectively. Their experience and leadership was essential for the success of the project. They created a professional, high quality product. This impetus was determinant in explaining the echo that the lipdub immediately achieved, as much in social media as in other areas of the Internet. The credits which appear at the end of the video illustrate the special awareness and dedication invested in the idea.

The selected song. American Pie was listed as the No. 5 song on the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) project Songs of the Century. American Pie is Don McLean's magnum opus and his signature song. He wrote it in 1971 and it tells the story of The Day the Music Died (on 3rd February 1959, as a result of a plane crash, the rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper -Jiles Perry Richardson, Jr- died). The parallelism between the hypothetical dying city and the theoretical the Day the Music Died was sufficient to ignite the spark of creativity. All experts agree the song is one of the major musical contributions to U.S. cultural heritage.

Support of sponsors. The long list of sponsors that appears at the end of the video illustrates the scandal provoked by the Newsweek report. The initiative had a budget of $40.000 (31.492 euro) money which was collected thanks to the voluntary work of a wide group of people. There were different levels among the sponsors: platinum, gold, silver and bronze. The money collected made it possible to use important material resources. An example of this were the final images taken by a helicopter.

All these factors explain the success of the lipdub. Another piece of information is that only 1.92% disliked the video. That is the lowest rate among all lipdubs analyzed in this work. Important U.S. media such as NBC, ABC television broadcasters (among others), many newspapers and radio stations covered the echo achieved by the video in the social media. In all cases, the media highlighted the work of director Rob Bliss.

5. 3. LIPDUB - INDEPENDĂ&#x2C6;NCIA - WORLD RECORD (OFFICIAL) This is a lipdub in favour of independence for Catalonian countries. It was recorded on 24th October 2010; in the city of Vic. According to World Records Academy, this video has the title of most people participating in a lipdub due to the 5,771 people who took part in the recording. However, it is necessary to say that the Guinness Book of Records does not recognize the record yet. Apart from the controversy about official records, it is evident that it is a very populous and colourful video which had a very large and fast impact on the Internet.

The promoters of this initiative were varied. More than 30 different groups were among the promoters: separatist groups, small and medium companies, sports organizations, cultural groups and institutions like the Council of Vic, for example. The videoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main objective was to spread around the world the idea that Catalan countries have the right to self-determination and, therefore, they aspire to being an independent

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state. This statement was based on the peculiarities that characterize these countries like their common idiosyncrasy, language, and own culture. The recording in the narrow streets of the medieval part of Vic was complex. The organization was vital and the volunteers needed to overcome the technical difficulties. Nevertheless, the organizers were not happy with the first recording and made a second one. The director and editor were Daniel Feixas and Santi Hausmann respectively. The screenwriter and stage manager was Giorgina Rieradevall i Tarres. Here is the chart with the principal data: Table4. Lipdub-Independència

Address Uploaded on Total visits (05/01/2012) Visits per day Duration Language(s) used by the author of the video.

Received assessments Category Tags Number of comments Transmitted values

Number of participants Profile of participants Author of the video Reasons for the video Name Author / Group Type of music Language used in the song

Lipdub-Independència - world record (official) General data http://www.Youtube.com/watch?v=muTMLuGWrp8&feature=feedlik 27/10/2010 1,613,387 3,709 06:36 Catalan, Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Basque, Galician and Asturian (Bable).

Likes: 9,324 (87.10%). Dislikes: 1,379 (12.90%) News and politics Independència, lipdub per la independència, world record, catalunya, vic 65,129 Need of Independence for Catalonian countries, national identity, collectivism, defence of own language, tradition, energy.

Participants 5,771 Wide age range Different collectives in favour of Catalonian independence.

Right to self-determination for Catalonian countries.

Song La flama (The flame) Obrint pas Rock Catalan

The keys of this successful lipdub would be the following: enthusiasm of all participants, the significant choreography promoting the Catalonian identity, the frenetic rhythm imposed by the well-known song, the special effort made to get the maximum expansion of the video using multilingual subtitles and the quality of the product.

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Enthusiasm. All the 5,771 participants who took part in the recording worked with great enthusiasm, from the first minute until the end. That is very palpable in the video.

Identity. During the video several significant elements of the Catalan culture like gegants, gegantons, castellers, sardanistes, capgrossos, bastoners,â&#x20AC;Ś appear among separatist symbols. The festive atmosphere contributes to the natural manifestation of emotions and feelings. As several comments say, in some moments, the video could make one's hair stand on end. At the end, all the participants join together in the main square of Vic, to sing Els Segadors, the national hymn of Catalonia while they demand Independence.

The song. The symbiosis between the objective of the lipdub and the message of the song is perfect. The rhythm imposed by the song The flame adds vitality to the video and makes the viewing easier. Another important factor is the appropriate duration: 06:36. Obrint Pas (Breaking Through) is the author of the song. They are a group from Valencia who play a mixture of rock, ska and reggae with dulzaina (a traditional instrument) rhythms, always in the Catalan language. The group helped with the production of the lipdub.

Multilingual diffusion. Since the beginning the authors of the video were clear that they wanted the maximum diffusion of their product and for that a multilingual perspective was essential. They used subtitles in eight languages: Basque, French, Galician, Spanish, English, Italian, Catalan and Korean and showed information about the video in nine (all the mentioned plus the Asturian language).

Professional quality. The video shows tidy and careful production. The participants demonstrate quite good lip sync. The image definition is the highest: 1080p HD. The statistics of the video are on line in this case. That is an important novelty.

Thanks to that, Internet users can discover, for example, that the progress of visits has been quite continuous and homogeneous in this case and how the profile of the audience is characterized by a majority of men aged between 35-64 years old. It seems like the political connotations of the video, apparently, have seduced more men than women, or simply that men use the Internet more than women.

Another data is the considerable number of comments (65,139). Among them, opposing points of view are very evident. There are very effusive comments in favour and against and a significant number of people do not like the video (12.90%). It is evident that the Catalonian nationalist profile of the lipdub mobilized the Spanish nationalist view in its most enthusiastic perspective.

This video is a clear statement in favour of a concrete political and cultural idea.

That does not fit with other lipdubs available on the Internet where the mainstreams are hedonism and post-modernism.

5.4. LIPDUB KUKUTZA The promoters of this lipdub show the different activities that they did in the Youth Centre called Kukutza III, located in the district of Errekalde, in Bilbao. In 1998, youth groups from Errekalde occupied an abandoned old factory. This kind of occupation is quite normal in a lot of districts of the Basque Country. The building had four flours and 6,000 square metres. After the occupation, local youth groups managed the building

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through a self-management system until 21st September 2011. On that day, amid significant controversy, Kukutza III was demolished following a judicial order and using an important display of police force. During the thirteen years that Kukutza III was working, the place came to be an active reference of underground culture. Apart from traditional music concerts, all kinds of workshops and courses were organized there. The objectives were very diverse: juggling, puppet shows, traditional Basque dances, sebillanas dances, body expression, children, youth and adult activities, climbing wall, library, mechanics courses, medicine, plants, electricity workshops, second hand shop, vegetarian restaurant (where after finishing, all users had to wash their own dishes), theatre, etc. Thousands and thousands of people visited and used Kukutza III; people of all ages: children, young and elderly. International demonstrations and meetings were organized there; for example, about circus or about juggling. Moreover, Kukutza III was a stage for poetry recitals, theatre performances and other cultural events. The local managers were committed to various ideas, one of those being particularly memorable: all possible economic benefits derived from performances done in that place were to be used to improve or maintain the building.

The initiative of the lipdub arose from the bosom of the Kukutza III. As a consequence of the claim presented in Court by the owner of the abandoned factory, the threat of evacuation and subsequent demolition increased considerably. In that context, the most active groups of Kukutza III decided to make a lipdub. On the one hand, they wanted to communicate all the different activities held in the building and, on the other hand, they used the video to mobilize people against the probable imminent demolition.

Through this lipdub, they specifically wanted to expand a social network in order to promote the international demonstration announced on July 16th 2011, in Bilbao. The video was uploaded on July 2nd 2011, and was immediately successful on the net, becoming the most viewed lipdub in the Basque Country at the beginning of 2012 with nearly 200,000 visits.

Table 5. Lipdub Kukutza

Address Uploaded on Total visits (05/01/2012) Visits per day Duration Language(s) used by the author of the video.

Received assessments Category Tags Number of comments Transmitted values

Number of participants

Lipdub Kukutza General data http://www.Youtube.com/watch?v=e2VieT5ksyo 02/07/2011 199,130 3,709 10:15 Basque, Spanish, French, English, Italian and Catalan.

Likes: 1,308 (96.31%); Dislikes 50 (3.68%) News and politics Kukutza, gaztetxea, desalojo arriskua, errekalde, bilbo, euskal herria 615 collectivism, festive atmosphere, multi-use space, selfmanagement, young impetus and enjoyment.

Participants Several hundred

300

Profile of participants Author of the video Reasons for the video

Name Author / Group Type of music Language used in the song

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Young people, especially girls, but children and elderly people too participated in the recording.

Kukutza III Youth Centre.

The Kukutza III youth centre was in danger of being demolished.

In the face of that possibility they promoted an international demonstration on July 16th 2011.

Song Kukutza III Group Zea Mays with the collaboration of the following: Naroa (group Amaiur) and groups Fenómenos de la Naturaleza, Berri Txarrak and Ken Zazpi.

Rock and rap Basque

According to statistics on line, during the first two and a half months, the number of visits was good, but the events which happened around 21st September 2011 were determinant in the explosion of the audience. The traumatic evacuation of the building and its demolition and the subsequent serious incidents (dozens of people were wounded and arrested by the Autonomous Police) were televised and they had an important echo in the public opinion. As a result of that, in the next two months, the number of visits nearly quadrupled.

The controversy provoked by the police intervention attached an added value to the lipdub. In fact, after the demolition, the message of the video was clear: “The power destroyed this freedom space”.

The video has three very different parts. The first one lasts one and half minutes and runs without music. The only accompaniment is the environmental noise. In this part, some people appear going to the youth centre using different forms of transport: cycles, skateboards, wheelchairs, etc. Before entering the building, some circus characters on stilts and acrobats turn their attention to the camera. The second part begins after 01:33, just at the moment when the music starts playing and the camera enters the building. The song is Kukutza III like the place name and the author is the group called Zea Mays, born in the same district as the youth centre, in Errekalde (Bilbao). The song was / is very famous especially among Basque young people and it was made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of that space. The principal vocalist is Aiora Renteria, the singer of Zea Mays but she is not the only protagonist. Together with her, other vocalists and groups put their voices to the song: Naroa (group Amaiur), Fenómenos de la Naturaleza rap group and the well known Basque rock groups Berri Txarrak and Ken Zazpi. The third part begins at 7 minutes and 21 seconds into the video. The camera arrives at the top of the building, on the flat roof. From there, the view that appears below is a square where a hundred young people move their bodies following the contagious and lively rhythm of batukada percussion. At the same time, the video viewer is warned of the danger of possible imminent demolition and is encouraged to take part in the international demonstration announced for July 16th. Thus concludes the video after 10:34.

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The necessary keys to understanding the success of this video are the following: the events surrounding the demolition on 21st September, the selected song and the enthusiasm demonstrated by the participants.

Events post-demolition. These incidents received important attention both in the Basque and Spanish media. Thousands of people were mobilized in Errekalde and the whole city against the announced demolition. The police intervention was seriously criticized from different sectors. Dozens of young people were arrested and injured. Due to this attention, a local issue was transformed into a global event. The severity of the police intervention provoked solidarity demonstrations in the whole of the Basque Country. The visits on Youtube rocketed.

The selected song. If, before the building demolition the selected song was appropriate, it was much more after that. The song's chorus does its particular bit taupada bakoitzaz koloreztatuz zuri beltza (with each heart beat colouring black / white); taupada bakoitzaz irribarre bat (one smile for each heartbeat). The underlying philosophy which appears throughout the song facilitates the propagation of the message: -deiak bultzatuz erabakiak, ideiak batuz eraikia, ideiak nahastuz zabaldua(take decisions promoting calls, build projects joining ideas, spread feelings mixing ideas).

Enthusiasm. From the first moment, the atmosphere of complicity among all the participants is very evident. They believed in what they were doing and this harmony increases throughout the video. The proximity of the demolition emphasized much more the necessity to appear enthusiastic and effusive.

Nevertheless, the video has some aspects which can be criticized; for example, the absence of subtitles and credits at the end , and the long duration. (Another political lipddub such as the video made in Vic, for example, had subtitles in eight different languages. That was one of the most important keys to its success: its multilingualism and its making of video.) Apart from that, the long duration of the video makes its complete viewing difficult. Before concluding, it is also worth mentioning that the lip sync of some of the participants is not very good.

6. Main conclusions 1. Six years after its birth, lipdub continues to be a phenomenon in permanent growth on the Internet. As has happened with other similar expressions included in the context of CMC (Computer Mediated Communication), its success is due to a desire and need of anonymous citizens to be present in the public sphere. In a strict sense, it is not possible to say that this phenomenon is something new, but a re-edition of old trends popularized in the 60s and 70s like, for example, art-performance. In this case novelty is not a consequence of media formats; but a result of the use of them. The viral culture protects this phenomenon and, thanks to the sneezer effect, incredibly amplifies its echo in society.

2. The four analyzed lipdubs show a flexible society; a pattern where the needs of the human factor, spontaneity, humour, friendliness, free expression of feelings, a mixture between a festive and clamorous atmosphere and the demand for social recognition are essential. Hedonism is everywhere. The logic of individualism

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dominates everything. The right to personal development has been made sacred by human beings. Narcissistic values are the mirror in which our society tries to finds its authentic model. As Guilles Lipovetsky says we have gone from personal individualism to a total individualistic pattern.

3. In spite of this dominant individualistic pattern, the analyzed lipdubs show the necessity of wider social sectors to create new spaces in the public sphere, using new instruments of social communication in which the subjects are common citizens and not the political, social, cultural, artistic or sporting elite. Nowadays a wide spectrum of social movements uses lipdubs as an efficient instrument in order to get more social influence and as a way of overcoming the invisibility with which the mass-media often punishes them, expelling them from the mainstream tendencies.

4. Lipdubs are a specifically appropriate tool to attract the attention of young people. They are the main protagonists in the majority of videos. Moreover, they are compulsive consumers of new technologies and traditionally reluctant to be convinced by conventional methods. In addition to that, it is necessary to take into account the attraction ignited by the spark of social agitation among young people. In fact, many lipdubs have their origin in a situation that their promoters consider unjust or removed from reality. That situation acts like a glint of energy capable of converting negatively connoted events or ideas in positively charged actions. This phenomenon is very evident, for example, in the last three lipdubs.

5. The four analyzed lipdubs show that the Internet audience recognizes the quality in the production of this type of artistic expression. In addition to an appropriate duration, well known song and a contagious rhythm it is very necessary to consider other factors like image definition, production quality (technical resources used, the work and the number of participants, lighting, photography, etc.) and the presence of other complementary information like multilingual subtitles, credits at the end, statistics on line, making of video, etc.

6. Looking to the future it is possible to predict that this phenomenon will continue at least in the next few years. If lipdubs are able to respond to the challenges that constantly arise from new technologies, new formats and new media, the survival of this kind of video is ensured. The Lipdubs of the future will be shorter, more spectacular, more massive and equipped with better technical resources. Social movements have an important ally in lipdubs, a necessary instrument to expand their social influence, a tool to make visible the invisible. That is becoming more important nowadays in a context where, as Ignacio Ramonet says, the transition from the mass-media to a mass of media is an increasingly evident reality.

Acknowledgements The author of this article would like to underline the essential collaboration of Angela Jones in the final English version of the text. This work has contributed to a better comprehension of the article.

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References Bosch Dols, Beatriz (2011). Desarrollo de un proyecto de marketing viral a través de un lipdub. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Gandia. Available on the Internet: http://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/12302 Castells, M. (2004). The power of identity (Vol. 2). Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Del Pino, C. (2008). Nueva era en la comunicación comercial audiovisual: el marketing viral. Pensar la Publicidad. Revista Internacional de Investigaciones Publicitarias, 1(2), 63–76.

Godin, S. (2001). Unleashing the Ideavirus. Hyperion, New York.

Jacob, B., De la Croix A., Hellet, N. (2010): Acheiving your lipdub 10 steps. Know all the tips to create a sucessfull Lipdub, Vivanor group, Louvain-La-Neuve.

Lipovetsky, G., Hernández, F., & López, C. (2002). El imperio de lo efímero: la moda y su destino en las sociedades modernas. Anagrama, Barcelona.

Lipovetsky, G., Vinyoli, J., & Pendanx, M. (1995). La era del vacío: Ensayos sobre el individualismo contemporáneo. Anagrama, Barcelona.

Mattelart, A. (2000). La publicidad (Vol. 45). Paidos Iberica Ediciones SA, Barcelona.

Méndiz Noguero, A. (2007). Nuevas formas publicitarias: patrocinio, "product placement", publicidad en Internet. University of Málaga, Malaga.

Ramonet, I. (2011). La explosión del periodismo. De los medios de masas a la masa de medios. Clave intelectual. Madrid.

Rheingold, H. (2003). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Basic books. Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Mobs-Next-Social-Revolution/dp/0738208612

Websites of interest http://www.lipdub.eu/ http://universitylipdub.com/ http://www.lipdub.eu/lipdub-book/ http://www.lipdubhub.com/ http://lipdub.euskalherrian.info/ http://mundolipdub.blogspot.com/

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M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 304-318.

GOFFMAN BITCHES Rhetorical Attribution and the Perversion of Meaning KRISTINA ALSTAM Department of Social Work University of Gothenburg Box 720, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract. This study explores a sequence of rhetorically aggressive behavior on a Swedish parental forum as a way of attributing categories of petty value upon the opponent; while at the same time perform face saving textual activities. The analysis suggests that it is not attributing a metaphor of low social value that manages to unstable the self presentation of the antagonist but rather an advanced know-how of conceptual metaphors to the extent were the aggressor is able to pervert the meaning of a word. The study suggests the need for a forum account to exhibit normative responsibility only applies for some of the nicks writing, while other and more experienced ones are able to act more freely, thereby indicating a divide of rhetorical accountability and of possible identity displays needing further examination.

Introduction and Aim ‘I stand back from this forum. When things simply irritates and robs you of your energy, then it is time to lose them. I have learnt. Seeing the PC patrol snubbing people… and missing frank discussions with a respect for other’s opinions. A lot of you have me on Facebook. See you there. Not here’ (extract taken from the parental forum The Parent Place 26th of April 2012).

What kind of reaction is it that we are witnessing here? The nick writing declares a forum fatigue to the point of not wanting any part of the virtual interaction that has been a piece of her everyday life since she registered in 2007. The posting comes from a nick that has been logging in on this particular forum every day: Christmas Eve, regular working days as well as on her sister’s wedding. What is it more specifically she is tired of? What is it the PC patrol is doing when they are snubbing other writers? Is it true that the forum environment exhibits a lack of respect for people ventilating disparate opinions? If so, how does it come about and what might be the consequences of that kind of shortage?

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It might well be that the digital divide as we are used to describe it; the extent to which employing the Internet spread out demographically uneven1, is gradually sealing. In fact gaps between groups when it comes to education, income and geographic settings in relation to Internet access decreased considerably towards the end of the 1990’s (Borgida et al., 2002). Other kinds of divides might however still be open, such as differences in knowledge of how to use the Internet effectively to obtain service and gain access to goods (Life and Shepherd, 2004), in other words questions relating to dimensions of agency. Agency in turn contains several dimensions; that of having a voice as one of the key nodes: not only to be able to present oneself but also to go about it in a way that secures an acceptance by a community. The idea of making a presentation can be understood as a rhetorical competence of composing messages that are comprehensible or likeable and so, voicing a self on the Internet is an event of producing a representation; an identity. An orientation towards the creation of virtual, identity representations transforms the object of study into an analysis of texts, making it possible to understand the textual strategies by Internet users (Mitra, 2006), and the possible differences, or divides, amongst users in this respect.

No matter forum competence, taking part in the interaction stands out as an activity where one cannot control the potential narrative transformation of a message (Tamboukou, 2010: 170) and managing well in an Internet forum appears, similar to other social contexts, to concern the provision of an expedient repertoire of stories and the competence of telling them in the right kind of context (Dingvall, 1977: 376).

Several years back Winter and Huff suggested that forums dominated by female nicks made the forum environment safer, reducing the hazard of sexual harassment or enabling a language style less confrontational or competitive (1996). Is this still the case? More recent observations conclude that forum messages need to exhibit a certain normative responsibility to be accepted (Antaki, Ardévol, Núñez and Vayreda, 2006), thereby making the nicks await the right moment to present themselves, eager to know the tone of voice of the forum What kind of venture are they trying to avoid? Or in other words: what happens when the forum interaction goes wrong? How can we understand what is it the nicks do when they debate one another? How do they make attributions of each other, while at the same time protecting themselves from being attacked? The paper will in an analysis of an extract of aggressive interaction on a Swedish parental forum, begin an understanding of the processes of rhetoric attribution in virtual quarrels as a possible digital divide needing further theoretical exploration. The divide is suggestively understood as relating also to identity issues such as whose stories or presentations are supported or rejected. The paper endorses a view of digital divides as also, and to a prominent extent, rethorical.

Research Area Parents using the Internet to seek information and gain contacts through everyday peer interactions stand out as a contemporary Western trend that seems more or less 1

In defining demographically uneven measures of income, race and urban vis-a-vis rural origin are often deployed (Borgida, Sullivan, Oxendine, Jackson and Riedel, 2002)

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permanent (Eriksson and Bremberg, 2008). It is predominantly female nicks that reside on the parental forums, seemingly validating the general perception of men using the Internet for more instrumental reasons, and women for social reasons (Kennedy, Wellman and Klement, 2003). These communities offer a space where people (i.e. women) socialize, exchange information, argue or make friends. However, the discussions on parental forums don´t solely revolve around parenting practices such as the fostering of a child, pregnancy, giving birth etc. but also ventilate issues of related character: health, nutrition, sexuality, equality, family finance, work life balance (Caproni, 2004), and so forth. Family issues seem to appear not only inside the mere topic of family. It is the writers (and on some occasions the moderators) that set the limits of what the forum should contain and of what issues might be related to family matters. Already a flora of studies on the phenomenon has been carried out. Some of them conclude that a valuable support is being handed out, and that the parental communities are experienced as a haven away from supervision by institutions (Daneback and Plantin, 2010; Madge and O´Connor, 2006). Parents of today tend to view the advice gained by turning to previous generations as outdated (O’Brien, 1999) and the forums are thus depicted as a backing and the social capital that the forum relations render appears to ease everyday life (Drentea and Moren-Cross, 2005). Other scholars highlight the dimension of social control manifested, as for example online shaming, and how race, class and gender becomes agents determining the outcome of the interplay (Hargittai, 2007; Wall and Williams, 2007). Yet again, others aim at explaining the interplay as a kind of digital Darwinism; those that adapt best to their environment will be the most successful in sustaining their point of view (Brabazon, 2007; Keen, 2007). This research onset emphasizes how a message posted on a forum needs to express a certain written normative responsibility, or accountability (Antaki, Ardévol, Núñez and Vayreda, 2006) and how there is a tendency on behalf of the users to gauge the perceived climate on forums before posting a message (Yun and Park, 2011).

A Swedish Parental Forum The online forum of The Parent Place2 is the seccond biggest forum of its kind in Sweden that every week receives approximately 250 000 visitors and has quite a long history since it started in 1997. The Parent Place, further on abbreviated TPP, is organized in a seemingly infinite amount of themes. The themes are organized into larger headings, such as ‘Planning of children’, ‘Pregnant’, ‘Baby’, ‘Children’, ‘Teenagers’, ‘Family Finance’, ‘Weight, ‘General topics’ etc. The number of headings and themes vary depending on the activity level in each heading and theme. A peek at 2

The name of the forum will for ethical reasons not be spelled out. The nicknames are also changed and corrections of spelling and a light rewriting of the order of words have been performed, in order to make searching for the nicks via search engines more difficult, thereby to some extent protecting the privacy of the online nicks. (For further elaborations of protecting the identity of members writing on a forum and for discussions on rendition, see McKee and Porter, 2009; Sveningsson Elm, 2009).

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the forum in October 2011 provided the reader with 15 headings and nearly 300 themes to choose from. There is yet only one report (Sarkadi, 2003) that has posed questions on level of education, age and sex of the members. Amongst the informants of the questionnaire some 95 % were women, a majority of the age of between 25 and 34, married with children and with an educational level corresponding to persons of the same age in the population as a whole. However, this study dates a few years back.

There is also one Swedish study on the largest competing forum in Sweden, noticing a predominance amongst members of women in their thirties from the lower middle class (Daneback and Plantin, 2010).

The phenomena of online forums have been received in divergent ways. On the one hand there have been conceptions of the computer mediated communication as liberating and on the other it has been outlined as simply promoting a kind of shout-outloud-culture where nobody takes any responsibility for what they are saying and for that reason contribute to the downfall of debate culture (Linaa Jensen, 2003: 358, 364).

Overall though, the perceptional change appears to move from views of forum interaction as liberating the self from the burden of class, race, gender and sexuality issues in an almost Utopian fashion (We, 1993) into a more pragmatic stance. One-sided argumentation is rarer and instead focus is directed towards questions of the ways argumentation is actually performed and towards questions of design (Lewinski, 2010).

This paper makes an intention of probing the first dimension: how can the argumentation and thereby interaction be theoretically understood or discussed? An overwhelming part of the participants on parental forums, whether they are writers or lurks, are female (Sarkadi, 2003; Daneback and Plantin, 2010). The participants on TPP have to a large extent resided on the forum for years, which in itself is no characteristic feature of this forum in particular. However, the years spent on the forum have chiseled out certain knowledge of each other, and skills when it comes to writing techniques. In the absence of an active moderator, the discussions and debates are taken care of without much intrusion from parties outside. A pattern of rhetorically strong writers have crystallized, and weaker ones in the same respect. In the empirical extract presented below, the conversation takes place between writers with a high social status on the forum. They are logged in everyday (often several times a day) and they are all skilled debaters. The particular conversation picked out for analysis is chosen since it manifests one thing quite clearly: how the position of being socially â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;safeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; on the forum really is not so safe; how having a face (Goffman, 1974) does not mean keeping it safe from harm. Inflicting rhetorical damage seams not an activity solely performed by the strong against the weak, but also composes a showdown between nicks with a position to defend. If research renders a multilayered outlook on forums; of support on the one hand and oppression and caution on the other, and if writing and interacting on parental forums is a particularly gendered activity, the inquiry into how female nicks gain social positions on forums might form a part of an understanding of how a putative oppressive behavior in computer mediated contexts is executed.

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Interaction and Impression Management The linkage between virtual interaction and Erving Goffman constitutes a road that has been travelled before (see for example Bargh, McKenna and Fitzsimons, 2002; Ellison, Heino and Gibbs, 2006), for one thing to be able to describe the kind of self presentation that takes place in these milieus of “ /…/ mediated contact with other participants” (Goffman, 1967: 5). For depicting virtual quarrels however, there are also other fruitful notions to preponderate.

In contacts with people, participants in interaction have a tendency to act out a line, a template of verbal and non verbal acts that enable the individual to couch his/her view of the situation and of the rest of the participants. The other participants will regard his/hers utterance as a matter of taking a stand, meaning in turn that if the individual wants to interact s/he needs to take into account the impression that others probably have formed of him/her. In interaction we claim a face – a positive social value for ourselves; an approved image of self. Face is maintained when the line we take presents an image that is consistent and favored by the other participants. The face is not situated or launched in or by the body but diffused in the flow of exchanges between participants. Trough this flow we are able to seize out the frames of the interaction, thereby knowing how to interpret the context (Goffman, 1974): we know how to behave in accordance with the situation of ordering coffee, saying the last farewell on a funeral or interacting at TPP. Since the lines available during dealings with others are largely institutional in character, the whole encounter gets to be of conventionalized nature, leading to there being only a small assortment of faces to choose from when engaging in dealings with others (Goffman, 1967: 5-7). In the case of analyzing quarrels on TPP, one of the analytic endeavors might be mapping the range of available faces and the rules, regulations and efforts of saving face (1967: 12).

However, it might also contain the studying of the transgressor. The transgressor as understood in the context of TPP could be of two kinds: the one who does not understand the frames, for example portraits herself in an inconsistent way and is punished for that, and the one who understands the face-work to an extent that enables her to turn the arena into a contest of making points. The idea of this kind of game is to keep every utterance free from contradiction and scoring as many points possible against the antagonist in the interaction, implying that an audience is necessary for the victory to be witnessed. One of the most urgent gains for the transgressor is to demonstrate that she handles herself better than the opponent. Having elucidated the phenomena quite thoroughly, Goffman reaches the inference: “/…/ one deals with the capacity at what is sometimes called bitchiness” (1967: 25).

Furthermore, the study of virtual interaction cannot afford to overlook the importance of the arena as a construction site for the fabricated and positioned self (Bevir, 1999). The metaphor of construction site however leads us looking for the drawing or the architect responsible for the format, where there is none. The making of the self in dealings with other people is in the interactionist sense rather an act of performance, and the subject plays a part on a stage. Viewing interaction this way rests heavily upon Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective (1959). It is used to understand the actors, co-actors and audience in an interactional sequence where they stage and perform ‘plays’, establishing temporary or situated virtual teams that are mutually

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negotiated and constructed (Panteli and Duncan, 2004: 423). The actor has to be aware not only of possible attributions but of her own treacherous leakage, e.g. the difference between ‘given’ information and information ‘given off’; that exudes without intent (Miller, 1995). The activity to control this leakage Goffman calls impression management: the presentation of a character whose moral properties the audience hopefully accepts, and a display of what the presenter perceives as ‘normal’ within the group with which she interacts (1959: 183, 73). An important part of realizing a social identity is hence “looking and acting the part” (Collet, 2005: 327); e.g. composing representation (Langellier, 1989, 2001) the right way. Yet another vital task is attributing boundaries; defining the opponent as different from oneself and by that defining the constitutive outside of the self (Torfing, 2003: 124). For this operation, an audience is necessary. It is the audience that witnesses and assesses what is being written (Pithouse and Atkinson, 1988:198) and in the milieu of computer mediated communication this is accounting in a goffmanian sense: the nick writing is counting on an audience.

A way of understanding what is going on in the forum conversations is viewing them as the construction of subject positions from which to speak or write. If the foucauldian notion on subject positions more pronouncedly focuses how discourses shape the inner state of the subject, how we (are allowed) to think (Foucault, 1982: 208), a goffmanian onset rather emphasizes the displays of the self in micro contexts or in short; uses an approach of bottom-up (Hacking, 2004:299-300). A display of self might consist of demonstrations of material assets as well as symbolic (Stommel, 2007).

Applying Goffman on the image of displays means for the sake of the paper to map out possible rhetorical ways of accounting (Orbuch, 1997) and the displaying is depicted as having a lot in common with presenting a self. If rhetoric is exerted in the appropriation of the self or others, something is narrated, orchestrated and maneuvered in a certain direction. There is a narrative transformation (Tamboukou, 2010: 170) going on in the interactions on TPP, through the work of the audience receiving, interpreting and commenting the accounts. Some nicks can control the process of transformation to an extent that make them able to sharpen impression management (Goffman, 1959) to a higher degree; some exhibit failures in the same area.

Words and Concepts The way to understand the quarrel to be introduced goes through the analytical concepts of presuppositions and conceptual metaphors. In this case the presuppositions will be examined in search for their tentative connotations, or their semantic relations to categories of different magnitudes. Things that belong to categories that are placed low (spatially, socially or metaphorically) have less status than things that are sited high3 (Boréus, 2005). Words and concepts structure our everyday living and is reflected in 3

There are other modes of arbitrary dichotomies, scrutinized by for instance Bourdieu (2001); one of the most important being the one of men as spatially, socially and metaphorically placed higher than women.

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language by a variety of expressions. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) use the concept of argument as an example of the linkage between concept and metaphor, claiming one of its conceptual metaphors being war. The conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR is visualized in a multitude of expressions, such as: Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target.

I demolished his argument.

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Arguments of course really are not war. Arguments and wars are distinct, the argument is a verbal conflict and war is a conflict carried out with arms. So the actions performed are not the same. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of WAR. The concept is metaphorically structured, the activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is metaphorically structured (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 3-6). For the analysis conceptual metaphors will be construed as more or less unspoken presuppositions of what is a high quality and what is not, what is good and what is bad etc. The link between the use of a word and the metaphor it is leaning on relies on presuppositions: we need to agree on what is high versus low quality and what is good or bad. Through the use of Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 14-17) the analysis will examine orientational linkages between for instance being sick/lying down, (which equals a low quality in comparison) and being healthy/standing up. Words that metaphorically are pointing upwards are regarded as representing a better state than words that are associated with a spatially low position. Orientational metaphors render a concept a spatial orientation, for instance HEALTHY IS UP.

A Case of Bitchiness?

The forum of TPP uses a threaded structure, meaning that one easily can follow who gives response to who and manages to study the frequent occurring sub groups, arguing or discussing a particularity within the general discussion of a topic. But it also means that, contrary to the flat forum structure, topics are not updated and placed on the top of the forum page when a new insertion for that topic is made. This means there is no point in debating a topic that is a few hours old, since it by that time is placed on page two or three and hence is not visible if one does not look for it. The nicks therefore have developed the custom of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lifting the topicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;; starting a topic over and over to get their insertions read. The chosen conversation starts off with a nick doing just that; by lifting a topic that has been debated during the day, she manages to get her view of the topic out. This time, the maneuver gets questioned by another nick.

The reason to pick this line of conversation for analysis however relates to other dimensions of making conversations in the forum environment. The first is how an initial posting sometimes gets overtaken by other writers that focus on other aspects of the posting or characteristics of the nick behind it. The second dimension concerns the

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frequent battle between writers equipped with a high social status on the forum. In this case the battle revolves around what topics you are allowed to ventilate at what times but it soon takes off to orbit around attributions of the counterpart and, in that sense, becomes a struggle of representation (Langellier, 1989, 2001). The two main antagonists; Bebopalula and up-the-creek, are both equipped with a solid forum reputation and are both skilled in the art of endless forum discussions. The debate opens up by an initial posting about infidelity, discussed on the forum several times during the previous hours. The first posting will not be rendered in full length, since the following conversation quickly leaves the topic.

Initial posting I don´t own my partner and he doesn´t own me. That is if he sleeps with somebody else she doesn´t ‘take’ him from me. He has left all by himself! /…/ Bebopalula Insertion no 1(Answers initial posting) But wtf, haven’t we reached the end of it, at least for today? How many do you think have changed their opinion the last hour, since Flames wrote the same thing a couple of lines down? vendela01 Insertion no 2 (Answers vendela01 above) Hahaha, Bebopalula the educator of The Forum has spoken. up-the-creek Insertion no 3 (Answers up-the-creek above) How do you mean now, up-the-creek?

Bebopalula Insertion no 4 (Answers Bebopalula above) I mean this: That your insertions often are very interesting. And very long. And very predictable and like look how crazy I am-goody two-shoes.

Often you lift a conversation from way below and write a looong and wiiiise answer of how one really ought to think. When one thinks like you.

And it´s ok. Calm down! But I have to be able to call you Educator Of The Forum too.

It is also ok. up-the-creek Insertion no 5 (Answers up-the-creek above) Yes, it’s totally ok, I can call you The Psycho Lady from the South, it’s also supernice .

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‘Look how crazy I am’ -goody two-shoes?? Imagine, I think a little the same about you sometimes, when you write your insertions and try to sound like Micki (nothing wrong with Micki, on the contrary, she is one of the best writers here I think!).

That I bring up some conversation from way below has something to do with me not sitting here all the time, but sometimes I do other stuff too, And then some interesting topics get lost. Then you can lift them up, and that is done by many more than me .

It’s nice you see my answers as wise. But I don’t mean at all that one ’really’ should think like me – but I must have the same rights as everybody else to have opinions here?

Bebopalula Insertion no 6 (Answers Bebopalula above) It’s totally ok, cause I’ve been living in the East the last 16 years…

It’s probably about that you have so many words, and the lack of respect for those who don’t have them. For you and me it is easy, pissing easy to assert ourselves in texted debates, but one has to have respect for the one who can’t. By living in the present, saying hakkuna matta [sic!] to certain things. You don’t always have to reassert yourself. Everybody still knows you think the right things. up-the-creek Insertion no 7 (Answers up-the-creek above) Oh, I really needed good advice from you, up-the-creek. You are so smart…

And the South and the East is same same but different. But ok, Psycho Lady from the East I´ll say then.

Bebopalula Insertion no 8 (Answers Bebopalula above) See! That’s just what I mean! The lack of self-awareness and the incapacity of embracing possible criticism. Nuff said. up-the-creek /…/ Insertion no 9 (Answers vendela01 above from insertion no 1) But wait, did I force you to participate? No, I didn’t .

I think however that the subject is just as interesting as your new hairdo or your shoes or your new corset or whatever it is that you want to show off for the moment . We think differently!

Bebopalula Insertion no 10 (Answers Bebopalula above) I’ll await in suspense to see where you manage to turn this discussion around in this conversation then. vendela01

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Insertion no 11 (Answers vendela01 above) No, I agree, it was stupid. We’ll have to shut it down so you get space to lay up new pictures of what you bought . I’ll step aside.

Bebopalula Insertion no 12 (Answers Bebopalula above) To this I agree, in the middle of everything. Some assert themselves through words, others through all they can buy, insert BRAND, nevermindthecolour. It is the assertion in itself that is the problem, and whatever you assert yourself with in front of strangers it points to one thing. Crappy self-esteem. up-the-creek /…/ There are a lot of common and unarticulated forum norms of conversation operating in this conversation and the brief analysis will highlight only a few. One of them is the convention of not lifting a topic that already has been ventilated. (Or rather, the rule appears to be not to lift it too many times. The problem is defining when the limit is reached). Insertion number one reminds Bebopalula of this rule. Insertion number two ignores the violation as well as the content of the posting and targets instead a character flaw of the nick behind the posting: Bebopalula is depicted as the educator of the forum.

Being an educator is not necessarily a bad thing. It might tentatively be associated with presuppositions of high quality properties: KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM or SKILL. But by starting the insertion with laughter, up-the-creek perverts the regular metaphors of the word educator. The laughter indicates the audience rather ought to associate the word with low quality properties, possibly ARROGANCE, CONCEIT, or the phrase up-the-creek herself uses; GOODY-TWO-SHOES. The insertion manages to unstabilize the word, throwing it into a quagmire of meanings. In insertion number four up-thecreek elaborates further on the defects of the nick of Bebopalula. The rhetorical technique revolves around arguing against the style of writing of Bebopalula, and the implications of that style, thereby leaving suggestions of dubious personality traits.

Bebopalula on the other hand, chooses in insertion number five a more up-front response, delivering a blow directly at the mental properties of up-the-creek, she’s mentally ill. This ought to attribute up-the-creek a rather low position. ‘Psycho’ as a concept, with its obvious correlations to (mental) illness, has as a relation to presuppositions such as being UNSTABLE, WEAK or DESTRUCTIVE. The use of ‘Psycho’ is to some extent an orientational metaphor, with the concept of health being up and the concept of sickness being down. (The basis for the metaphor is relying on how humans are forced to lay down physically when sick which is a more degrading or dubious position than standing up). The connotations of the metaphor is visualized in sentences such as ‘being at the peak of health’, to ‘rise from the dead’, to ‘come down with the flu’, or having a health that is ‘declining’. ‘Psycho’ as an insult is orientational also in referring to not being rational, since rational is up and emotional is down; obvious in formulations such as ‘ put ones feelings aside’, rise above ones emotions’, or

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in ‘the discussion fell to the emotional level’. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980:15-17). But in this case the attribution does not appear to work properly. In insertion number six upthe-creek settles for sedately delivering a geographical correction and seemingly unconcerned continues to enumerate the flaws of Bebopalula, thereby proving a better behavior than her opponent (Goffman, 1967: 25). Instead Bebopalula concentrates on face-saving activities (Goffman, 1974) that might be worth mentioning, such as the sentence in insertion number five, stating that: ‘That I bring up some conversation from way below has something to do with me not sitting here all the time, but sometimes I do other stuff too’. It is a rather classical remark of a quarrel at TPP, convincing the audience that you have a life outside the forum. By this remark Bebopalula is reasserting her social value; she does not live by and off TPP. In insertion number seven, Beboplaula makes a last attempt of bringing up ‘Psycho’ again, but this time upthe-creek uses the effort on behalf of Bebopalula of attributing a low quality on up-thecreek as evidence of the unstable character of Bebopalula: she is said to suffer from a “lack of self-awareness and the incapacity of embracing possible criticism”.

Remarkably the rather innocent connotations of ‘educator’ seams to inflict more harm to the face of Bebopalula than the harsh designation of ‘psycho’ does to up-the-creek.

The two main debaters of this conversation both belong to the forceful writers of the forum and their debate proves yet another thing: the social position of the forum, or the face, is never entirely safe. A high status position or an identity that doesn’t get damaged requires constant work or at times, defense. But Bebopalula walks in a trap, resentfully defending herself against the accounts on how to behave against the rhetorically weaker nicks: ‘By living in the present, saying hakkuna matta [sic!] to certain things. You don’t always have to reassert yourself. Everybody still knows you ’ (Insertion number six, written by up-the-creek). The nick of think the right things. up-the-creek immediately uses the anger in insertion number seven: ‘Oh, I really needed good advice from you, up-the-creek. You are so smart… And the South and the East is same same but different. But ok, Psycho Lady from the East I´ll say then. ‘ as an opening to make a point (Goffman 1967: 25). She simply uses the force of Bebapelula to prove it: “See! That’s just what I mean! The lack of self-awareness and the incapacity of embracing possible criticism./…/”. The damage is done, and it is done by Bebapelula herself.

Bebopalula is moreover waging a two-front war. In the same conversation she is fighting off the reproaches from vendela01, claiming by techniques of understatement that she has every right to bring up a subject that has already been discussed. In this attack, she is surprisingly aided by her other opponent up-the-creek. This feature of the scolding is also recurrent on the forum; there are no stable liaisons – nicks that you trust can turn on you and sworn enemies might back you up, if you target one of their own enemies or if you touch upon issues important for them. In this case, insertion number twelve by up-the-creek makes a u-turn and sides with Bebopelula, as if the needs of upthe-creek to define her constitutive outside (Torfing, 2003: 124) against the suggested commercialized identity work of vendela01 overrides her lust for scorning Bebopalula.

So, in a few lines the experienced nick of up-the-creek manages to ignore a contagious conceptual metaphor of mental illness, prove that Bebopalula is too hot headed to have any self-awareness and cannot take criticism and almost simultaneously mock the identity display built on material assets (Stommel, 2007) of vendela 01. This in turn

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might imply that there really is one conceptual metaphor that is really working in the moment of conversation, since it brings the nicks of Bebopalula and up-the-creek into a sudden alliance. It is the conceptual bridge between shopping and its semantic relations to categories of petty value. The nick of up-the creek spells it out: some people assert themselves through words; others by what they can afford to buy. It is all the same because both the words and the shopping reveal a need for reasserting oneself. So this need of reasserting gets equated with low self-esteem, thereby establishing a bridge between shopping and INSECURITY, SHALLOWNESS or, in relations with these two; WEAKNESS. Tentatively, this might be what the rhetorical hunt is about – the search for weakness. When a conversation turns aggressive an exploratory scouting starts, where the nicks probe each other in search for a leakage (Miller, 1995). In this case the leakage is determined to be the manifestation of commercialized identity work; it is what for this line of conversation will be depicted as the abnormal behavior within the group (Goffman, 1959: 183, 73), although in other places of the forum or in the same place but in another day, the same identity display would be celebrated. This, the temporarily lowest of the low categories, finally reunites the two combating nicks, turning them towards an unspoken presupposition of the conversation.

Discussion One needs to bear in mind that the debate discussed takes place between nicks with a high social status on the forum. Further analytical endeavors on rhetoric attribution on forums of this kind might want to continue exploring the possibility of proficient writers cunningly holding the rhetorically strong positions, and weak ones in the same respect that are exposed to the workings of their force4. However, as a point of departure it can serve the general understanding of the forum debating structure, to turn also to the textual interrelations of the strong writers to understand the real savoir-fare of attacking and still manage to maneuver face-saving activities more in-depth. However, the inference that the rhetorical attributions above to its core is about a hunt for weakness should be considered merely the first inquiry into what it is that make some conceptual metaphors stick and some to pass without much attention. Plausibly the light-headed attitude on behalf of up-the-creek regarding the quite troublesome attribution of ‘Psycho’ relates to a couple of things. The nick is first and foremost an experienced one, with many years on the forum and she knows her way around the terrain. Secondly, there is an audience to the debate. Presumably, if the assault is too crude the semantic relations to categories of lower magnitudes (Boréus, 2005) no longer have any bearing.

It is impossible to inflict damage to a face with exaggerations. With an attribution such as ‘Psycho’ the response of up-the-creek does not have to do a lot, since Bebopalula takes the risk of ruining her own face on the forum with the acting out and with the 4

Although perhaps a coincidence, the nick from the very first cited insertion opening the paper is the nick of up-the-creek stating she is leaving the forum. Despite the skills received through years of battles, even this rhetorically potent writer comes out as a wounded warrior; tired of the endless combats, whether they result in victories or defeats.

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using of a disproportionately offensive wording. By making a too strong accusation, Bebopalola simply jeopardizes more than up-the-creek. Paradoxically, and although the accusations started with up-the-creek accusing Bebopalula, the former comes out in a somewhat better place.

The skills demonstrated have something to do with rhetorical competence; knowing the available nuances of a word, (such as ‘Educator’) and thus being able to pervert it. If this would hold true, it means taking into analytical account the diverse accessibility to linguistic resources in terms of creatively handling them; thereby partly confirming the observation that a forum insertion needs to produce normative responsibility (Antaki, Ardévol, Núñez and Vayreda, 2006) but also to some extent contradicting it; the need for responsibility appears to be valid for everybody; but for some of the nicks the task is not as heavy as it might be for others. This, if nothing else, makes up a divide of rhetorical accountability that makes the wrongdoings of some stand out and other infringements to vanish. This divide also raises further questions worthy of exploration. One such might be: what kinds of identities are possible to launch in what kind of contexts and are there specific forum cultures that promote or rule out certain identity displays? Having considered the proposition of a digital divide consisting of differences in rhetorical competence, i.e. differences in skill and artisanal ability the result is also linking once again to structural issues such as those of socioeconomic positions, education and class – thereby referring back to divides that have been assumed to be dissolved (Borgida et al., 2002). The problem area seems to have moved from a divide in terms of access towards one that more relates to acquired skills in handling the world that faces the forum user, once s/he has entered.

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POST BORDERS: INFORMAL BILINGUAL BLOGGING AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE MATTHEW PARISIEN, KENNETH REEDER AND LEE GUNDERSON University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract. This paper describes an informal bilingual blogging environment that was created to develop intercultural communicative competence. After a consideration of ICC, the paper explores the opportunities for development of ICC that were created by three features of this blogging activity. A descriptive analysis shows that the design features of informality of topic, and intentional lack of strict language protocol, as well as attention to cultures of use of blogging were associated with users’ display of ICC.

This paper outlines the role of an informal, bilingual blogging environment that was created to develop what Byram (1997) terms intercultural communication competence (ICC), and reports on the various displays and developments of ICC during a collaborative blogging project involving Canadian and Japanese university students.

The paper’s purposes are to explore the opportunities afforded by an informal, bilingual blogging environment, and to determine if such an environment is associated with an improvement in participants’ attitudes towards intercultural communication.

1. Intercultural Communicative Competence As an extension of Hymes’ (1972) concept of communicative competence, Byram (1997) proposes intercultural communication competence (ICC) as a model for teaching and assessing both verbal and non-verbal communication between speakers from different countries. In ICC, communication is not just a matter of information exchange, but “is focused on establishing and maintaining relationships” (Byram, 1997, p. 3).

Byram argues that five factors influence a speaker’s intercultural communication: skills to interpret and relate, skills to discover and interact, knowledge of self and interaction, education in critical cultural education and politics, and attitudes toward self and others (Byram, 1997).

An attitude beneficial for ICC can be described as: (1) a willingness to seek out interaction through equality, (2) a genuine interest in the other's point of view, (3) a readiness to interrogate one's own values and assumptions, (4) a readiness to examine one's own affective reactions toward others, and (5) a readiness to engage in culturally appropriate verbal communication (Byram, 1997).

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These five points of attitude can be assessed within a curriculum of study.

Assessment of ICC should be based on observable demonstrated action rather than stated preference, and evidence should be gathered over time rather than at a single instance (Byram, 1997). Belz (2003) elaborates, adding that such statements of preference are more generally and accurately “norm-referenced exhibitions of facts” (p.

72), which are not necessarily the most valid and reliable sources of data. This study examined the five points of attitude as the relate to ICC by using Byram's five suggested kinds of evidence: equality can be evidenced in speakers' choice of representation of their daily lives. Interest in other points of view and interrogation of values can be seen in speakers' choices to evaluate phenomenon in their own culture using explanations from another culture. Examination of affective reactions can be seen in reflective self-analysis. Finally, engagement in culturally appropriate communication can be seen in adaptations and change in speakers' methods of communication toward a common ground (Byram, 1997).

2. Informality in Task Design On the topic of task design for internet-mediated intercultural foreign language education (ICFLE), Legutke, Müller-Hartmann and Ditfurth (2000) make the broad assertion, “appropriate content needs to be explored and meaningful tasks have to be developed that frame the use of resources and the production of learner texts” (p. 1128).

However, what counts as appropriate content and meaningful tasks has been interpreted

by ICFLE researchers in unusual ways. Kramsch, in Thorne (2005), writes, “[foreign language] teaching should be built on a philosophy of conflict...and where understanding and shared meaning, when it occurs, is a small miracle” (p. 14). This small miracle is indeed rare in the literature; many studies, such as Kramsch and Thorne (2002), Lee (2009), Ware and Kramsch (2005), and Belz (2003) uncovered tours-deforce of name-calling, disappointments and bruised egos.

It is no surprise why egos were bruised. In the four studies above, the participants’ discussions centered on high-profile, confrontational and extremely sensitive topics.

Lee (2009) moderated a discussion between Spanish and U.S. students on the inauguration of Pope Benedict, and Kramsch and Thorne (2002) encouraged discussion on hot topics like AIDS, drugs, sex and politics. Lee (2009) went so far as to ask participants “to produce a podcast on a controversial topic” (p. 431). Perhaps a quizzical application of Vygotsy’s disruption-development argument (Belz, 2003) is the reason why so many ICFLE projects proudly report the disjunctions, the failures of communication, and the fighting among their participants, and even design tasks to incite confrontation. The decision to generate conflict is extremely risky, and is made riskier still by the fact that all participants are meeting for the first time, made riskier still by the participants lacking a shared genre of communication (Kramsch and Thorne, 2002), and further compounded by questionably reliable communication technology (Belz, 2003). Under these circumstances, the small miracles of understanding must have been very small indeed.

Despite a solid awareness among ICFLE researchers of the failures of online communication, O’Dowd and Ritter (2006) note that “surprisingly little research has

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looked at the relationship between failed exchanges and the methodological aspects of the activity” (p. 626). Failed exchanges are often attributed to participants’ misunderstandings of argument roles, their lack of understanding of culture-specific patterns of interaction, or unworkable timetable scheduling (Kramsch and Thorne, 2002; Belz, 2003; Reeder, Nozawa & Berwick, 2009; Mompean, 2010). Rarely has it been proposed that communication fails because participants are asked by the moderators to discuss difficult and controversial topics that they may not yet be ready or willing to discuss. If it is the case that politics, religion and social welfare are more difficult topics to successfully negotiate than, say, discussions of breakfast, then it may be a failure of scaffolding when new learners become frustrated with their progress without having a foundation built on the more approachable topics.

We see no reason for conflict to be such a sought-after ingredient in ICFLE task design, especially in the first stages of participant interaction. One of our aims is to investigate whether culturally appropriate verbal communication can also be potentially developed and evaluated by using approachable topics of discussion. Admittedly, nonconfrontational topics may not encourage the critical self-analysis that comes from Agar’s (1994) “contestation-invoked opportunities for development” (in Thorne, 2006, p. 14).

3. Language Choice and Task Design While Thorne (2005) recommends that “the language use protocol should be explicitly presented to all participants” (p. 13), a study by O'Dowd (2005) showed that different language protocols did not affect participation levels whatsoever. Furthermore, many interesting language options are available to participants when no language use protocol is set, and participants can use these options as venues for expression and community building. Participants can choose to write a post in their base languages (sometimes called first or native language), their target languages (alternatively their second language, their additional language, or language of study) or some combination of these languages. If participants choose to write a post in more than one language, they have two options: they may encode the same information in each language (effectively writing the same thing in translation) or they may code-switch.

Code-switching (CS) is a matter of writing or speaking in such a way that the discourse alternates amongst two or more languages. CS may be used by speakers as an indicator of group membership (Bullock and Toribio, 2009). In a historical overview of sociolinguistic approaches to CS, Gardner-Chloros (2009) identifies three factors that contribute to CS in language contact: factors independent of individual speakers, such as overt and covert prestige, factors related to the speakers, such as social networks and attitudes, and factors within each instance of conversation, where CS becomes another conversational resource. Operating across these three factors is a phenomenon that Rampton (1995) calls “crossing,” where CS is used “by people who are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language they employ” (in GardnerChloros, 2009, p. 102). The reason for CS in this type of situation is not out of necessity, nor is it to draw into the conversation the aesthetic connotations of the other language (Blom and Gumperz, 1972 in Gardner-Chloros, 2009), but instead CS is used

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as an identifying resource—speakers switch languages to assume, or to relate to, the identity of the other peer group.

By leaving students to choose a language for communication it is possible to evaluate intercultural communication competence in terms of the language choice. If CS serves as a marker of group solidarity, then an increase in CS exchanges between two cultural groups may demonstrate Byram's (1997) Objective (e) of IC, where participants have developed their own mutually satisfying modus vivendi. CS may also indicate Byram's Objective (a), a willingness to seek out interaction through equality. In contrast, a profusion of base-language posts may indicate that no equality, no modus vivendi, and very little IC, has been developed.

4. Cultures-of-Use of Blogs Technology is cultural. Thorne (2006) writes that “technologies, as culture, will have variable meanings and uses for different communities” (p. 21), proposing a cultures-ofuse framework to make explicit the way in which certain technologies are considered appropriate for a given task within a given community. On the cultural appropriateness of the technology for the task, Reeder, Macfadyen, Roche, and Chase (2004) found that “bulletin boards, which cater to publicity, and learning platforms such as WebCT, which are based on the notion of Western-style efficiency, are not necessarily appropriate tools for international groups of learners, even though one of the main driving forces of Internet-based learning is internationalization of education” (p.100).

Blogging, as a shared yet personal activity, walks a fine line between publicity and privacy. Anecdotal reports suggest that blogs have a different culture-of-use for Japanese and North American users (Matsumoto, 2008; Harden, 2007). The culture-ofuse of blogs deserves more analysis, in particular for the role it could play in developing intercultural communication competence. Since part of developing ICC involves, as Byram (1997) says, a “willingness to question the values and presuppositions in cultural practices” (p. 92) then questioning the values and presuppositions involved in blogging may be a sign of developing ICC. If a baseline culture-of-use for blogs in both Japanese and North American cultures could be established, and if participants begin to adopt the other group's culture-of-use, then such behaviour may indicate developing ICC.

5. The Study 5.1. THE POST BORDERS BLOGGING ENVIRONMENT The participants in the study interacted for a period of 6 weeks by writing, posting pictures, and developing diagrams in a Wordpress blogging environment. The project, titled “Post Borders,” was a secure discussion forum hosted by a major Western Canadian post-secondary institution, and used asynchronous communication, after the strong support that the mode has seen from researchers and practitioners in ICFLE (Haucks and Young, 2008; Ware and Kramsch, 2005). The Wordpress environment

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was also chosen in that it provided good support for participants to post pictures, hyperlinks, and video, enabling multiple modes of comprehensible input. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the Wordpress platform was its comment function, where participants could respond to each other's posts, and posters can respond to comments, a feature which can generate significantly long threads of discussion.

5.2. THE PARTICIPANTS 31 participants volunteered for the project, 22 from a major Japanese university, and 9 from a major Western Canadian university. The Japanese participants had been studying English in Japan for a number of years, and were, at the time of participation, preparing for a one-year academic study abroad experience at the Canadian university.

The Canadian participants had no such common plans for academic study in Japan, but nevertheless had studied Japanese language at a secondary and/or post-secondary level.

As a moderator of the project, the first author posted and commented along with the participants in the study. He was often the first to post on a new topic, and his posts often received comments. We felt that since his posts and comments were taken up and commented on by other participants, a post-experience self-analysis of his behaviour as a Canadian participant is valid.

5.3. THE TASKS “Post Borders” was built on a weekly schedule of discussion tasks. Given that even a small group of participants involved with asynchronous online communication can generate astounding amounts of text, tasks were chosen so that each participant could create a post or comment, and read all other posts and comments, within a reasonable time. In keeping with the informal approach outlined above, the tasks were light, friendly and approachable. Participants were asked to complete the tasks on a weekly schedule. The tasks were as follows: Task 1. Introductions. Post a brief introduction of yourself.

Task 2. Blogs. Post a link to another blog. What's interesting about it?

Task 3. Breakfast. Post a picture of your breakfast.

Task 4. One-minute stories. Using the flashcards, create a five-line, one-minute story.

Task 5. “Culture” mind map. Collaborate on the mind map tree diagram by adding nodes to the word “culture.”

When the task was assigned, the blog moderator modelled each task. Figure 1 shows the moderator’s introduction.

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Figure 1. Moderatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s introductory post.

In order to explore participants' language choice, no language use protocol was made explicit by either the moderator or negotiated among the participants themselves.

In addition to the tasks above, the project included a pre-project survey modeled after Furstenberg et al.'s CULTURA project (2001; Reeder, Nozawa & Berwick, 2009).

Through free-word associations, the survey asked participants about blogs, culture, Japan and Canada. However, instead of the syntactically challenging CULTURA questionnaire types such as sentence completion and troublesome situation reactions, participants were asked to self-report their intercultural experience and confidence on a scale.

6. Findings and Analysis Data for analysis was drawn from all posts and comments made by study participants and the moderator, as well as from responses to the preliminary survey. Results and analysis are organized by the research topics set out in the previous section.

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6.1. LANGUAGE CHOICE Participants' posts and comments were coded according to four linguistic choices: Base-language (BL): posts or comments made in the participant's base language (English for Canadian participants, Japanese for Japanese participants).

Target-language (TL): posts or comments made in the participant's desired language of study (English for Japanese participants or Japanese for Canadian participants).

Translation (Tr): posts or comments made in both English and Japanese where the same content was encoded in each language.

Code-switch (CS): posts or comments made in both English and Japanese where different content was encoded in each language.

TL-type posts were prominent in both posts and comments, and while Tr-type responses were nearly absent from all comments, accounting for only 16% of all comments, the Tr type accounted for 45% of all initial posts.

6.1.1. Base-language (BL) type posts For BL posts, the language of the comments was strongly related to the language of the post; Japanese base-language posts received Japanese base-language or Japanese targetlanguage replies, and English base-language posts received English base-language or Japanese target-language replies, with occasional code-switching type comments.

6.1.2. Target-language (TL) type posts For TL-type posts, the language of the comments seemed related to the language of the post, with Japanese target-language posts receiving mainly Japanese replies, but also English-language replies as well. Code-switching type comments were occasional in TL type post replies.

6.1.3. Translation (Tr) type posts Translation-type posts were the most common type of post. The comments were primarily target-language and code-switch type. Base-language replies to translationtype posts were rare.

6.1.4. Code-switching (CS) type posts CS posts, though infrequent, received between 0 and 4 comments. Comments were primarily CS-type, with occasional target-language or base-language comments. It seems that the language of the initial post was related to the language of the subsequent comments. This could be a case of participants adapting their language to the language choice of the poster, or it could be a case of participants relying on a single language type and then interacting only with others who post in that same type.

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As noted, the proportion of translation-type posts is much higher among the posts than among the comments. The difference can be accounted for by heavy commenting by a handful of students who were very much interested, and influential, in making CStype posts.

Raven, a Canadian participant, made a much higher percentage of CS-type posts than the average. Other students such as India, a Japanese participant, seem to have adopted Raven’s CS strategy, even though they did not use CS in previous posts. The following (abbreviated) exchange of comments to Raven’s introduction shows India’s switch from TL to CS-type posts: India: [TL-type] Hi, [Raven]![...]

It's nuce to meet you.

I also like EXILE, and I often watch thier TV program and listen to music [...]

Raven: [CS-type] [Tr: Hello, Ms. [India]!]

Nice to meet you, too.

I haven't seen their TV program yet. [...]

India: [TL-type, with Japanese name] [...]One of their TV program is EXILE ( ).

In that, they sing songs and talk freely with some guests, which is sometimes funny! [...]

Chi: [CS-type] Hi [Raven]!

Thank you for your comment:)* EXILE [...] [Tr: Wow, you like Exile, don’t you?]

Raven: [CS-type] [...]I know NEWS, too!

However, I am only familiar to

(

P) and

. [...] [Tr: About

that… does Ms.[Jin] watch Secret Storm?]

India: [CS-type] Yes! (^o^) [Tr: Tell us what you think.]

Yes. At first, it was so hard for me, too, but now I can say all of their name[...]

In this exchange, India first responds to Raven’s Tr-type post with a with a TLtype comment. After Raven’s turn with a CS-type comment, India makes a another TLtype comment, but this time with a Japanese name (“EXILE ( )”). After one more CS-type post from Raven, and another from Chi, India switches to a complete inter-sentential CS-type comment.

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This influential behaviour fits with Bullock and Toribio’s (2009) claim that codeswitching serves as an identifier of group solidarity. In the short exchange, participants found that they had a common interest (Japanese pop music) and began to adopt each other’s language conventions. The convention of code-switching, was neither exclusively Japanese nor English yet functioned like Byram’s (1997) common modus vivendi, a key element in developing ICC: participants had an interest in each other’s lives, and adapted their methods of communication toward a common ground.

6.2. INFORMALITY IN THE POSTS Posts and comments to several informal discussion topics were examined for evidence of developing ICC. In a total of 46 posts and 106 comments, there was no evidence of conflict or aggravated misunderstandings. While the pervasively genial attitude was not without its shortcomings, it was nevertheless associated with several aspects of ICC. 6.2.1. Breakfast Task Participants were asked to post a picture and a description of the breakfast that they had that morning. As a representation of daily life, the breakfast-sharing task gave us the opportunity to observe the choices that students made in terms of their attitudes toward each other's culture, as well as the personal identities that they chose to put forward.

The breakfast topic did not receive as many posts as either the blogging topic (discussed below) or the introductory posts. Nevertheless, four Canadian and two Japanese participants posted a description. Only one breakfast could be said to be culturally distinctive: “ BB,” a ready-made-in-Japan breakfast drink that is not widely available outside the country. The benefits of this breakfast were outlined by a Japanese participant, who enjoyed its convenience. The BB post received three comments from Canadian students, who asked a few questions about the drink, and suggested some places in Canada where it could be found. Despite the apparent triviality of discussing a breakfast drink, and despite the possible stigma of discussing this in a university setting, the exchange demonstrated a development in ICC; As Byram (1997) suggests, interest in the daily life of others can promote beneficial ICC attitudes.

Also generating some commenting was Violet’s (Canadian participant) breakfast, which involved chicken, rice, cucumbers and tomatoes. Regardless of whether the breakfast was distinctively Canadian or Japanese, it was obviously healthy, and this feature was the basis for an exchange between Violet and Day, a Japanese student. Day asked, in English, for ways to eat healthily, and Violet responded with a few tips in English. Day probably had ample resources for Japanese-style healthy eating, but her question represented an instance of positive ICC; she was looking for alternative explanations, and showed a genuine interest in Karen's point of view on the subject as she reframed the task into the question of what was a healthy breakfast.

6.2.2. Blogging Task Not all interaction in the project developed, or even demonstrated, ICC. The open, “ecological” (Basharina, 2009) nature of the tasks allowed participants a good deal of freedom within the task outline to discuss and even reframe a variety of topics, and to

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comment or not on whichever topics they chose. Because of this open approach, many discussions gravitated toward Japanese popular culture to an intractable degree.

The blogging topic was a particularly strong case. Participants were asked to post a link to a blog that they thought was interesting. The geographic origin or language of the blog was not specified in the task outline. However, Canadian students posted about Japanese blogs 50% of the time, while Japanese students posted only about Japanese blogs. Although posting about a blog tends toward a statement of preference, and may not qualify as evidence within Byram's model (which looks for evidence in observable action) the disparity in behaviour between the two groups is worth examination. It seems that in the blogging task, the Canadian participants demonstrated some element of ICC, namely an interest in the daily life of others and the other’s point of view, but the task did not elicit a similar response from the Japanese participants.

In the pre-project survey participants were asked to write three words that they associated with the prompt word “blog” which were placed by content analysis into two conceptual sets: words that related to privacy, and words that related to publicity, such as share, communication, or exchange. The findings are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Participants’ responses to survey prompt « blog » by type.

Canadian participants, word count

Japanese participants, word count

diary-private-secret

2

5

share-communication-exchangeconversation

5

3

Word set

Analysis of the free-word association question gave results that seem to be in line with current culture-of-use theory. While both groups commented on the public-private phenomenon of blogging, Canadian participants reported fewer “privacy”-type words than Japanese participants. In addition the complimentary case is also true; Canadian participants reported more “public”-type words than Japanese participants. This suggests that the two groups had different notions of the role of a blog; perhaps for the Canadian participants, blogs are for publicity and sharing, while the Japanese participants’ responses seem to indicate that for them, blogs function as a personal diary-type activity (despite the fact that they are posted in a highly public medium).

The pattern was repeated in participants’ responses to the blogging topic, where participants were asked to post a link to their favourite blog. The linked blogs were placed into two broad categories: blogs that were concerned with the daily activities of a single person (“personal” blogs) and blogs that dealt with either impersonal topics (such as cooking) or dealt with multiple people (such as general celebrity blogs).

Of the six links posted by Japanese participants, all led to “personal” blogs about young Japanese women. The focus of each blog was clearly demonstrated in their headers, an example of which appears in Figure 4.

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Figure 4. Maeda Atsuko Official Blog header. Reprinted from ameblo.jp/atuko-maeda Featuring prominently in each header was a bold stylized image of each blogger, clearly indicating that the blog is exclusively concerned with the very person immortalized at the top of the page. Although the sample of Japanese participantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; contributions is small and cannot be reliably generalized beyond the population of the study, it is a fair point of comparison against the Canadian participantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; contributions.

Of the six links posted by Canadian participants, two led to personal blogs and four led to non-personal blogs. One blog posted by a Canadian participant appears in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Drool over desserts header. Reprinted from fuckyeahdesserts.tumblr.com

Figure 6. Tokyohive header. Reprinted from www.tokyohive.com

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Figure 7. Suzanne’s Blog header. Reprinted from plaza.rakuten.co.jp/zannsu Only one of the Canadians’ blog headers bore any resemblance to the blogs headers in the previous group (Fig. 7), which we discuss below. The only other blog with human figures represented is Tokyohive, (Fig 6) which differs from the previous group’s headers in that it represents multiple figures, and that the text does not necessarily tell the name of the figure. However, Tokyohive’s header does a good job of describing the purpose of the blog: it is an agglomeration of Japanese celebrity news.

An analysis of the type of blogs linked to by the participants seems to support the culture-of-use pattern that is suggested by the survey data, and generally supported by Thorne’s (2006) culture-of use theory. Since the task asked “Got a blog you like? Post a link” without defining what kind of website would constitute a blog, the participants’ responses show what each group of participant believes to be, for them, a prototypical blog. Japanese participants seemed to show that personal diary-type websites were prototypical blogs, while Canadian participants tended to show that informative or nonpersonal entertainment website were prototypical blogs.

If these generalizations about culture-of-use hold true, then in terms of Byram’s ICC, a move away from the base culture-of-use toward the target culture-of-use would constitute a development in ICC attitude. This connection seemed to hold true in observations of participant’s behavior. One link in particular pointed to a blog that did not fit within the group norms. Suzanne’s Blog Zannsu (Fig.7) is a personal blog linked to by a Canadian participant. However, this participant demonstrated among the highest levels of ICC, evidenced in other behavior. Throughout the project this particular Canadian participant posted extensively in Japanese, used creative code-switching, and had one of the highest levels of participation. Further, the complementary case is true; participants like Violet who posted links to highly prototypical blogs had relatively low levels of ICC, evidenced by a large percentage of base-language posts and overall lower levels of participation in discussions. Although this pattern does not support the claim that participants’ ICC developed as a result of the blogging task, the anomaly in cultureof-use as an index of ICC offers a descriptively-consistent explanation.

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7. Conclusions and Limitations It is certainly the case that “the experience of communicating and interacting in interculturally competent ways is difficult to describe in its complexity” (Byram, 1997, p. 105). Evidence for ICC is subjective and multiply interpretable, and the observable behaviour is influenced by a number of factors unrelated to ICC. It is a limitation of this brief study that a more extensive assay and rigorous analysis of the participants’ behavior was not possible.

Nevertheless, a few tentative conclusions can be made about the effects of blogging on ICC. Contrary to the advice of many ICFLE researchers, it does not appear necessary in all cases to explicitly define language use protocol, and in some cases leaving the protocol undefined can be beneficial. We found that giving participants the option to use base-language, target language, translation or code switching can be beneficial, in that it serves as a venue for group solidarity that is not available when a language protocol is fixed. The study found that informal, approachable tasks can aid participants’ ICC in terms of an interest in the Other’s daily life. Finally, we found that participants seemed to approach blogging environments with different cultures-of-use, and that stepping outside the respective cultures-of-use was related to ICC.

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TWO SCREEN VIEWING AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS Exploring the invisible backchannel of TV viewing MARK D. JOHNS Associate Professor of Communication Studies Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, USA

Abstract. Use of social networks to create a real-time backchannel of communication among viewers of television programs has been documented, and has been termed â&#x20AC;&#x153;two-screen viewing,â&#x20AC;? with one screen devoted to the program being watched, and a second screen (usually a laptop, tablet, or cell/mobile phone) devoted to maintaining the backchannel. Prior research has examined twoscreen viewing through content analysis of social media posts. However, little has been done to explore the way in which two screen viewing qualitatively changes the viewing experience, or to understand how this behavior contributes to the construction or maintenance of social relationships. Couch (1992) noted that social interaction require a shared focus, a social objective, and congruent functional identities. The first screen program provides the shared focus. Using online interviews, this small pilot project seeks to discover whether social objectives and congruent functional identities are established through two-screen viewing. That is, the study explores how one might go about determining whether this communication actually contributes to social relationships or serves some other, asocial purpose. The present study is a small pilot project only. Preliminary data suggest that there are two types of two-screen viewing defined by different degrees of visible and invisible online practice.

1. Introduction The formation of fan communities online has been long established (Baym, 2000; Jenkins 1992, 2006). Members of these communities engage one another in conversation about various media programs, sharing observations, opinions, rumors, and fantasies about plots and characters. Fan cultures frequently engage in promoting variant readings of media texts, enabling and empowering individuals to make meanings from the program that were not intended by the producers (Fiske 1982, Jenkins 1992). Fiske (1982) suggested that these contested readings often remained invisible, while Jenkins (1992, 2006) suggests that the internet generally, and social networks in particular, allow these readings to circulate visibly.

More recently, use of social networks to create a real-time backchannel of communication among viewers of television programs has been documented (Boyd 2010; Doughty, Rowland, & Lawson 2011; Ferguson 2012). This has sometimes been

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termed the “two screen viewing” experience (BBC Click 2011; Skates 2011) -- with one screen devoted to the program being watched and a second screen (usually a laptop, tablet, or cell/mobile phone) devoted to maintaining the backchannel.

Dedicated social media applications are being marketed to facilitate two screen viewing. The recommendations of social network “friends” can be a powerful promotional tool. Also, the content of the backchannel can provide valuable insights into the type of viewers watching a given program and their immediate responses to it.

Thus, producers and broadcasters of media entertainment, and the advertisers who support them, have utilized the two-screen phenomenon both to learn about fan trends and to feed them (Cooper, 2012). GetGlue, miso, movie IQ, Disney SecondScreen, Zeebox, and StarPlayer are some of the applications, launched within the last two to three years, expressly for this purpose.

Real-time two-screen viewing has only recently been recognized as a phenomenon distinct from other forms of online fandom. Thus, the literature on this topic is not abundant. Much of the existing research has been administrative in nature, and remains proprietary. Previous academic studies (i.e. Ferguson 2012) have examined two-screen viewing through content analysis of tweets, status updates, or other public social media posts. However, little has been done to explore the way in which two screen viewing qualitatively changes the actual viewing experience, to understand how this behavior contributes to the construction or maintenance of social relationships, or to examine users’ motivations for engaging in these interactions. It is unclear to what extent the use of social networks in this way allows fan relationships, or alternative fan readings of texts, to become more openly visible. To better understand this relatively new and rapidly growing phenomenon, it is necessary to go beyond the instrumental questions about what is taking place, and to delve into the reasons why participants are engaging in these interactions and how such engagements contribute to users’ social matrixes.

2. Theoretical Foundation Carl Couch theorized that “a shared focus is established when interactants achieve mutual understanding that they are simultaneously attentive to some third object” (Couch 1992, p. 120), but Couch also noted that social interaction requires “a social objective, and ...congruent functional identities” (p. 119). In the context of media fandom, Couch might say that members of the audience for a particular media program or other content constitute an audience because of their shared focus on the program itself. However, as Walter Ong (1982) has noted, the concept of the media “audience” is an abstraction in that the members are not copresent and have no interaction with one another. Individuals attending to a television screen by themselves, or even in groups of two or three, are isolated from others who may attend to the same content at the same time. Thus, while the ratings tabulators may measure the “audience” for a particular program in the millions, in fact, there are millions of audiences comprising one or few persons.

Online social networks may have the potential to link these individuals into a true audience, but in order to do so, in accord with Couch’s (1992) theoretical assumptions, such networks must create congruent functional identities. Further, they must develop a

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shared social objective. That is, members of the social network must recognize one another as persons sharing the common focus on the particular media content who have some past history and common understanding of this content, as well as some developing expectation of planned future action. As Couch details, this past and future need not be elaborate. The shared past may be as little as a common knowledge of other episodes of the same series or of other programs in the same genre. The planned future action may be no little more than continued exchanges beyond the next commercial break, or the next scene in the program. But social relationships take place within time.

Simply watching a program, or even commenting upon a program, does not necessarily create a social relationship among audience members unless this temporal link is established and the social other is recognized.

In order to gain insight into the depth and quality of social relationships formed and maintained through two-screen viewing activities it is necessary to go beyond the mere content of the backchannel. One must understand how the act of engaging in this activity impacts both the viewing experience and the social experience of the viewers involved.

Prior research (e.g. Doughty, Rowland, & Lawson 2011; Ferguson 2012) has established that the two-screen experience involves a shared focus, but has failed to uncover clues to the meaning this activity has for the viewer, either in enhancing enjoyment of the program, and/or in enhancing the social relationships with other participants. Absent from these analyses has been information about the prior relationships existing among participants in two screen viewing, the level of shared purpose among participants, or the extent to which two-screen interactions lead to building ongoing relationships in the future. The present research investigates the level to which participants engage in establishing congruent identities and social objectives necessary to develop interactive relationships as they view, or whether other types of asocial motivations are in play. In other words, is the two screen experience only about the moment of viewing, or does this communication contribute to ongoing social relationships, deepening across time, among participants? And if relationships are not being established or maintained, then what other social or personal motivations lie behind this behavior? The purpose of this small pilot study is to determine if the theoretical perspective will be useful in analyzing this behavior, and to test whether the method will be adequate.

3. Method Through online interviews using a snowball sample, the way in which two-screen viewing qualitatively changes the actual viewing experience, and usersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; motivations for engaging in these interactions, are explored. The sample begins with persons known to me who have been observed posting second screen comments on social networks, and expands outward to their two-screen viewing partners. An interview protocol was developed including questions such as: How frequently do you engage in two-screen viewing?

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During what sorts of media programs are you most likely to engage in twoscreen viewing?

Are there specific persons to whom you address your comments during twoscreen viewing? If so, who are these persons and what is their relationship to you?

In what ways does two-screen viewing enhance or deepen relationships with these persons?

As you view media programs, do you watch a stream of comments posted by others, or do you only post comments of your own?

Are there particular types of programs during which you intentionally refrain from participating in two-screen viewing? If so, what are these?

On what type of device do you generally engage in two-screen viewing (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.)?

Do you post comments during the program itself, or do you wait for commercial breaks to engage with the social network?

Do you ever use a Tivo or other digital video device to stop the action in order to post comments or read the comments of others?

In what ways does two-screen viewing enhances your enjoyment of media programs?

Are there any ways in which two screen viewing detracts or distracts from the media program itself?

Follow-up questions were added as seemed appropriate or necessary in each interview.

4. Findings IRB approval for this project was been secured for a period beginning March 1, 2012.

A very small number of interviews were conducted (N=6) in order to test the interview protocol and explore whether the theory is appropriate. Results are, of course, preliminary with such a small number of interviews.

4.1. FREQUENCY For some respondents, engaging in two-screen viewing was dependent upon the schedule of certain television programs, and was carried out only during those specific broadcasts. For example, one responded, “The frequency is really dependent on programming schedules. I’d say several times throughout the year, maybe 10-15?”

Another wrote, “A few times a week. It depends on what’s on – the sport or the show, and if I know others are watching the same program.” Yet another responded, “I usually do it during Chicago Bears (football), College football or Chicago White Sox (baseball) games. I’ll be watching the game, but browsing online during the frequent commercials and breaks.”

Others, however, indicated an ongoing, almost continuous interaction with others in a viewing audience. One wrote, “Almost at a constant. Work demands simultaneous use of my computer and smartphone, and occasionally the TV. On weekends, the TV, computer and smartphone may all be on simultaneously.” Another indicated that she

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keeps up a running dialog with friends who share her interest in particular programs or actors; “Daily on a very low level (either my husband or myself looking up a quick fact on Wikipedia— someone’s name, what they’ve been in, facts about the story etc.).” It appears that while the two-screen viewing behavior is triggered by certain programming for some, others see the behavior as an extension of fan behavior in which they converse with other fans, through social networks, about a program or series through the week, after the conclusion of one episode and in anticipation of the next.

4.2. PROGRAM CONTENT Indications in this pilot study point to participants selecting the programs in which they will engage in two-screen viewing according to the perceived preferences of their twoscreen viewing partners. Sports broadcasts were also more likely to be those in which two-screen viewing was engaged. One wrote, “Mostly live events like award shows or sporting events, plus highly popular premieres I think my peers will be watching at the same time.” Another responded, I do it with two things: major sporting events and television shows that my friends also watch. That frequency is determined by how important an event is, either to the popular consciousness or to my close group of friends that I know will also be engaged in it at the same time. Although a football game, for example, may have some importance to me (but not to my friends), I don’t often participate in two screen viewing if I am simply going to be shouting at myself, so to speak.

Political programs or news events also seem to play a role in two-screen viewing, at least for some. These might also be in the category of “live events,” but seemed to occupy a special place in this presidential primary season. One wrote, “Awards shows, presidential debates or speeches, shows that a majority of our friends also watch.” Yet another suggested that personal two-screen viewing was sports related, while twoscreen viewing during work hours tended to involve politics: “My ‘free-time’ twoscreen viewing is primarily dominated by sporting events. I share my opinions via social networking sites with other sports fans. At work, CSPAN is typically on the TV so I can keep tabs on current Hill happenings while going about daily computer business, emails.”

However, others sought to avoid the political realm. One wrote, “I probably tend to avoid two-screen viewing related politics.” Another elaborated, In general, but not always, I will not -personally- post about divisive topics or developing political events such as presidential debates (although I do re-post others’ posts from time to time). Posting about divisive topics only prompts flamewars and attracts online trolls. I also learned in a college course that employers do judge employees based on their social media posts, so I stick to sporting events -lighthearted disagreement is fun. Politics is never lighthearted. Or fun.

While some appeared to look forward to sharing favorite dramatic programs with two-screen partners, others seem to want to refrain from dividing their attention and to concentrate fully on certain programs. One wrote, “In our house I think it goes without saying that a 2nd screen will be out during something like the Super Bowl or Oscars, but that phone/computer use should be kept to a minimum during a Monday night

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viewing of Mad Men.” Another was sensitive to this desire among friends, noting, “Many of my friends watch serial dramas, such as Mad Men and Justified. However, with real-life getting in the way of viewing, we are often forced to watch these at different times, and I do my friends the courtesy of not commenting on them when I’m watching them.”

4.3. TWO-SCREEN VIEWING PARTNERS Participants in two-screen viewing appear to fall into two camps; the most prevalent seem to be those who share comments only with a select group of known individuals, but there are also those who seek to play to crowds of strangers with their comments.

Among the former camp, one respondent wrote, “Yes: [name of specific individual]; we fundamentally disagree about the NFC North, but shoot barbs at each other through Twitter and Facebook. All in good fun.” Another wrote, “I direct my comments to people on my Twitter stream who I either know or assume are watching the same sporting event as me. They are a mix of personal friends and people I’ve met online.” Yet another wrote, “I interact with people I’m already ‘following’ on Twitter, and mostly those who I’m friends with in ‘real life’. I’ve never participated in twoscreen viewing conversations with anyone I wasn’t already following.”

Among those who seek a wider audience, one wrote, “The persons I share comments with during my personal two-screen viewing time includes a large swath of both strangers and acquaintances. Whoever happens to be using the same social media platforms as me during the event will see my posts. Some are strangers who have subscribed to my posts, others are friends.” Another described her partners very generally; “Most of my two-screen interaction is aimed towards Twitter and I would say that the majority of my followers are 23-30 y.o females.”

4.4. SHARED FOCUS Participants in this study were asked, “As you view media programs, do you watch a stream of comments posted by others, or do you only post comments of your own?”

The purpose of this question was to assess the degree to which participants in twoscreen viewing seek to engage in actual social interaction. That is, in Couch’s (1992) terms, do they seek to create both a shared focus, as well as some developing expectation of planned future action? Overwhelmingly, respondents indicated involvement with others by reading, as well as by contributing. However, there is some effort to attend only to certain comments, and not those of the entire audience.

Participants are selective in their engagement.

One responded, “I filter the stream of comments using my own lists of friends and through hashtags. I post comments of my own and also comment on other viewer’s posts.” Another wrote, “I do read and comment on posts by others, if they are relevant to the posts I am sharing. I even share others’ posts with my own group of followers, if I deem them to be sufficiently witty or insightful. My ego enjoys being the absolute arbiter of useful information.” Yet another wrote, “During larger events I keep tabs on what others are saying.” But one respondent appeared to be more inclined to strictly broadcast his own thoughts rather than engage with others, writing, “I’ll read them if available...they literally need to be in front of my face, I don’t seek them. The frequent

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comments and illegible posts from NFL.com has taught me to keep my expectations low.”

4.5. USE OF TECHNOLOGY Respondents seemed to have no preference for the second screen device of choice for use while viewing television broadcasts. Many switch among several devices as may be convenient. Surprisingly, however, there seems to be a slight preference for fullkeyboard laptops over the phones or tablets typically envisioned as the second screen.

One wrote, “Typically iPhone or iPad but if I’m live Tweeting something I prefer my Ultrabook as I prefer to have multiple tabs open. I really like the apps that are being developed for second screen viewing---I think they have a lot of potential.” Another wrote, “Generally a laptop but sometimes a phone.” Another wrote, It used to be my phone, but since I bought an iPad, I find myself using that more.

There are apps to monitor multiple feeds at once (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), so if I do feel like participating in a Facebook topic, along with Twitter which is my primary outlet, I can do both. On the iPhone, you have to flip back and forth between apps. I don’t own a laptop anymore, and my desktop is in another room and used purely for work.

Similarly, respondents tended to eschew the use of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs, one brand of which is Tivo) or other recording and time-shifting devices. One explained, “I pride myself in my real-time posts. I’ve been re-posted by much more widely-viewed “sports aggregators.” Not keeping up with the live action would lose any chance at having my posts re-posted. The goal is to be part of the discussion, not mopping up afterward.” Another stated, “I would never stop a show to simply read what others think about it - I do that in real time. If I delay it, I may read ahead of the feed (in real time) while the program lags and unintentionally spoil something for myself.” Yet another simply wrote, “I own a Tivo but do not use it for that purpose.”

4.6. TIMING Respondents appeared to be more or less equally divided between those who wait for commercial breaks to write comments, and those who post comments during the program itself. One wrote, “I try to post in real time.” Another explained in detail, Primarily during the program. I base a lot of my comments on snarky humor and observation, and those observations mean nothing if they occur 15 minutes after the event happened on-screen. The nature of an instant social network like Twitter is talking about something while it’s happening. I see this as no different than watching a movie with my friends -- if I were to comment on something funny 15 minutes after it happened and the movie has long since moved past it, that would be an annoyance to my friends. But if there’s an overarching theme I’d like to point out in the episode, or an aside that may have something to do with what I think will happen next..., I post those anytime they come to my mind, whether it’s during the program, or in commercial.

Two others, however, did not wish to chance missing something in the program as they posted. One responded, “I usually wait until commercials. The commentary on the

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sporting event is secondary to the action.” Another, “I prefer to wait for breaks or commercials, but if something exciting enough happened, I really can’t help myself.”

4.7. ENHANDCED VIEWING Respondents were asked, “In what way would you say that two-screen viewing enhances your enjoyment of media programs?” Most responded at some length to this interview question, or to follow-up questions posed in the interviews. Most pointed to the creation of a virtual community surrounding the broadcast. One wrote, “It tends to make me feel like I’m actually watching the program with other people, even though we aren’t physically in the same room together. I enjoy the interactive element and the conversation with my peers.” Another responded, “Humans are social creatures, and I think that we find natural enjoyment in sharing our opinions. The fact that one can converse with more people than whoever happens to be sitting nearby at the bar just multiplies the effect and enriches the viewing experience. It’s fun!” Yet another wrote, “It allows me to participate in a collective consciousness with friends who are likeminded, despite us being in different places. It creates a friend experience with anyone online.”

Similarly, respondents mentioned the ability to express emotions with others who may be reacting in a similar way. One wrote, “It’s also a good way to vent when watching a frustrating game.” Another, “I get to know what others think or are thinking during the show/game, if that particular penalty or call was as bullshit as I thought it was, and to brag/lament about my team’s fortunes.”

Another theme in these responses had to do with the sharing of information. Some appreciated receiving background information on the backchannel, such as the one who wrote, “I enjoy seeing the thoughts of other people who are watching the same game as me. Sometimes there are angles that I haven’t considered. As a college basketball blogger, it’s interesting to get perspectives from people who are also engaged in viewing the game.” Another indicated a combination of information and socialization, writing, [The] ability to quickly look up a fact to answer a question you have can enhance your understanding of the program, story-line etc. But when engaging in secondscreen viewing for the purpose of social media interaction I think the benefit is enhanced interaction with others---it can make you feel like you are interacting with others socially even though you haven’t left your house (which is probably good and bad), it can also enhance your knowledge of the topic since you are viewing other’s opinions/thoughts and also perhaps thinking about things on a deeper level than you would be if you were simply watching the program.

4.7. DISTRACTIONS Respondents were asked, “Are there any ways in which two screen viewing detracts or distracts from the media program itself?” Universally, they answered that the distractions are minor compared to the benefits they perceive. One wrote, “I think there’s always the risk that you’re going to miss something while you’re typing----but in most aspects I think it enhances your experience.” Another responded, “When commenting, especially during sports, you run the risk of missing an important or

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exciting play. However, with things like Tivo it’s easier to go back and review events you may have missed.” And yet another, “Occasionally I’ll miss something, but modern TV loves to reiterate itself, so there’s always repeats.”

5. Discussion In light of Carl Couch’s (1992) requirements that social interaction requires a shared focus, a social objective, congruent functional identities, and planned future action, the present study is inconclusive as to whether or not true social interaction takes place in all instances of two-screen viewing. Clearly, those who engage in this behavior with previously identified, known individuals at set times (during particular or pre-arranged television programs or sporting events) have fulfilled all of Couch’s requirements for complete social interaction. This is the majority of respondents in this small pilot study.

An additional feature is that these networks of individuals become visible not only to one another, but to others who have access to the Twitter stream or Facebook status posts. Depending on the privacy features employed, this may be true whether or not the individuals involved desire to make their association visible.

However, others have suggested in their responses that they post comments with little or no reference to the comments of others. Other respondents have indicated that they post comments to widely read forums read my large numbers of essentially unknown or even anonymous audience members. In these instances, it is less than clear that Couch’s conditions for social interaction are being met, and the present study does not supply sufficient data to make a determination.

Further, if some are participating in two-screen viewing only in the mode of “broadcasting” comments to unknown others, without social interaction, if relationships are not being established or maintained, the present study provides little or no indication of what other social or personal motivations lie behind this behavior. Some of the responses hint that having a post picked up and repeated by others with a larger following makes visible the expertise of the one originating the post, and enhances that person’s prestige among other fans. This points in the direction of a uses and gratifications type of study, which was not the direction of these interviews.

At least one respondent mentioned the use of “snarky humor” on the backchannel, suggesting the possibility of mocking or questioning the producers in the way they have presented their storylines or the way a team is playing its game. This points to the possibility of alternative readings of the media text being suggested or developed through the two-screen viewing process. If this is the case, the social network may make these alternative readings visible in ways not generally done in real time heretofore. However, the questions posed did not explore this sufficiently.

In the present study, at least four the respondents are male, one is female, and one unknown. Responses did not betray noticeable gender differences in behavior or levels of social interaction, but with such a small number of interview subjects, it is difficult to know with any certainty if gender plays a role in how two-screen viewing is used.

Similarly, there were no questions regarding race or ethnicity, and all respondents had email addresses pointing to U.S. locations. As the research continues, a greater effort will be necessary to explore this phenomenon in more diverse populations.

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6. Conclusion As a pilot study, this small investigation verifies that two-screen viewing is an important behavior for study. However, there is reason to suspect that some of the interview questions will need to be adjusted going forward. Issues of technology used appear to be irrelevant, as respondents do not consistently use any one platform, nor does the selection of platform (laptop, tablet, or smartphone) appear to affect the basic behavior in any meaningful way. Similarly, while some report using digital video recorders, such as Tivo, to rewind the live broadcast when something is missed, no one indicated time-shifting as a factor. In order to enjoy the experience of interacting with other viewers, it is necessary to watch the broadcast live or real time, and not delayed.

At least one respondent mentioned the dedicated applications becoming available for two-screen viewing (such as GetGlue, miso, Zeebox, and others), and the employment (or not) of these applications would certainly be more important to understanding how two-screen viewing is being carried out than information about the hardware. Because these applications are less popular than social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, using them would make the interaction less visible and places the conversation in venues under the powerful control of producers and advertisers, who are the builders and promoters of the applications.

Conversely, in view of Couchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (1992) theoretical framework for examining this phenomenon, the questions posed to interview subjects in the pilot study do not focus sufficiently on the social relationships created or sustained by two-screen viewing.

Going forward in this research it will be necessary to develop interview questions that address the nature of the relationships between the interview subjects and those with whom they interact in two-screen viewing. There are hints, in this preliminary data, that while most tend to share their comments with a relatively invisible few persons with whom they are already well-acquainted, others are striving for highly visible, widespread recognition of their fan knowledge and perceptive observations. The distinctions between these two types of two-screen viewing need to be better understood, and interview questions need to be formulated that will enable this information to be gained.

By design, this small pilot study is extremely limited and few conclusions can be drawn from such a small number of respondents. While two-screen viewing warrants further investigation, the primary benefit of the present study is to guide and refocus the ongoing research.

References Baym, N. K. (2000). Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. (New Media Cultures series). Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.

BBC Click (2011, November 18). The phenomenon of two screen viewing (Video clip).

Retrieved February 9, 2012 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/ 9640887.stm Boyd, E. B. (2010, November 10). Twitter Drives Crowds Back to Must-See, Live, Appointment TV. Retrieved February 8, 2012, from http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1701701/print

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Cooper, S. (2012, February 7). Social Entertainment Startup GetGlue Corrals Fans for Advertisers. Bloomberg. Retrieved February 9, 2012, from http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/print/2012-02-07/social-entertainment-startup-getglue-corrals-fans-foradvertisers.html.

Couch, C. J. (1992). Toward a Formal Theory of Social Processes. Symbolic Interaction, 15(2), 117-134. doi:10.1525/si.1992.15.2.117.

Doughty, M., Rowland, D., & Lawson, S. (2011). Co-Viewing Live TV with Digital Backchannel Streams. EuroITV ‘11: Proceedings of the International Interactive TV & Video Conference (pp. 141-144). Presented at the ACM International Interactive TV & Video Conference, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal: ACM. doi:10.1145/2000119.2000147.

Ferguson, D. (2012). The trivial pursuits of mass audiences using social media: A content analysis of Facebook wall posts by fans of top-trending television programs. In H. Noor AlDeen & J. A. Hendricks (Eds.), Social Media: Usage and Impact (pp. 39-56). Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books.

Fiske, J. (1982). Introduction to communication studies. London; New York: Methuen.

Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Skates, S. (2011, February 23). Two-Screen Viewing Enhances TV Experience? MusicRow Nashville’s Music Industry Publication. Retrieved February 9, 2012, from http://www.musicrow.com/2011/02/two-screen-viewing-enchances-tv-experience/print/

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REGIONAL LANGUAGES ON WIKIPEDIA Venetian Wikipediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s user interaction over time ASTA ZELENKAUSKAITE Fondazione Bruno Kessler Via Sommarive 18, Trento, Italy astaze@gmail.com AND PAOLO MASSA Fondazione Bruno Kessler Via Sommarive 18, Trento, Italy paolo@gnuband.org

Abstract. Given that little is known about regional language user interaction practices on Wikipedia, this study analyzed content creation process, user social interaction and exchanged content over the course of the existence of Venetian Wikipedia. Content of and user interactions over time on Venetian Wikipedia exhibit practices shared within larger Wikipedia communities and display behaviors that are pertinent to this specific community. Shared practices with other Wikipedias (eg. English Wikipedia) included coordination content as a dominant category of exchanged content, user-role based structure where and most active communicators are administrators was another shared feature, as well as socialization tactics to involve users in online projects. While Venetian Wikipedia stood out for its geographically-linked users who emphasized their regional identity. User exchanges over time spilled over from online to offline domains. This analysis provides a different side of Wikipedia collaboration which is based on creation, maintenance, and negotiation of the content but also shows engagement into interpersonal communication. Thus, this study exemplifies how regional language Wikipedias provide ways to their users not only to preserve their cultural heritage through the language use on regional language Wikipedia space and connect through shared contents of interest, but also, how it could serve as a community maintenance platform that unifies users with shared goals and extends communication to offline realm.

1. Multilingual Wikipedia Internet plays a complex role in representing linguistic communities. On one hand, Internet potentially discourages the use of smaller languages, due to the global spread

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of the Internet and the predominant use of English to communicate online. On the other hand, due to accessibility, convenience the Internet proposes new opportunities for the speakers of smaller languages (Danet & Herring, 2003). Wikipedia is no exception in this trend. Despite Wikipedia it is featured in 265 languages, larger Wikipediasâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;such as the Wikipedia in English language, have received mostly scholarly attention (see Bryant et al., 2005; Choi et al., 2007, Kittur et al., 2007; Viegas et al. 2004, 2007).

Other larger Wikipedias (by the number of speakers) that attracted researcher attention include Chinese version of Wikipedia where conflict management in content edition was analyzed (Liao, 2009), differences in content of Polish and English Wikipedia were found by Callahan and Herring (2011). Cross-cultural, cross-linguistic studies include measurement of power dimension between French, German, Japanese and Dutch Wikipedias (Pfeil et al., 2006). Hara and colleagues (Hara et al., 2010) studied crosscultural behaviors on talk (TP), user talk (UTP) in four languages that differ in size and culture English, Hebrew, Japanese, and Malay. Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias were compared by Stivilia and colleagues (2007).

Among 265 language varieties present on Wikipedia, in the European context alone, there are at least 31 Wikipedias in regional linguistic varieties that are featured on Wikipedia. Given that little is known about content creation in regional-language Wikipedia user interaction and development, the question of that arises is what are the communicative practices that drive regional language communities and how these communities evolved over time? What are the goals of such user interactions? Are there any particular practices that evolve in a regional language context?

Based on the number of articles (that go beyond 5000) and number of speakers that count more than 1 million, the following table summarizes the top 6 list:1 Table 1. Languages spoken in European context with more than 1 M speakers and more than 5000 articles. abbreviated Wikipedia's name als bar vec lmo pms sco

Language Alemannic Bavarian Venetian Lombard Piedmontese Scots

Speakers in million (M) 10 M 12 M 2M 3M 2M 2M

editors per speaker 2 2 3 3 4 5

views per hour 1,738 1,248 952 1,482 975 799

article count 10,998 5,176 9,302 23,733 50,061 8,151

As it is exemplified in Table 1, among the largest by number of users and produced articles, are regional languages in European context are present in Italy and Germany.

Italian northern regional linguistic varieties â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Venetian, Lombard and Piedmontese constitute the majority of top 5 categories. As Table 1 shows, regional languages on Wikipedia are denoted with a tree-letter abbreviation (eg. Ven for Venetian), compared to standard languages that are denoted by a two-letter abbreviations (eg. en for English).

1

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

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Thus, to study user interaction and development regional language communities of the time, this study is based on the analysis on Venetian language, which is spoken in the Northeast of Italy and is spoken by around 2 million of people and consists of around nine thousand produced articles. Among other Wikipedia in linguistic varieties, Venetian Wikipedia is positioned among the top 12 Wikipedias that contain more than 5000 written article contents.2 Therefore, Venetian Wikipedia represents a regional language variety of Wikipedia in the European context with a quite larger amount of article content produced in this language and an average number of editors per speaker.

It was established in 2005, five years after English Wikipedia--the first Wikipedia--was first edited.

The goal of this study is better understand interactional exchanges between community members by studying the social aspects of the exchanges in user talk pages of Venetian Wikipedia. To do so, this study further analyzed the contents that have been especially pertinent to the interpersonal exchanges which were not directly related to Wikipedia content.

1.1. USER CONTRIBUTIONS TO WIKIPEDIA Wikipedia is a large, task-focused community whose goal is to produce a free online encyclopedia. Thus, it is highly dependent on a constant user contribution and ability to attract new members. However, it is the users who are the ones who enable to produce vast amount of contents. As such, Wikipedia has been considered as an exemplar case of online collaboration since there are millions of volunteer users who contribute to the content creation as well as maintenance, monitoring and cleaning this knowledge depository (Kittur et al., 2007; Viegas et al., 2007). The uniqueness of Wikipedia lies in the twofold data of this online technology. It is known as a large knowledge depository where millions of volunteers daily contribute by creating and managing the content which is comparable to print-based genre of encyclopedia (Emigh & Herring, 2005).

Based on the idea that Wikipedia users engage into practices of editing which in itself is not self-explanatory, users face the challenge to learn how to better contribute to the project. In offline working environments, there has been observed a great disparity between espoused practice and actual practice which is implemented that despite specified manuals and guidelines that delimit the work (Brown & Duguid, 1991). Therefore, there is a great need for users to learn how to effectively implement the rules and thus increment the level of satisfaction to receive the best results in a shorter amount of time. It has been argued that there are three central features that are determinant in working environments that truly provide the space of experience sharing. Those are there overlapping categories that occur through narration, collaboration and social construction (Brown & Duguid, 1991). Thus, in parallel, it would be possible to hypothesize that user interaction through narration in Wikipedia contexts could be of a considerable importance for its community development. User talk pages have been considered as spaces where users can exchange information as well as engage into the narration process described by Brown and Duguid in other working settings (Brown & Duguid, 1991). Thus, socialization through interpersonal context would be a potentially important aspect to Wikipedia contributors. Similarly, 2

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

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given the need to maintain the community efforts for quality contributions, it has been argued that especially for newcomers, it is important to provide appropriate socialization tactics such as welcoming, personal content, requests to encourage members to stay within a community (Choi et al., 2008). Thus, the first question was formulated: RQ1: What were the meanings that were constructed through exchanged content?

RQ1a: What are social construction strategies formed through positive content?

Content in Wikipedia is produced by the user consensus; Wikipedia also provides access to the interaction that accompanies content production consensus part--which occurs in article talk pages, as well as interpersonal interaction between users which occurs in user talk pages (UTPs). Previous studies on English Wikipedia revealed that UTPs majority of the content exchange evolved around coordination (Viegas et. al., 2007). Given that little is know about the nature of user interaction in Wikipedia, previous research of Wikipedia talk pages pointed out the need for further more fine grained investigations of user exchanges in user talk pages (Viegas et al., 2007). Thus, this study primarily focused on the user interaction in user-talk pages. User talk pages (UTPs) â&#x20AC;&#x201C;defined as spaces which have been created to facilitate coordination process by allowing direct user-to-user communication. Wikipedia contrasts UTPs with other name spaces such as discussion pages where communication evolves around specific content. Every registered user automatically is assigned a user talk page. From the functional point of view, UTPs can be compared to other interfaces of interpersonal asynchronous communication such as email with the difference that all the records of exchanges are publically available and accessible.

1.1.1. Nature of user exchanges and community evolution over time Wikipediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collaboration is a well-structured space where users can contribute in various roles ranging from anonymous contributions (users identified by IP address through which their computer gets connected), as registered users (contributing with a created account and specific user name that a user chooses), administrators (elected by the peer members). Given that Wikipedia users represent different roles, collaboration dynamics might change, the goal of this study was to observe the development of the community over time. Based on this interest the following research questions were formulated: RQ2: How the interaction of Venetian Wikipedia community evolved over time?

RQ2a: Which user types become central in user talk page exchanges?

RQ2b: What are the meanings that users draw from the interaction via UTPs in this specific community and how they evolve over time?

2. Data and Methods Data for this study have been collected from Venetian Wikipedia by manually collecting messages from the user talk page of all users who received at least one message. Signatures of the users have been considered as delimiting units of a given message. This coding allowed to allocate the sender name and role as well as the

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receivers’ name and role. This extraction technique has been tested for its internal consistency (Massa, 2011).

Message exchange was gathered from user talk pages from the inception of Venetian Wikipedia in 2005 up to 31 December 2009. Total corpus that was considered in the study contained N=1786 messages and comprised all interactions between the users in user talk pages. The total number of messages included template messages – which were produced in a semi-automated way – most of which were welcome templates as well as warning templates (against vandalism acts). Messages that were not templates constituted N=800 of sample. Messages that included interpersonal exchanges constituted N=81 messages or 10.1% of the messages. To further analyze the types of messages, grounded theory approach was used to code the messages (Glasser & Strauss, 2009).

To answer the research question that aimed at analyzing the nature of the interpersonal interactions, quantitative computer-mediated discourse analysis content message analysis was conducted (Herring, 2004). All exchanged messages were coded by two coders following coding scheme that was used for English Wikipedia talk pages conducted by Viegas and colleagues that include categories such as coordination, request information, ask authorization, warning, personal content, other content (Viegas et al., 2007) and plotted longitudinally through the course of the years. Content analysis coding was manually conducted by two independent coders reaching an acceptable interrater reliability ranging from 75% to 90% of Krippendorff’s alpha for each coded category (Krippendorff, 2004). To answer Research question 1a, word frequency of positive content exchange words – thank you and welcome – were plotted over time.

To answer the research questions about the community development over time and the interactions between user types, the study was based on two methods. To observe interactions between users of different roles over time, social network analysis over time was applied by using network visualization graphs using Gephi software based on previous research on Wikipedia contribution representation (Lim et al., 2007). To answer research questions 2a and 2b, descriptive statistics of the number of users and the period of time they were actively present in UTPs was calculated.

3. Results 3.1. EXCHANGED CONTENT BETWEEN USERS Content analysis of the messages showed that majority of the messages 79% fell into coordination category (N=1209) and maintained its prominence over the years (2005=49; 2006=255; 2007=364; 2008=242; 2009=299) with especial increase in 2007.

Aside from the most prominent category – coordination, the remaining content categories show the following content distribution over time shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Frequency of content type exchange by the users over five years.

Figure 1 shows that in 2005 request info, personal messages and others were only present, while ask authorization and warnings were not exchanged among the users.

Thus, Figure 1 shows an overall trend where personal messages and request information categories are prominent in the first years of Venetian Wikipedia existence.

Personal messages were the highest category in 2006. While in 2009 personal messages decreased, warning and ask authorization categories became dominant. Warning messages have been particularly pronounced in this category showing a steep increase in the years 2008 and 2009.

3.2. NATURE OF THE EXCHANGED INTERPERSONAL CONTENT Personal messages were further analyzed based on grounded theory approach (Glasser & Strauss, 2009), to assess the social value associated with interpersonal exchanges between the user interpersonal communication exchange that occurred on UTPs. Such content constituted N=81 messages, that is 10.1% of all messages excluding template messages. The following broad themes emerged from the data: references to offline meetings, location-based identity, other.

3.2.1. References to offline meetings The interpersonal exchanges between the users contained references to the offline activities of the users of Venetian Wikipedia. There was a message thread that discussed the offline meeting that had to be arranged.

(1) Anca mi sarìa fe izse de véder fina mente che conbinemo qûalcosa. Par l'ora, par mi sarìa ben a sera, co che semo tuti senzsa inpegni. Va ben a e 8.00-8.30?

[Me too, I will be happy to see that we eventually make something. About the time, I prefer the evening, so that everyone is free. Would 8-8.30 pm be good?]

(2) Cusì no se semo catài...xe difizsie in efeti. Altro apuntamento? Maximillion Pegasus 18:37, 11 set 2006 (UTC) [At the end, we didn't meet ... actually it is quite difficult. Another meeting?]

(3) Benon par stasera a ora! Catemose a e 8, 8.30 masimo. Maximillion Pegasus 11:41, 12 set 2006 (UTC) [Tonight is fine! Let's meet at 8,8.30 pm at max.]

(4) Caro Semo o,

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son come al solito de corsa. Te saludo e torno a laorar. Speraria de andar a Castel del Piano, magari se vedemo ì. Ciao. Scriveme par iméil se te vol, o su Wikisource. 15:23, 25 gen 2008 (UTC) [Dear Semo o, As usual I'm busy. I send you my greetings and then go back to work. I hope to go a Castel del Piano [place], and maybe I will meet you there. Ciao. Send me and email if you want, or on Wikisource.]

Examples one through four shows that users coming from the same geographic region tried to arrange offline meeting which extended their online activities to offline realm.

3.2.2. Location-based identity Given that this Wikipedia is regional, moreover, it covers a quite small geographic location, thus users were trying to reach out the other members through personal identification: (5) Ciao, me ga dito Nick1915 che te si de Fontaniva anca ti! Ciao paesan! ;-) Sémo o (scrìvame) 19:40, 20 gen 2008 (UTC) [Hi, Nick1915 told me that you are from Fontaniva too! Hi paesan! ;-)] (6) Beh, varda ti, so' anca mi da Fontaniveta! Sto al Belgio par dirla tuta. :-D Sémo o (scrìvame) 20:19, 20 gen 2008 (UTC) [Well, I'm from Fontaniveta too! But I'm in Belgium actually. :-D] (7) To naltro Fontanivaro!! Te ga dito ben Nick1915 so un Fontanivaro doc! Pa l'exatezsa so da Fontaniveta... Co gavarò un poco de tenpo sistemarò un peo a voxe del nostro comune. Ciao --GatoSelvadego 19:58, 20 gen 2008 (UTC) [Wow, another one from Fontanariva!! Nick1015 was right, I'm an authentic guy from Fontanariva! To be exact, I'm from Fontaniveta... When I'll have some time, I'll fix some pages about our municipality.]

(8) Grasie, Semolo75, par el benvegnuo. Go deciso de dar un pico o contributo anca mi a tirar su sta wiki in veneto. Bisogna ke femo come e formighe e ke iutemo sta lingua a star viva e vegeta. Mi me contento de far le robe ke serve par tuti e pal Veneto (in sto caso) e dopo star kieto. Tasi e tira. Sarà parkè son 'n Alpin anca mi. Te saludo, ciao. Vajo [Thanks, Semolo75, for the welcome greeting. I've decided to provide a small contribution too in order to raise this wiki in Venetian. We should act like ants and keep this language alive and used. I'm happy to do what is needed by everyone and by Veneto (in this case) and then feel that I have done what I could. Be silent and keep working. Maybe it's because I'm an Alpin too.

Greetings.]

Examples 5 through 8 show how the regional identity was the unifying leitmotiv of the users. Regional referencing also indicates to the motivation which drives them to contributing to the Wikipedia in this regional language.

3.2.3. Other Other contents combined various themes that included positive feedback such as in the example 9.

(9) 6 forte --dario ^_^ (cossa ghe se?) 14:52, 13 giu 2007 (UTC) [You are cool]

This message also contained non standard typography “6” which is read as ‘sei’ in Italian which means – number six and ‘you are’. The other messages were of humorous nature such as example 10: (10) Laora!! che avon da pagarghe la pension a me nono!! Ciaooo --Jacobus 09:47, 23 luj 2008 (UTC).

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[Go back to work!! That we have to pay the pension to my grandfather!! Hi]

The others were greeting messages: (11) Bentornà, Vajotwo! Tuto ben li esami? Bona serada :) !--Marco 27 20:26, 31 Ago 2009 (UTC) [Welcome back, Vajotwo! Is everything ok with the exams? Enjoy the evening :) !]

3.1.4. Social construction strategies formed through positive content To identify social construction strategies formed through positive content that were related with community formation and development, the corpus of the total messages was analyzed by the word frequency of mentioning of positive emotional content – specifically focusing on the use of ‘thanks’ and ‘welcome’ – the content that is relevant to the corpus of Wikipedia.3 The results are summarized in Figures 2, 3.

Figure 2. Thanks over time.

Figure 3. Welcome over time.

Figures 2 and 3 show that overall, as the community grew over time and more frequent exchanged occurred between the users, the references to thanking and welcoming increased. This finding indicates the friendly nature of the exchanges between the users.

3.2. USER INTERACTION OVER TIME In order to assess the user prominence in communication over time, user interaction was plotted using social network analysis. The summary of the descriptive statistics of user interrelations over time is provided in Table 2.

Table 2. Users (nodes) and the number of messages (edges) over time.

3

Year

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

Users (nodes)

39

227

299

214

340

Messages (edges)

30

176

213

154

301

message frequency (weighted edges)

62

323

445

321

386

Wikipedia users engage into a practice where they greet new users, thus the content of “welcome” was treated as a relevant content.

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Table 2 summarizes the nodes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the number of users per year as well as messages exchanged between users over time. Table 2 comprises the users who received or sent at least one message. Also, the unidentifiable users (who did not leave the signature with their name) were not included in this study since it was not possible to identify their roles. Therefore, the users who did not engage in message exchange in user talk pages as well as the unidentifiable ones were not included in this table â&#x20AC;&#x201C; because the scope of this study which focused on the message exchange process between users. The results show that the community started out with relatively small number of users who exchanged approximately two messages while, the number of users increased ten times by 2009. The year 2007 shows a large increase in number of users as well as content exchanged among them.

3.2.1. User type centrality over time To assess the user centrality over time by roles, user interaction was plotted over time using social network analysis. Users have been colored by roles where dark purple represents administrators, red represents registered users, while green was used for anonymous users, and black represents bots. The size of the nodes is based on indegree centrality measurement: the bigger is the node, the larger is the number of messages received by the users. Social network construction by the users has been constructed based on the techniques described by Massa (2011).

Figure 4. Directed graph of UTPs of message exchange in 2005.

Figure 5. Directed graph of UTPs of message exchange in 2006.

Figure 4 represents the user interaction in user talk pages in the first year 2005. There were two administrators who had central roles in communication and they were the ones who were most actively engaged in messages exchange with the registered users.

Majority of the messages were the welcome messages greeting new users who joined the network. In 2006 (see Figure 5) the network evolved when new members of the community joined Venetian Wikipedia. The same two administrators remained central, with a new one L.V. who became more central. Some registered users also got more central by engaging in conversations more actively.

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Figure 6. Directed graph of UTPs of message exchange in 2007.

Figure 6 represents 2007 where the communication between the users got more active with less centered position of the first two users and with larger number of users who engaged in message exchange process.

Figure 7. Directed graph of UTPs of message exchange in 2008.

The year 2008 is similar to 2007 with slightly diminished activity by the users.

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Figure 8. Directed graph of UTPs of message exchange in 2009.

In the year 2009 two new members got central positions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Vajotwo (top left of the graph) and Marco27 (top left of the graph). Those two users - who were not administrators - formed a star network around them and engaged in more active conversations, possibly by sending out multiple welcome messages to the new users thus gaining the central role and marginalizing previously central administrators Semolo75 and Nick1915.

It is worth noting, that in none of the graphs anonymous users, nor bots become central or prominent members. This might be explained due to the fact that anonymous users were identified only with IP address which becomes each time unique when registered â&#x20AC;&#x201C; therefore it is very unlikely that the users engage into multiple conversations with an anonymous user besides the few vandalism warning messages directed to these users. To assess the average number of years that users contributed in Wikipediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s user talk pages, Table 3 was constructed.

Table 3. Number of users who contributed to UTPs from one to five years in Venetian Wikipedia. #active users

753

28

10

4

2

#years

1

2

3

4

5

Table 3 shows that vast majority of the users contributed something only during one year. And it was only two users who stayed for all the five years since the beginnings of this Wikipedia. Therefore, the community of Wikipedia consists of volunteers who are constantly changing with a very small number of core users who contribute for an extensive period of time. User activity has been also observed by the number of messages produced by a single member. The results are summarized in Table 4.

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Table 4. Proportion of messages received by users of Venetian Wikipedia. # of messages received # of users % of users

1

2

670 40 84.1 5.0

3

4

5

25 14 10 3.1 1.8 1.3

6 - 10 11- 20 21-40 41-100 101-250 ~500 12 1.5

10 1.3

4 0.5

6 0.8

4 0.5

1 0.1

Table 4 shows that majority of users received only one message and that it was only one user who received more than 500 messages. This analysis is cumulative, however, leads to consider that it is the small proportion of users who emerge as active ones â&#x20AC;&#x201C; consistently with the graphs over time. In order to analyze the nature of interpersonal exchanges, further thematic analysis was performed.

In addition to an overall representation of the users in Venetian, the study revealed how many unique users would exchange contents on User talk pages of Venetian Wikipedia. Table 5 summarizes the user flows of the users over the five years of the existence of this Wikipedia. Table 5 summarizes only active users who sent at least one messages.

Table 5. User flows over five years.

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

35

47

41

37

remained

3

8

12

9

left

4

24

30

31

32

39

29

28

Actual users

new users

7

Table 5 shows that the number of actual users remained quite constant since 2006, however, the community is formed by the core users who constituted a smaller portion of the users with the highest numbers of users who change over time.

4. Discussion The study was based on the analysis of Venetian user interaction on Wikipedia UTPs as ways to observe community interaction which goes beyond the content creation. The analysis, regarding user content exchange revealed communicative this regional language communityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s specificity as well as exchange traits present in other larger Wikipedias.

Venetian Wikipedia was engaged into exchanges that referred to offline activities thus extending existing community bonds to offline environments, in addition to coordination of content that was attested in English Wikipedia (Viegas et al., 2007). A more fine grained analysis of at the other categories revealed that personal messages and request for information were more likely to be used in the first years of Venetian Wikipedia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2006 and 2007 suggesting the emphasis on the interpersonal communicative value that emerged between its users in the first stages of this Wikipedia editing.

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Thus, this analysis shows quite a strong reference to the identity of the users related to the territory – Venetian region which was used as a stimulus and motivating point for the users to contribute to this specific Wikipedia in Venetian language. Interest in this regional locations of the users could be explained through the fact that Venetian Wikipedia is tightly restricted to the users located in a specific geographic area – in contrast to other larger Wikipedias – such as English Wikipedia where the unifying communality of the users is based on the knowledge of English language and less to the specific geographic location. In addition, Venetian region is small enough that users would potentially know each other and there is quite a small number of people who speak this language – therefore it is only because of the enthusiasm of this small community that this Wikipedia was created and to serve a relatively small population of users, thus, this study shows that Venetian Wikipedia editors could be considered as a community of practice with shared tasks and well-defined roles and who share knowledge and resources (Feenberg, 1993; Preece & Maloney-Krichmar, 2003; Wenger, 1998).

Similarly to larger Wikipedias such as English Wikipedia, social network analysis revealed that the central users in coordination process were administrators. However, while administrators were particularly important in initial phases of a community, yet in two years a larger number of registered users got involved into central positions of message exchange. Given that user talk pages allow for a direct communication with a specific user, most of the times these were the administrators who got involved into direct communication. This finding suggests that the administrators were the more experienced and/or had more executive power to address concerns of the other users.

Also, it is worth noting, that majority of interactions were based on a standard-semi automatic greeting message (in a form of welcome template) suggesting that administrators had a chance to be first to get engaged into interpersonal exchange with all the users who joined Venetian Wikipedia. Therefore, it is more likely that then users would refer to them in case they had questions.

This study shows that much effort has been placed by the community members to welcome and maintain new users to the platform by using techniques that have been identified in previous research in English Wikipedia – such as welcoming and personal content exchange (Choi et al., 2008). Consistent with previous research of English Wikipedia, the findings of the study situate members of Venetian Wikipedia as a community of practice that is based on professional exchange and contains personal components, however, exhibiting traits of regional community of practice.

5. Conclusion Broader implications of this study are the following. Given that regional language Wikipedia–Venetian Wikipedia–provides ways to their users not only to preserve their cultural heritage through the language use on regional language Wikipedia space and connect through shared contents of interest, but also, how it could serve as a community maintenance platform that unifies users with shared goals and extends communication to offline realm. By the virtue of collaboration process, and especially shared geographic location–Veneto region–this specific community of Wikipedia users

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engaged into communication that goes beyond the content related to Wikipedia – users used UTPs to coordinate offline meetings, express their emotions and discuss issues related to their offline lives – such as holidays. Through these shared experiences, the community of practice goes beyond anonymous online contributions – it acts as a group with shared experiences. Through analysis of interpersonal content, the community of practice with shared goals looks more similar to an online community that emphasizes not only information and discussion but also and they offer professionals emotional support consistent findings reported in previous studies (Moon & Sproull, 2000; Sproull & Faraj, 1997; Williams & Cothrel, 2000a).

This study shows that Wikipedia provides spaces for interpersonal communication that occur directly between the users. In contrast to common uses of Wikipedia as knowledge depository, users engage in interpersonal exchanges that go beyond content creation and edit wars. Users of smaller Wikipedias such as the one in Venetian language engage into interpersonal communication that makes it similar to online communities with the interpersonal exchange and trying to get to know the other contributors who share common interest and the need to contribute to this specific environment.

While, the study of Venetian Wikipedia contributes to the general understanding of Wikipedia as online collaborative space by revealing dynamics of the users in Wikipedia, users role analysis show similar patterns to previous findings such as users who stayed for different periods of time were involved in different levels of activities (see (Bryant et al., 2005) for examination of socialization tactics (eg. Choi et al., 2008); and interaction between novice and experienced users (see Zelenkauskaite & Massa, 2011 for the users of English Wikipedia), at the same time, Venetian Wikipedia sheds light on potential specificity of user exchange in this Wikipedia–where Venetian Wikipedia users got involved into interpersonal exchange that was tightly related to the geographic identity of the users. Future cross-language studies of Wikipedia should further investigate the question of cultural, geographical specificity of regional languages on Wikipedia to identify its common practices and potential benefits to regional language communities.

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M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 359-371.

REFLECTING UPON THE CHALLENGES OF BUILDING ONLINE COMMUNITY, OR: ‘A TECHIE’S GUIDE TO THE HELP DUMMIES NEED’ LEESA COSTELLO AND LELIA GREEN Edith Cowan University 270 Joondalup Drive, Joondalup, Western Australia

Abstract. This paper is less about the potentially therapeutic use of online community and more about communication between members of a research team: between those with digital/technical expertise, and those without. Academics are usually good at collaborating, and at seeking help, so it is not generally seen as a problem if an inter-disciplinary team needs to be assembled in pursuit of a shared research goal. Such collaboration requires a common language, however, and this paper is about the realisation that a shared language such that lay people can talk to technologists, and technologists to lay people, is not easily acquired. Indeed, this is an account of cultural attitudes towards technology and communication in the microcosm of the relationship between a social science researcher without web design skills and expert digital support staff who are technically excellent and used to working with researchers in their field. At the core of the discussion lies the notion of the competent brief, and the question about whose competency is reflected in that brief. Is it sufficient that the brief be conceptual and descriptive to a level that would persuade a granting agency to part with their money, for example, since that was the level at which the social science researcher began? Or does the brief have to be as highly technically literate as the website-constructing audience who plan to work from it? Is it appropriate to expect a digital professional to work from a descriptive brief and translate it into a technological one? If not, where can the parties concerned find an appropriate translator ready and skilled enough to correct the misalignment of expectations? This paper addresses that story.

1. Introduction For well over a decade the internet has been an important tool for delivering health interventions, often associated with broad-ranging policy and research initiatives (e.g.

Cassell et al., 1998; Webb, et al., 2010; Fox & Purcell, 2010). Our specific research interest has historically centred upon the idea of the ‘online community’ and the therapeutic benefits that such a community might provide for people who live with the effects of heart disease (Bonniface & Green, 2007). More recently it has expanded to include social networks.

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In the mid-2000s, the research organisation involved in the case study reported here, Edith Cowan University, successfully established a partnership with the National Heart Foundation (WA) to win grant funding from the Australian Research Council to investigate the possible value of an online community to recovering heart patients. The National Heart Foundation of Australia (WA) provided an ideal context for this research given their interest in delivering alternative forms of support for, and communication with, key stakeholders – including heart patients, carers and financial donors. This paper is not so much about community, however, or heart health, but is a retrospective investigation into the miscommunication between different parties and people with distinct and separate knowledge frameworks who were working together to turn a vision into reality. The main perspective, the ‘I’, is that of a social scientist, with a research Masters in Social Marketing, whose role on the project was to provide the data for a PhD in the construction of community.

Heartened by evidence that communities can flourish online (e.g. see Howard Rheingold’s 1993 account of The WELL) we set about providing a website for heart patients in order to determine if participants would construct their own community experience. Driven by the National Heart Foundation’s mission and current objectives, the success of the website was to be measured against two critical outcomes: 1) an increase in heart-healthy behaviours, and, 2) an increase in positive philanthropic attitudes and behaviours. The first priority of the research, however, was to investigate if online participants would construct an online community; one that ultimately increased their perception of support and reduced their feeling of isolation. While a Netnographic methodology (see Kozinets, 2010) guided the research process and enabled the research objectives to be successfully investigated, the establishment of the website - which would provide the opportunity for a community to flourish - was one of the more challenging aspects of undertaking the research.

2. The Concept of Community Back in 1993, Howard Rheingold (1993) defined virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (p. 5). The subjectivity implicit in the phrase “sufficient human feeling” is self-evident, and as such it may be easier to experience community than to define or measure it. Further, what might be experienced as community by one person might be something very different to another. Where people described their online experiences in terms of community, however, the notion of online community gathered credence.

Simply referring to any aggregation of people who gather together online as a community overlooks the emotional attachment necessary for communities to flourish (e.g. Wilbur, 1997). The tendency to treat all online groups as communities was spurred on by the popular media’s loose labelling (Papadakis, 2003). Researchers have also been known to overuse the term. For example, Anders suggested that engaging in conversation via a discussion group creates an “instant virtual community” (2001 p. 22).

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This over-simplifies the situation - to reiterate our position: online communication about common interests is necessary but not sufficient to build community; it takes communion (Watson, 1997) for true community. True community must be legitimised as something beyond the gathering together of people online: having gathered together, the people concerned must form bonds (Green 2010, pp. 139-58).

Our task with HeartNET was to create and authenticate an online community through the provision of a best-practice website design. Although we acknowledged the importance of the web interface in helping foster a sense of community, the research was not concerned with the testing of different website models to achieve community.

Instead, the research was partly to test whether community would emerge as a result of interaction: How would we know it was working? What would be the benefits for participants? Thus, we set out to provide a user-friendly â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cyber placeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for heart patients to interact and, hopefully, form bonds so that the website would become self-generating and vibrant. That is, users would visit the website because of the communion they sought with one another. Although we recognised that any best practice website model would need to be tailored to the specific user group, we decided this was best achieved by enlisting an Internet and Multimedia (IMM) technology specialist to develop a suitable website according to established principles of online community.

3. The Research Team There was a strong sense of optimism at the commencement of the project since a wellqualified research team had been assembled to conduct the research. Two senior academics represented the two major disciplines which underpinned the project. One specialised in IMM research and practice; the other in communication and cultural studies. I was responsible for carrying out the research and am qualified to interrogate the idea of community and track the expected outcomes. My understanding of the qualitative methodology and the health behaviour theories that framed the research design also complemented the research team. However, as a social scientist, my knowledge of web-design was limited at best and, given the research was reliant on a best-practice website design, two in-house IMM technologists were recruited to build the site which would allow exploration of the research objectives. Our industry partner also provided key knowledge: The CEO of the National Heart Foundation (WA), Mr Maurice Swanson, was an expert on heart disease and secondary prevention; while the PR Manager Tami McMahon had extensive experience in patient/donor relations.

Essentially, the project was team-driven and a continuous good relationship existed between all members of the research team.

Given the broad nature of the research (comprising technology, health promotion, support and communication), the research team was characterised by positive collaborations between social scientists, technologists and practitioners. As it transpired, during the process of web development, my role as a social scientist came under pressure as a result of my incapacity to identify the technical characteristics desired of the online community website. This paper outlines the misalignment of expectations and the struggle to communicate across misperceptions which occurred primarily

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between the technologists employed to design the website and me – the primary social researcher. Such struggles have been (Davies & Harvey, 1994) and remain (Dutton et al., 2006; Gelbstein 2004) a characteristic of interactive design since early CMC environments, but seem less acknowledged and less anticipated than may be expected.

More recently, however, it appears that some researchers are addressing the problem by providing tools and models (e.g. Camara & Abdelnour-Nocéra, 2010) which might help to bridge the gap between technologists and social scientists like me. At the time, these tools were either not available or unknown to the researcher and, if they were known to the technologists, they did not offer their use.

In the early stages of the research proposal, it was taken for granted that the website construction would be unproblematic. The approach of the technologists was that what can be imagined can be constructed, assuming that someone somewhere has already done something along the same lines. This approach freed up the social scientists to get on with the research design, literature searches, and sampling plans, having been reassured that the website could be built to achieve the research objectives.

I understood that my role was to interrogate the idea of community, and any related health-benefit outcomes, in an online setting. I was to see the project get off the ground by communicating with all project stakeholders: the National Heart Foundation, research participants, supervising academics, the media, health practitioners, cardiologists and the technologists. The technologists would provide the expertise – knowing what interface and content management system would best allow for the goal of creating community. That is, the technologists would assume the role of the service provider while the social scientists assumed the role of the client, representing and acting on behalf of all other stakeholders.

4. Problems with Developing a Website The initial meetings between the social scientists and the technologists (at this stage, including both the web designer and the academic specialist in web development) gave the first indications of communication confusion. I expected the web-technologist to be able to work to the brief which had been included in the bid to win competitive research funding presented to the competitive research body at the point where the research was funded. This outlined the purpose of the project. That is, I assumed that webtechnologists would provide solutions to the core task (of providing a best-practice website to foster community). On the other hand, the technologist charged with developing the site, expected me to provide a full technical brief – instructing him as to what was required in terms of design and functionality, security and access, public and private forums etc... That is, leaving to one side the agreed aims and objectives of the research, the technologists wanted a complete outline of the type and style of website required. However, this information was outside my established social science expertise. The first meeting was very short-lived – the technologists requested I tell them exactly what they were required to build, while I asked them to build what was needed.

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Following this impasse, I consulted the technological literature as to what type of website design might foster the desired outcome – a sense of community. Although this was not part of the original research proposal, there now seemed to be a pressing need to glean technical information about website design from key references. Having reviewed the then-key texts, such as Figallo’s (1998), Hosting web communities, and still feeling out of depth, I turned to the increasingly popular book series (all suffixed by the popular catch-phrase “for dummies;”) which are targeted at ‘do-it-yourselfers’ or ‘self-helpers’ eager to learn a new skill. The title “How to build a website: for dummies” seemed like a fitting selection! I also re-reviewed health-related websites to identify the specific functions that seemed appropriate for our project (initially these were used to show IMM technologists some examples of sites which might be seen to be broadly equivalent to the one desired).

Armed with this new information, I was able to develop a more detailed set of instructions, indeed a ‘wish list’, for the website designer to inform the initial development stage. That is, I outlined (by way of a story-board) the functionality I thought was needed (with new-found, albeit still limited, knowledge and experience) to foster a sense of community, or an actual community, based on observations made from other established websites and key texts.

This intervention saw the beginning of a lengthy development stage which caused frustration to all parties. Once a basic web layout had been constructed by one of the technologists, another technologist began fine-tuning the design and usability. Although this sounds reasonable, what was estimated to take four weeks to complete, took approximately six months to reach launch standard. In part, this was because of challenges in the recruitment of participants, our raw material for the hoped-for community. Each dynamic helped exacerbate the negative cycle. That is to say, given that other research activities were proving to be more complicated than originally anticipated, more time could be given to website development. Likewise, given that the website was proving problematic, there was more time to enlist the help of cardiologists and others to solve recruitment problems. Neither recruitment nor web development was powered by the readiness of the other. Nonetheless, the main reason for the delay in web development was due to a misalignment of expectations between the technologists and the Social Scientists, each of whom believed the other should be driving the building of the site, and both of whom believed that the other was better placed to specify how the website should work.

This delay in web development was further complicated when I realised the need for what was eventually termed the ‘back-door’ functionality. This was required to support the collection, storage and formatting of data for analysis and was a necessary part of a research project, although not all these specifications would have been required for a site that aimed only to support an online community. As I had no experience with virtual data collection, the development of the back door to create an accessible and usable data set was done by trial and error. My frustration is evident in the following research diary excerpt:

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I don’t know anything about building websites! The research is not about investigating web interfaces – it’s about the community which might result from the best design available. Sure, the website is important - that’s why I need the professionals to advise on the best design available. Now I’m being asked to tell the web developers what I want….I don’t know what I want…I just know what I need – a website for heart patients which enables them to communicate with each other! Isn’t this their area of expertise – isn’t this what they have trained for? I know what I have trained for! Surely I can’t learn a whole new area of web design? That would be a whole new research topic! I’m finding that because I don’t really understand how things work behind the scenes...what I think I’m asking for is not what I need in reality. Surely they can help me out by asking the right questions?

5. Problems with the Developed Website At the official launch of the website, some 8 months after the first meeting, it became clear that there were problems with the design. Three main communication tools had been provided for users: The Members’ Network, a Discussion Board (otherwise known as a forum or bulletin board) and a Chat Room. Discussion Boards are fairly wellknown and allow users to comment on various topics asynchronously. Chat, on the other hand, is like a virtual conversation which occurs between two or more people synchronously (at the same time).

The Members’ Network was a much more current use of communication technology. Initially, it was designed to be used like a web log (blog). That is, each member was allocated a ‘page’ on which to post their thoughts and comments while other members could post replies or follow-up messages. Upon joining the site a new member was directed to the Members’ Network and invited to write about and share the story of their heart health. It was anticipated that other members would respond with their own stories and with words of encouragement or sympathy.

People use communication tools for their own purposes, however, and not for the purposes they are supplied for. Very quickly the new HeartNET members began to use the Members’ Network like an internal messaging system. That is, rather than replying to open messages at their point of origin, members would post ‘private’ replies by selecting the appropriate name from the list of blogs on the Members’ Network. This led to difficulties since conversations could not be read as one thread and there was no logical flow. In turn, this worked as a brake on group communication. According to Cook et al. (2010), project failures arise from “a lack of effective communication between the user (or the user’s caregiver) and the design team” (p. 46). In this case, given the users were not consulted during the design or testing of the Members’ Network, its misuse was the first sign of the site’s impending failure.

In more recent times, there has been an increasing focus on ‘participatory’ web design. One example of this concerns the role of the “produser” in web development (Bruns, 2008; Bruns & Schmidt, 2011) where users are seen as producers and users of

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the content they help to create – through their establishing of an online community for example. While it was intended that users of the HeartNET site would ultimately ‘produse’ their own community, this concept was not embedded in the design and development of the website itself. If the design team had embraced this philosophy from the outset, it is likely that the process of designing would have been more “iterative in [...its] reliance on participation and knowledge sharing” (Russo, 2011).

It is also worth noting that all users at the start of the research were baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), many of whom were unfamiliar with blogging practices.

Even so, a few members understood the process of ‘blogging’ and posted appropriately.

Paradoxically, however, even the proper usage became difficult because members had to visit approximately 68 (at the time) blogs to get to know all the other members, which was time consuming and labour-intensive. In hindsight, this structure stunted the community’s growth because members could not easily make contact to form relationships with each other. Indeed, one rationale for writing up these experiences at this point, as the research project is finally about to wind up, is as a reminder of just how far research and practice in the field have progressed since 2004-5.

To make the Members’ Network more ‘user friendly,’ a search tool was added so that members could locate users with whom they particularly wanted to communicate.

That is, rather than having to wade through 68 records about ‘my heart story’, users could employ a key word search to find people with similar conditions, or who had undergone similar medical procedures. However, the users seemed unwilling to unlearn their established ways of interacting with the Members’ Network. Eventually, interactions declined dramatically. Thus, whilst the Members’ Network was initially considered to be useful, it ultimately proved problematic when members used their Network in an unexpected way and siphoned what might have been communitybuilding exchanges into semi-private correspondence.

As a result of the focus on the Members’ Network, the Discussion Board was overlooked. Although HeartNET members seemed to enjoy the more ‘private’ form of communication on the Members’ Network, which they used a little like a distorted email service, it is possible that if they had been initially introduced to the Discussion Board, they would have recognised the value and convenience of this group-wide style of communication.

After recognising that this initial design produced limited interaction on the site, it was decided that a re-design of the website, which was to be known as ‘Phase II’, was necessary to develop the functionality of the Discussion Board and eliminate the Members’ Network. Meanwhile the failure of what was to be known as ‘Phase I’ of the research, the twelve weeks following the first launch of the site, was written up (Bonniface et al., 2006). Once again, technologists were consulted to provide feedback and solutions for the problems identified in Phase 1. Despite my efforts to bridge the knowledge gap by attempting to learn about web design (maybe because it was for dummies!), the site had not provided the best possible opportunity for an online community to flourish.

At this stage I consulted other IMM academics for their opinion of the development process of the website to date. They invariably thought development should have begun with an instructional designer to “scope out” the site in order to

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determine its requirements. This feedback strengthened my resolve to turn again to the web technologists in the hope of enlisting their knowledge and expertise for the purpose of “scoping out” Phase II of the research.

During the first redevelopment meeting, I explained why the original website design had proven inadequate, explaining the problems with the way that participants had used the Members’ Network and subsequently turned away from possible Discussion Board interactions. Despite making it clear that this was partly a result of my lack of experience in the area, I was told to outline exactly what was now required for the adjustments to be made. So, again I retreated to review health-related and other websites, identifying those which seemed to foster a community spirit (or at least some easy-going communication!). This time, I painstakingly planned a framework for each web page as a user would encounter these and click through to the next level, describing the login processes, layout, and ‘back-door’ requirements. Finally, I presented a number of story boards to the technologists that mapped out these new requirements. The website was then re-built. Given that the ‘community’ was on hold and waiting, and it was clear that the project was in crisis, this restructure was completed in approximately two weeks. One other change: the site was made open to anyone who wanted to join: it was no longer restricted to the people who had so carefully been recruited to take part in the research (Bonniface et al., 2005).

Although the new design was much more comprehensive than the first and seemed to be more conducive to promoting both interdisciplinary communication and an online community, problems were still evident. For example, the system was not designed for users other than heart patients or administrators. While we had talked in the briefing meetings about different people playing a part on HeartNET (e.g. special guests, hosts, cardiologists, visitors) the possibility of a variety of membership or interaction roles had not been factored into the website design. When I realised that there was no way to distinguish between users, I reported this problem promptly to the IMM technologist. I had assumed the problem was simply another ‘bug’ (a term I had become familiar with, meaning a glitch in computer programming). However, I was quickly deflated: “You’re talking about user levels. You should have told us about the number of user levels you required before we built the database”. Not knowing that ‘user levels’ were somehow determinants of databases, and that databases were somewhat difficult and time consuming to re-jig, I blithely requested this be fixed. But, given the work load of the IMM technologist involved, and the priority that had been given to the site’s rebuild, this request was met with resistance.

Another aspect of the re-design related to the login process. Initially, new members requested access to the website (electronically) with the aim of granting membership within 24 hours. This was to allow some control over who was given access to the site. This ‘personal approval’ system quickly came under pressure when the site suddenly received an increased number of ‘hits’ and requests for access.

Further, although many potential users requested membership, they never revisited the site once access had been granted. Naturally, I wondered whether we were losing interested parties simply because we were not providing immediate access. The login process was changed again and new users were given immediate access by way of a

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username and password. Fortunately, this resulted in a marked increase in both active membership and participation.

Having temporarily solved some of the design problems still evident at the start of Phase II, and having opened up the website for immediate access by all interested parties, there was a dramatic uptake in participation. The Discussion Board began to be (and still is being) used regularly. This increase was clearly evident within four weeks of the site’s relaunch (in Week 18 of the Research) when weekly posts increased to 60; prior to this there had been up to 12 posts made per week (see also Bonniface et al., 2005). The following graph (Figure 1) illustrates the changes in Discussion Board interaction for the first 39 weeks of the research. Week 37 is particularly noteworthy showing a trebling of posts made compared to a fortnight earlier.

Forum Interactions between After Website Relaunch 350 Number of Posts

300 250 200 150 100 50

W ee k W 12 ee k W 14 ee k W 16 ee k W 18 ee k W 20 ee k W 22 ee k W 24 ee k W 26 ee k W 28 ee k W 30 ee k W 32 ee k W 34 ee k W 36 ee k 38

0

Figure 1. Phase II discussion board interaction.

Apart from the increase in discussions, there was also a new private messaging service which was also growing in popularity. Phase II members seemingly understood that the discussion board was the best way to communicate publicly, while private messaging was for personal messages to individual members.

HeartNET membership continued to grow for several years, to the end of the first set of research monies (and the completion of my PhD) and to the start of a successful bid for follow-up competitive funding. It would appear that, although the website development was very much a hit and miss process, a suitable web interface was eventually achieved – offering a good opportunity for community development. A range of posts testified that the surge in membership and interaction marked the start of a new quality of engagement between heart patients online:

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Crackers: This heartNet was an excellent idea, Australia needs it, definitely. There's the Heartkids websites, but this website works so well and I can also keep an eye who is popping in and [out] myself Jogstar: I'll add my vote of thanks to Leesa too. The site has really taken off thanks to your hard work and Gerry’s also. Big thank you.

Sicman: I would give Leesa more than 3 cheers. This site has been wonderful and of a very big help to me.

TomCat: Thanks again for an amazing vehicle for us to use. It really does make such a difference.

Genesis: I am now back on deck and hope to be a regular participant on this site. I have just spent an hour navigating around the site and have found it very user friendly from the aspect of a non competant user.

6. Discussion Faults in the original website design contributed to the lack of interaction identified in Phase I. Perhaps if the site had been adequately ‘scoped-out’ by expert technologists in the first instance, it would not have required a complete overhaul in Phase II. However, the technologists argue that re-design, or at least ongoing ‘tweaking’, is inevitable and as such there is no best-practice model to work from. Still, a better first take might have been achieved if the technologists and the social scientists had been able to negotiate the web development process as a team.

While there is a large body of literature which provides insight into the benefits of teamwork in various disciplines and for various outcomes, research is emerging which suggests the ‘soft skills’ needed for successful teamwork are not prioritised in IMM training (Lingard & Barkataki, 2011); perhaps due to the level of proficiency required for acquiring high-end technical competency. On the other hand, while teamwork is a skill which requires careful communication, some have argued that its benefits need to be weighed against its costs – one of which may be the impeding of creativity for the designer (Beatty & Ball, 2010). Assuming creativity is highly regarded and defended by the majority of IMM technologists, there is a mutual responsibility for nontechnologists to understand and respect technicians’ creativity, and for technicians to understand non-technologists’ desire to describe and outline wishes, if teams are to function effectively. While this does not appear to have been the reason why communication broke down in the designing of the HeartNET website, a greater awareness of the soft skills required for teamwork might have made it easier for each party to identify what was expected of the other and then provide solutions to help bridge the inadequacies or shortfalls of each.

Instead of interoperability and a shared vision of team membership, the technologists constructed the social scientists as being able to give a clear, concise, authoritative, competent and instructive brief as to the specifics of the site requirements.

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On the other hand, the social scientists constructed the technologist as being able to transform a lay person’s perspective into a workable site solution. However, in this case, the researcher and site manager was unable to provide the information the technologists sought, and as such was judged to be lacking in competency. As a result, the social scientists retreated to find the missing knowledge in order to re-present to technologists.

One way of looking at this case study is that the technologists held the balance of power given that the social scientists did not “know enough” to communicate adequate instructions. Davies and Harvey (1994) report on the power struggles that can occur where technology is concerned, depending on who is ‘knowledge rich’. In their example they describe how the more practical knowledge of student technologists threatened the professionals who were plugged into the business end of university organisation. The balance of power was held by the professionals and, as a result, the students were blocked from being involved in decision making. Those with technical knowledge were considered to be knowledge-poor because they did not understand the politics involved, even if they had a better grasp of the technology.

This case study offers an opposite example where I was considered to be lacking in technical knowledge despite my involvement in the bigger picture – having understood the politics of the key stakeholders. Instead, the balance of power was awarded to the technologists in that they required me to specify what they needed to achieve before they would proceed. In effect, I understood the politics of the research stakeholders, but not the politics of communicating with technologists. Danermark and Germundsson (2011) note that the way in which collaborative work is arranged “influences the development of social representations and power relationships” (p. 33).

The organisational arrangement in our design team meant that my need for ‘help’ translated to a powerless position until I could acquire and communicate more knowledge about technical requirements.

The experience shared here has focused on the grass-root issues around designing and developing a fairly modest website for the purposes of building and sustaining an online community. Since this time, there has been much discussion of the new Web 2.0 environment which relies upon user-generated content rather than content designed and delivered by a group of authors which was common for Web 1.0. Although the notion of ‘user-generated’ seems to imply that the balance of power is now being awarded to the users, Ankerson (2010) reminds us that Web 2.0 logics are not “unconnected to the power struggles of the recent past” and that by understanding the history of the internet, new generations will be able to appreciate that the way technology works, or how it looks, is not “obvious” or “natural” (p. 189). This paper has intended to add to that discussion, particularly for the benefit of new social researchers undertaking research which rely upon internet technologies.

Still, upon reflection of my experience, I am left wondering: Would it have been possible to negotiate the power relationship in a way that was mutually beneficial and which could help bridge the knowledge gap for both parties? Was it simply a case of false expectations or was it a straightforward communication problem? Maybe the solution would have been to read “effective communication for dummies” rather than “websites for dummies” …

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Perhaps there needs to be some kind of middle-language, where technologists and non-technologists can communicate what is required to each other. Although new tools and models are being developed which support this need (e.g. Camara & AbdelnourNocéra, 2010) they will not necessarily solve the problem. The social scientist who relies on technology experts to deliver the ‘answer’ will remain stuck, unless the support models and strategies can be supplied in a more consumer-driven, ‘tool box’ type format. Had such tools been available and known to me, however, I might not have been asked to produce what I didn’t know, and the technologists might have known how to ask the right questions … of a dummy.

Acknowledgements We acknowledge the users of the HeartNET website (www.heartnet.com.au) for which this site was developed. We also acknowledge the support of our Industry Partner, The National Heart Foundation (WA) and of the Australian Research Council who funded the project.

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FIREWATCH: USE OF SATELLITE IMAGERY BY REMOTE COMMUNITIES IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA FOR FIRE RISK COMMUNICATIONS. DANIELLE BRADY, DONELL HOLLOWAY AND LELIA GREEN School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

Abstract. This paper presents the contextual background and early findings from a new research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using community engagement and enhanced visual information to promote FireWatch satellite communications as a support for collaborative decision-making.

FireWatch (provided by Landgate in Western Australia) is an internet-based public information service based on near real time satellite data showing timely information relevant to bushfire safety within Australia. However, it has been developed in a highly technical environment and is currently used chiefly by experts. This project aims to redesign FireWatch for ordinary users and to engage a remote community in Northern Australia in this process, leading to improved decision making surrounding bushfire risk.

1. Introduction This paper introduces and reports on early progress from a research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using community engagement and enhanced visual information to promote FireWatch satellite communications as a support for collaborative decision-making. The project concerns FireWatch, an internet-based public information service based on near real time satellite and remotely sensed information relevant to bushfire safety within Australia. The service is produced by Landgate, a government statutory authority in Western Australia, and has been developed in a technical environment primarily for the use of fire and emergency services experts. The aim of the project is to redesign and repurpose FireWatch for use by ordinary users and to engage a remote community in northern Western Australia in that process.

The redevelopment of this product will extend the usability of the product from experts to ordinary users in order to facilitate community-based decision-making and action both before and during bushfire emergencies. The two main research questions this project poses are: how can FireWatch be integrated into communities as part of a holistic fire awareness program? and, how can Firewatch be redesigned to incorporate global best practice and modern principles of dynamic information design to develop a more intuitive version for ordinary users?

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To this purpose the project has been broken down to two distinct, yet interdependent, strands. One strand involves purposive community collaboration using networks and associations which are formed to protect individuals and families in the face of life-threatening risk of bushfires in the Kimberley region in the north of Western Australia. These networks and associations will form the basis of a community-centred approach to product development in order to help ordinary users “extract and harness knowledge [that is] hidden in the collage of scientific data” (Zudilova-Seinstra, Adriaansen, & van Liere, 2009) making it more readily accessible to the general public in rural and remote Australia. The second strand involves the development of an intuitive and accessible web presentation of complex information in clear, unambiguous ways to inform action in stressful circumstances.

This paper will outline relevant background information about bushfires in the north of Australia and about Landgate’s FireWatch service. It will then discuss the theoretical framework and research design of the project, with a special focus on the community collaboration aspects of the research, and report some early findings.

2. Background information 2.1. BUSHFIRES IN THE NORTH OF AUSTRALIA Fire has shaped Australian history, both natural and cultural (Pyne, 1991) and bushfires continue to threaten human life, property and the diverse ecosystems of the continent.

The most publicised and fierce bushfires occur in the southern regions of Australia. In 2009 over 170 people lost their lives in the Black Saturday Fires in rural Victoria in south-eastern Australia (Victorian Bushfires Commission, 2010). Last year (2011) in Western Australia many properties were lost and lives threatened in two major fires, one on the rural/urban fringe of the city of Perth and another in the tourist destination of the Margaret River area in the south-west of the state (Keelty 2011, 2012).

What many people do not realize, Australians included, is that the majority of large bushfires occur in the sparsely populated north of Australia (Figure 1). The sheer size of the Australian continent means that there is a variety of climate zones with significant biodiversity. This means that there is no specific time of the year or season in which Australia is free from the threat of bushfire (Tropical Savannas CRC, n.d.). In the north of Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory the main bushfire season occurs May to September: which is also the dry season in the tropical and subtropical north. These bushfires occur more frequently and cover larger tracts of land than in the south of Australia, and they do not impact as many people.

In the north of Australia, bushfires are increasing in intensity and frequency due to a decrease in traditional fire management practices; a lack of fire mitigation practices in grasslands leased by graziers (farmers) and reduced occupation and access of Indigenous communities to their traditional lands (Tropical Savannas CRC, n.d.). Other reasons for the increase in the scale and frequency of bushfires in the north of Australia are the spread of introduced species which result in higher fuel loads and higher temperatures associated with climate change (Williams et al., 2001).

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Figure 1. Frequency of burnt areas in the last ten years determined from NOAA satellite imagery. (Calculated by Satellite Remote Sensing Services, Landgate).

2.2. FIREWATCH Raw satellite data, such as reflectance, is processed using algorithms based on known correlations (for example that reflected green light equals plant material) to produce images that are recognisable to us. Imagery sourced from multiple satellites processed quickly using fast computers, combined with presentation technology, has made possible near real time mapping of fires. FireWatch provides this near real time fire mapping together with information about lightning strikes, burned areas, vegetation coverage, aerial photography, meteorological observations and topographic information. A web-based interface allows queries and distance measurements.

Historical data can also be accessed and searched. FireWatch therefore provides users with a range of information and tools relevant to safety decision making and emergency responses.

FireWatch has been operating for 12 years and is currently used by emergency services agencies in Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. It is also used as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;fire monitoring system covering the whole of Indonesia to enable the generation of valuable fire monitoring information to effectively fight firesâ&#x20AC;? (Landgate, n.d.).

To date, FireWatch users have predominantly been fire and land management teams which protect economic, social and environmental assets through the monitoring of fires. Although available to the general public, the current public interface is dense

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with information, the result of a decade of requests by professional users for additional data sets and functionality. It is unclear how useful it is to those outside the emergency services; nor is it clear whether and how ordinary users might access and make sense of the data available.

Following the 2009 bushfire tragedies in Victoria, greater attention is being paid to Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bushfire readiness and the harnessing of available information for informed decision-making (Victorian Bushfires Commission, 2010).

Recommendations from the commission suggest a new approach to bushfires involving greater co-ordination in which home dwellers, fire services and government work together and acknowledge that education, safety, planning and management can be effective responses to the threat of bushfire. Policy makers and community members are seeking to revise bushfire protocols and access new sources of authoritative information which may help guide public responses. Thus, FireWatch has a role to play in developing public engagement to enhance informed decision-making in protecting individuals, families, communities and their property in times of bushfires.

3. Theoretical Framework and Research Design Although this project concerns an advanced technical service, its aim is to examine the technology from a social perspective. In doing this, the research team hopes to acquire new insights which will allow the development of FireWatch into a relevant service for the wider community. The project has two complementary strands: the first incorporating contemporary knowledge about communities and the internet, and the second utilising best practice information design. Theories about on-line communities will inform the first part (Rheingold, 2000), along with an understanding of the use and application of technology in everyday life (Green 2010). The second utilises best practice information design, specifically matters of visual and graphic design and display, and will be informed by developments in information design and visual communication (Nielsen, 2000; Norman, 2002; Tufte, 2001; Wurman, et al., 2001).

Both parts of the project are framed within a social shaping of technology perspective (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 2003; Lievrouw, 2006) and both assume that public end users constitute an active audience who make choices about how they access information and what they do with it. As such, the project goes well beyond website design to critically examine the ways in which people integrate internet information within community decision-making and planned response strategies.

The separate strands to this project entail both purposive community collaboration using networks and associations which are formed to protect individuals and families in the face of life-threatening risk and also web design with intuitive and accessible presentation of complex information in clear, unambiguous ways to inform action by ordinary users in the community.

3.1. COMMUNITY PHASE The community phase of the project involves an initial investigation into current approaches to community decision-making around fire awareness and response-

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readiness. The study will occur in a defined geographical area in order to investigate and trial community integration of FireWatch at a sufficient level of detail. This community collaboration will involve working with community groups and individuals both online, and through visits to the geographical community. It will explore the developing awareness of the FireWatch service; identifying how it is currently used, or not used, and how useful people find FireWatch after it has been integrated within the community. Key areas of interest include identifying public information-seeking behaviours at times of fire-risk, and professional information-seeking when fire management decisions are pressing. This dual focus includes determining what information is required, how it is sourced and communicated and, finally, how decisions are made and who makes them. These questions are informed by findings from the community consultation meetings carried out by the Victorian Bushfires Commission (2010) after the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009.

Wellman et al. (2002) suggest that â&#x20AC;&#x153;rather than weakening community the internet adds to existing face-to-face and telephone contactâ&#x20AC;? (p.151). In the case of communities in remote areas of Australia, mixed mode online/offline communications occur in a multifaceted communications system. Mobile telephones, satellite telephones, two way radios and the internet all combine to facilitate and enhance community communications, especially in times of emergency. This community phase will also research community networking in times of crisis and the mixed modes of communication used during these times. This will provide the basis for expanding FireWatch as a central location for information dissemination and community activity, supporting fire management and decision-making. It will also engage civic society, geographic community and organisational networks in supporting a successful and sustainable online community (Bonniface, et al., 2005).

The research methodology used for this part of the project is broadly qualitative (Creswell, 2009). The intent of this phase of the research is to understand both the information-seeking and communication cultures of communities under threat of fire, and the culture of an online community which links people on the ground with core information.

3.2. DESIGN PHASE In an investigation of digital decision making, Corrigan (2007) argued that people who make decisions about information systems for public use need to understand the technology in the environment in which the public will operate it. Ordinary people can work alongside technology experts to facilitate this understanding. In the context of persuading ordinary people that the technology offers uses and benefits, it is the nonexperts who may hold the true expertise. Wurman (2001) says people understand new things in terms of, and in relation to, other matters which are already understood.

Landgateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s FireWatch can be re-examined in light of existing community knowledge about fire awareness acquired through the community phase of the project. However, the development of the service to address issues of community engagement, everyday use and social inclusion requires the involvement of those that use and will benefit from the technology in a participatory process. An iterative, participatory design methodology will therefore be central to the project (Simonsen and Hertzum, 2010).

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Although it is often assumed that users prefer realistic representations; schematic representations, or infographics, may be easier to understand (Grimwade, cited in Errea, 2003, p. 17). The optimum way in which information can be presented schematically, however, needs to be developed through research with users from the communities concerned. In this project we will not assume that there is a universal way of seeing things and will consider the local and temporal understandings of visual messages and signs (Lupton & Miller, 1999). An understanding of the audience, and what will motivate the audience to become familiar with the FireWatch website, are both critical aspects to be explored. Such understandings will inform the development of a prototype website capable of delivery via multiple devices (for example desktop and hand held tablet computers). Information from the community phase of the project will feed into the design phase to be followed by iterative, face-to-face user testing of the site and the collection of website analytics. A final phase will involve the launch of a pilot version of a new FireWatch Community site.

4. Early Findings Differing cultural attitudes to technology have been significant in the startup of the research project. Emergency services, government service providers, volunteer organisations and academics working in bushfire research all have different perspectives. At the time of writing the proposal for this project, The Victorian Bushfires Commission (2010) report had just been released.

During the commencement of the project, two enquiries into fires in Western Australia were underway (Keelty, 2011; 2012). In this politically charged environment, early meetings with stakeholders about this research have been characterized by talking at cross purposes until it became clear that the project is not designed to produce a broadcast emergency alert system.

It appears that the concept of a web-based tool for longer term management and decision making needs promotion in relation to bushfire, particularly in a nation where fire and emergency services have been held to account for loss of life and property.

Concern about ordinary members of the public receiving a clear message from one source dominates conversations about fire. This is despite recent fire events in Australia showing that the public can rarely depend on a single message and indeed are vulnerable to one mode of transmission (Victorian Bushfires Commission, 2010).

Confounded with this problem is fear of non-expert users making the wrong decision and of the public receiving false alerts resulting in evacuation chaos. It has also been difficult to focus attention on the needs of rural, remote dwellers whose emergency response and rescue options are more limited than those in the city and peri-urban settlements. For rural dwellers in remote areas, traffic congestion due to evacuation is not an issue and a precautionary evacuation may be a reasonable choice from limited options. For urban Australians, who can call a nearby fire brigade, it is hard to understand the scope of fires in the north of the country, and that for rural dwellers prediction and preparation are paramount to survival. There is a divide between urban and rural attitudes to fire and a further divide between the north of Australia and the

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south. Changes in the traditional fire practices of Indigenous people (Pyne, 1991) further complicates common understandings about fire management.

The idea of fire emergency alert is so pervasive that it has been difficult to enter into discussions about the many features of FireWatch which could be useful in nonalert situations. One for example, is the ability to view previously burned areas and vegetation which might provide information for planning evacuation routes for humans and stock prior to an actual fire event. Another is the inspection of lightning strikes which can give advance warning of where fire hotspots may occur after several days.

The embeddedness of FireWatch within a largely determinist fire emergency network may be hampering the contingencies which could occur with wider public access (Lievrouw, 2006). It is our contention that rural dwellers have a different relationship to the land and are less reliant on one way messages. Hence, they may use the information available from FireWatch in unanticipated ways. One possibility is that the people with differing attitudes to fire management may be able to communicate in more effective ways when able to access information directly, and not filtered through the perspective of a group with an opposing perspective. The development of the FireWatch interface may be shaped by such communications, for example through social networking linkages.

At the startup of the project, we were immediately confronted with our loosely articulated concept of public or ordinary users. In retrospect we were seeking to open up the use of technology to other than emergency services professionals without really knowing who these people were. We have subsequently begun to explore possible types of users in a trial community centered around a regional town, Kununurra, in the east Kimberley region of Western Australia. This location has been chosen as it is a regional centre with a large population by rural Australian standards (3748 with about 30% Indigenous residents; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006) and a node for a range of community groups from volunteer fire and rescue services to the Country Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Association. Key contacts accessible through the project team will include the regional Fire and Emergency Services Association (FESA) and Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC). A separate approach will be required to canvass the views of Indigenous people. The town of Kununurra has 3G mobile phone coverage, ADSL internet and will receive fibre optic broadband cabling as part of a national program.

Mobile phone coverage is a significant factor in rural Australia and a possible impediment to delivery of FireWatch via mobile devices.

A feature of this project is the freedom to completely redesign FireWatch. It does not have to simultaneously meet the needs of both professional and ordinary users at this stage of the research. However, there are limits to what can be delivered from the data available, and the frequency of satellite passes over Australia, and hence limits to what users can request. Some difficulties have arisen in conceiving of a completely participatory design methodology based on ordinary users. Firstly, as a professional version of the service exists, and is under constant amendment, it would be difficult to reinvent the service within the network of service provision which includes Landgate and the regional emergency services. Secondly, the boundaries between ordinary users and local land management and emergency services are not clear cut in rural areas.

People charged with protecting the community from fire can also be involved in lighting fires for management purposes. The Margaret River fires in Western Australia

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in 2011 were caused when a controlled burn escaped containment lines leading to damage to homes and property in a significant tourist region. In examining the situation, Keelty (2012) acknowledged that some of the people managing the controlled burns were members of the community and deeply affected when things went wrong.

To counter charges of exporting representations of good user experience and usability, a user-scenario design process is being investigated (Carroll, 1995). The intention is to develop a range of user-scenarios from the trial community that will guide the development of a revised public access version of FireWatch. Further modifications will be carried out in an iterative, participatory design process which will commence through face to face contacts in the geographical community and be extended through online research.

A recent event near to our trial community illustrates some of the problems, and also opportunities, for community decision making in relation to fire. In 2011 an international footrace event, RacingThePlanet, was held between Kununurra and the El Questro Wilderness Park. Five runners were injured and two received burns to up to 80% of their bodies when they were engulfed by fire in the remote location of Tier Gorge. At the time of writing, a Western Australian Legislative Assembly inquiry into the incident is underway. A key question is why the race was not cancelled when fires were known to be burning in the area. A detailed submission to the enquiry by the race organisers suggests that, although they had observed smoke and spot fires in the area, they were unaware of the real danger of fire in the region and had repeatedly been assured that such fires were normal occurrences in this region. The race competitors were apparently unable to see the main fire front which was obscured by the Tier range.

Public submissions to the inquiry include topographic maps with hand drawn annotations showing where smoke was observed, etc.

Figure 2 shows information that could have been obtained from FireWatch on the morning of the incident. The red and yellow zones show areas which had already been burned and the diamonds show hot spots still burning at the time of the satellite pass.

Viewing this image in retrospect it appears unwise to have continued with the event route within 20km of an actively burning fire. FireWatch on the previous two days showed fires burning at a greater distance from the race route, but easterly winds on the day suggested the fire would move toward the route. Although the extent of communication between the race organizers and local authorities is being questioned, FireWatch and other internet based fire monitoring systems, such as North Australia Fire Information (NAFI), are freely available to public users. Why such systems are not are not being used will become a key question for our project.

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Figure 2: FireWatch image derived from satellite pass at 9.55 WST on 2nd September 2011 showing the region between Kununurra and El Questro Wilderness Park. It shows burned areas (yellow and red) and current hotspots (gold diamonds). The red box shows the area in which marathon runners were injured between 1-2 pm on that day.

(Captured 29/4/2012 from Landgateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public access FireWatch site http://firewatch.landgate.wa.gov.au).

5. Conclusion The aim of this research project is to research ways in which remote and regional publics can be engaged and mobilised with the development and use of FireWatch, a public information service based on near real-time satellite data. The research project aims to involve purposive community collaboration using networks and associations which are formed to protect individuals and families in the face of life-threatening bushfire risk, in order to maximise the usefulness of FireWatch to ordinary users. In the sparsely populated north of Australia, where emergency organisations cover large areas prone to regular seasonal fires, there is clearly a role for the kind of information which can be provided by FireWatch. This is particularly relevant where different agencies are responsible for adjoining areas and people from outside the community, such as tourists, are exposed to risk, making seamless communication difficult.

An early finding from this project is that perceived expertise is a factor in provision of information to ordinary users and to information-seeking by such users.

Our task is not simply to make the information more user friendly and accessible, but perhaps to validate and promote the use of web-based imaging technology for the purpose of individual and community information-seeking and decision-making outside an emergency context.

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Acknowledgements We would like thank our ARC team colleagues Dr Stuart Medley, Dr Barnard Clarkson, Dr Peter Jacklyn and Mr Paul Haimes and also our industry partners at Satellite Remote Sensing Services, Landgate. We acknowledge and are grateful for Australian Research Council funding for this research.

References Australian Bureau of Statistics (2007) 2006 Census Quick Stats: Kununurra (Urban Centre/Locality) http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au Bonniface, L., Green, L., & Swanson, M. (2005). Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community. M/C Journal, 8(6). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/05bonnifacegreenswanson.php Carroll, J. M. (1995) Scenario-based design: envisioning work and technology in system development. New York: Wiley.

Corrigan, R. (2007). Digital decision making: Back to the future. New York: Springer.

Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Errea, J. (2003). Essential infographics, an interview with John Grimwade. In J. Errea (Ed.), Malofiej, 10th World Infographics Awards (pp. 5-18). Pamplona: Capitulo Español.

Green, L. (2010). The internet: An introduction to new media. Oxford: Berg.

Keelty, M. (2011) A shared responsibility: The Report of the Perth Hills Bushfire February 2011 Review http://www.dpc.wa.gov.au/Publications/Pages/KeeltyReport.aspx Keelty, M. (2012). Appreciating the risk - Report of the special inquiry into the November 2011 Margaret River bushfire. http://www.publicsector.wa.gov.au/newsevents/news/appreciating-risk-report-special-inquiry-november-2011-margaret-riverbushfire.

Landgate. (n.d.). Indofire Retrieved 21 Mar, 2012, from http://indofire.landgate.wa.gov.au/ Lievrouw, L. A. (2006). New media design and development: Diffusion of innovations v social shaping of technology. In L. A. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The handbook of new media (Updated student edition ed., pp. 246-265). London: Sage Publications.

Lupton, E., & Miller, J. A. (1999). Design writing research: Writing on graphic design. London: Phaidon.

MacKenzie, D. A., & Wajcman, J. (2003). The social shaping of technology. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing Web usability. Indianapolis: New Riders.

Norman, D. A. (2002). The design of everyday things. (1st Basic paperback ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Pyne, S. J. (1991) Burning bush: A fire history of Australia. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (Rev. ed.).

Cambridge: MIT Press.

Simonsen, J. & Hertzum, M. (2010). Iterative Participatory Design. In J. Simonsen, J.O. Bærenholdt, M. Büscher, and J.D. Scheuer (eds.), Design Research: Synergies from Interdisciplinary Perspectives, pp. 16-32. Routledge, London, UK. Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre. (n.d.). Fire in Australia's Tropical Savannas Retrieved 18 Mar, 2012, from http://www.savanna.org.au/all/fire.html

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Tufte, E. R. (2001). The visual display of quantitative information (2nd ed.). Cheshire: Graphics Press.

Wurman, R. S., Leifer, L., Nolan, M. J., Sume, D., & Whitehouse, K. (2001).

Informationanxiety2. Indianapolis: Que. Victorian Bushfires Commission. (2010). Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission: Final report.

(0980740819). Melbourne: Victorian State Government.

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Williams, A. A. J., Karoly, D. J., & Tapper, N. (2001). The sensitivity of Australian fire danger to climate change. Climatic Change, 49(1), 171-191.

Zudilova-Seinstra, E., Adriaansen, T., & van Liere, R. (Eds.). (2009). Trends in interactive visualization: State-of-the-art survey. London: Springer.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 383-392.

THE HIDDEN SIDE OF TRANSPARENCY AMONG GOVERNMENT AGENCY BLOGGERS ANNETTE AGERDAL-HJERMIND Business & Social Sciences, Aarhus University aan@asb.dk

Abstract. This paper shows and discusses blogs as social action in a corporate context by investigating and seeking to understand organizational bloggersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; motivations and discursive behaviors in the contextual and cultural diversity of a blog-setting. Providing empirical findings on the possibilities and limitations that are embedded in an organizational blog in a government agency context, traced through focus group interviews of the organizational bloggers, the paper shows that culturally bound limitations exist and are exposed when implementing an open-source social technology like the weblog. People, even within the same organization, have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the transparency of the blog and the blog comments is managed differently by the internal bloggers. Through the discussion of the different cultural discourses at work in the blog, diverging roles and dilemmas that the blogging employees meet when engaging in corporate blogging are exposed and discussed. The aim of the paper is to discuss the social implications of these different cultural discourses in a corporate blog and how corporate cultural tensions emerge because of the blog.

The paper pinpoints the problematic of transparency through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting self-censorship by bloggers as they operate in an environment that is increasingly transparent, and shows examples of how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing behavior due to self-censorship, as well as identification with the key actors in the group.

1. Introduction Social media â&#x20AC;&#x201C; internet-based applications such as (we)blogs, social network sites, online chat forums, text messages, micro blogs, and location-based communication services used from computers and smart phones - have diffused profoundly as platforms of interpersonal communication and sociality in everyday life (Lomborg, 2011) as well as in business communication. The functional definition of weblogs (blogs) classify them as frequently modified webpages, either as part of an existing webpage or as a separate webpage (Herring, et al., 2004, 1). However, in this paper, the boundaries of blogs are approached as socially constructed, not technologically defined (Efimova, 2009, 23), and blogs are located as a situated communicative practice, manifested in the

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user’s engagement in the production of ’text’ and in the practices of interacting with fellow users.

The aim of this paper is to show and discuss these culturally discursive analytical implications of the transparency of blogging in a government agency’s internal blogcommunity by looking at a specific case of a Danish government agency, the Patent and Trademark Office (DKPTO)1, and its blogging activities towards external publics.

When an organization as DKPTO set out to manage their communications in accordance with the corporate ideal of transparency and you make the users coproducers (i.e. produsage, Bruns & Jacobs, 2006, 6), they are transparent not only to their publics but also to themselves (Christensen, 2002, 162). Corporate culture in this sense refers to those activities critical for the implementation of strategy and for generating widespread understanding and commitment among the organization's members.

The paper will start out by giving a brief look into organizational culture, communication and transparency in relation to organizational blogs by presenting some writings and different approaches to these concepts and how they relate. Next, the transparency on a government agency blog will be discussed through the presentation of examples of instances of cultural discourses and some of the social implications that follow the increased transparency such as social validation and social control, and discuss some of the consequences and how this affect the practice of blogging inside the organization.

2. The Organizational Culture, Communication Practice and Transparency of Blogging On a promise of blogs and blogging representing the missing link or metaphor and paradigm for the ultimate software on which the knowledge society will operate, Kline & Burstein (as well as many other blog practitioners and ’evangelists’, e.g. Scoble & Israel, 2006, Clay Shirky, 2008) argue that blogs derive from the human urge to give voice to our ideas, to have our ideas understood, acted on, and remembered, and to engage in the quest for knowledge and understanding interactively and collaboratively.

Kline & Burstein refer to blogging in a ’global culture’ and also touch upon blogging inside the business world, predicting that business will be changed profoundly as well, just as politics and other aspects of our culture are morphing as a result both of what is said in the blogosphere and the process of saying it. However, despite this alleged global culture and promises of digital collaboration and interaction that blogs are one of the first representatives of, blogging generally is being conceptualized differently in distinct cultural contexts. By looking at local contexts, it is possible to develop more nuanced assessments of how blogospheres variously serve communication needs, how they exist in relation to one another, how they explore identity, where they exist apart as well as where they overlap and how they interact with other forms of communication (Russel & Echchaibi, 2009, 8).

The company website: http://www.dkpto.org/

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Among the various definitions of transparency that can be found in the field of Corporate Communication, Christensen (2002) takes up the assumption in the field that corporate communication operates in a context of transparency and that transparency is an appropriate managerial response to that context. He defines transparency by looking at corporate transparency as a staging process that involves strategic disclosure, institutionalization and mimetic behavior. Transparency is seen as a form of expressive communication with stakeholders. In the current business environment, internal and external stakeholders not only expect to have unrestricted access to corporate information but also demand that organizations are held accountable for their strategic choices making organizations of today feel more vulnerable and, in a sense, transparent than ever before. Christensen points to how the introduction of new communication technologies, most notably the Internet, has intensified this feeling considerably because organizations are expected to contribute to transparency themselves by sharing relevant information with their surroundings (Christensen, 2002, 163). Hence, transparency is considered both a condition and a strategy, and Christensen questions if it is possible to articulate the challenge of corporate transparency in alternative, strategic terms. In accordance with this definition, transparency is highly related to visibility which, when related to blogging, is one of the basic premises, i.e. to expose information and communication from bloggers making them and their knowledge visible while also opening up for the outside to give feedback openly. This means that the blog increases visibility in relation to both the individual employee who becomes a blogger and increases transparency in the reactions from outside of the organization (exemplified by blog-comments or other online or ‘offline’ reactions to blog content from the audience).

Tracing the concept of transparency in relation to blogs further, Miller & Shepherd (2004) point to voyeurism and exhibitionism in their genre analysis of the blog, arguing that the social psychology of self-disclosure, which serve four purposes – self-clarification, social validation, relationship development, and social control – are all seen in blogs. In the work of Efimova (2009) on knowledge workers’ blog-practices, visibility is discovered as a crucial element when employees’ blog. While visibility might be a driving force for blogging and a reason for many positive effects it brings (e.g. ideas and people being found), bloggers also have to deal with the effects of visibility and deal with expansion of networks and information overload, changes in power distribution when crossing hierarchical or organizational boundaries, raised expectations and making mistakes in public (Efimova, 2009). The bloggers have to make choices and draw the boundaries in their position as corporate bloggers, blogging on behalf of the organization. Hence, a great part of blogging practices in an organization is concerned not only with co-production, knowledge sharing and interaction, but also, and sometimes dominantly, with the employees having to learn how to deal with fragmentation, abundance and issues of social control (AgerdalHjermind, 2010).

In approaching the notion of transparency in blogging, this paper looks at ways in which corporate bloggers working with information about patents and design rights use transparency as both telling and not telling to maintain their reputation, identity and ethos for both internal and external audiences in the organization. The bloggers use both knowledge and the omission of knowledge in order to both build trust at the

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intersection of internal and external audiences and to assert their identity as professionals, leveraging a combination of trust and knowledge to frame their public ethos.

One approach to culture is to treat it as an overarching macro concept influencing the larger social system; in contrast, it can be observed on the micro-, interactional level, exemplified in relationships, emotions, and small groups (Fine, 1995, 127). The case study presented in this paper grows from this micro cultural perspective: the internal culture within an organizational blog-community. The use of cultural discourse analysis on a communication instance like the organizational blog can say something about the meaningfulness of a practice to participants and can also be used to construct an interpretative account of the discursive practice (Carbaugh, 2007, 179). Treating a community culturally through discourse allows for the investigation of the processes by which the blog is interpreted by its members: ‘In cultural terms it is useful to conceive of a social movement (or, for that matter, any group or organization) as a space in which actors interact; it is, in other words, a staging area for behavior’ (Fine, 1995, 129). Every group develops a culture: a bounded set of images and traditions that come to characterize those individuals to themselves and often to outsiders, an idioculture which develops in interacting collectivities in which members share at least one trait (in this case that they are appointed to be bloggers). An idioculture consists of a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer and which they can employ as the basis of further interaction. The DKPTO-bloggers have developed such an idioculture. Culture only becomes meaningful through its public performance and cultural forms are simultaneously a property of social actors, embedded within relationships, and also a property of the group or community (Fine, 1995, 129). ‘The real issue in this process is not so much whether organizations really are transparent to their stakeholders – or to themselves – but how corporate standards for transparency are defined and developed, who the major players in this process are, how different voices are integrated, etc.’

(Christensen, 2002, 167). I address the organizational blog-community as a bundle of narratives, which, when expressed within an interactional arena by participants, strengthens the commitment of members to shared organizational goals in the face of external audiences watching. In addition to the positive, binding functions of narratives, demands of audiences for assent and emotional response and for the production of comparable stories serve as forms of social control. In the analysis presented in this paper, I describe the process by which a collective group culture is established within a group of internal blog-actors, examining the group as a social arena (Clarke, 2005). The group serves as a place of cultural enactment, where values take form and are invested with shared meaning (Fine, 1995, 130). Narrative is a crucial cultural domain in constructing shared meaning and group cohesion, and it contributes to organizational identity (Fine 1995, 133).

The empirical findings of this paper are based upon the view that communication both presumes and constitutes social realities, and that, as people communicate, they engage in a meta-cultural commentary, that is they say things explicitly and implicitly about who they are, how they are related to each other, how they feel, what they are doing, and how they are situated in the nature of things. All concerns about identity, relationships, emotions, actions, and dwelling are central concepts in cultural discourse

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analysis (Carbaugh, 2007). ‘An identity emerges for each of us only out of efforts at control amid contingencies and contentions in interaction. These control efforts need not have anything to do with domination over other identities. Before anything else, control is about finding footings among other identities. Such footings is a position that entails a stance, which brings orientation in relation to other identities (…) The control efforts by one identity are social realities for other identities’ (White, 2008, 1). The discourses presented encapsulate how the increased transparency that the blog represents has led to social control among some of the blogging employees in the sense White describes as ‘finding footings among other identities’, and manifested in selfcensorship in the blog-behavior. The concept, cultural discourse, is used systematically to organize ways of understanding how culture (in this case local organizational culture) is an integral part and product of discourse systems (in this case the organizational blog). Focus is on the interactional dynamics that occur among culturally shaped communication practices (Carbaugh, 2007).

3. Transparency on a Government Agency Blog: Self-disclosure, social control and self-censorship Based on an empirical investigation of the DKPTO-weblog, and the organizational bloggers through focus group interviews of 19 employee bloggers (data gathering technique) and a situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) and thematic network analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001) (data analysis techniques) in a discourse analytical perspective, access is provided to organisational bloggers’ longitudinal contextualized experience with the medium, the result being a nuanced and deep understanding of the phenomenon from an employees’ perspective.

Discourse research offers routes into the study of meanings, and is a way of investigating the back-and-forth dialogues which constitute social action, along with the patterns of signification and representation which constitute culture (Wetherell & Taylor, 2001). Since I am interested in the attitudes and opinions of the bloggers, i.e. their sense-making as bloggers, the focus within discourse analysis is on discourse psychology, not as a method, but a perspective, with interaction as the primary site where psychological issues are live. The analysis is centered around organizing as a discursive practice from describing how the members of an organization speak of and understand their usage of the weblog and the implications of this.

DKPTO is part of the Danish Ministry of Business and Growth and hold the authority to issue Patent and Design Rights and register Trademarks. The agency entered the blogosphere in 2005 when blogs were an almost unknown phenomenon in a Danish organisational context and hence hold the title as corporate blog-pioneers and the first public authority in Denmark to engage in blogging. The internal blogcommunity at DKPTO is represented by a broad and varied group of employees blogging on the same blog, a group blog, and is an example of organizational blogging as a multi-complex form of communications with corresponding multi-dimensional behavior to multi motivations. On one side, the blog is an open communication technology aimed at a broad range of stakeholders and hence meets the demands of management’s high priority of the government agency’s corporate strategy of an

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increased open digital communication with the publics. On the other side, employees are faced with and have to deal with being measured on their blog activity (on frequency, and not content) at the same time as handling their primary work tasks and protecting themselves from potential trouble from readers. This implies being cautious and ‘looking over their shoulders regarding what content they generate. Among the implications of this, the thematic network analysis of the motivation of the organizational bloggers shows that self-censorship is a common consequence. The selfcensorship traces back to the official ‘government agency’ culture that follows being a public authority.

One approach could be to focus on how the technology shapes the communication as would be the case from a social-technical perspective focusing on the co-shaping of the social and the technical that takes place when people blog. However, the paper puts a particular focus on how the communication practice of the DKPTO employee bloggers is culturally shaping the blog and how the transparency towards the publics inherent in the blogging practice is subject to a conflict of opinions among the different blog voices. The starting point of the blog was to change communication practice into being more open and informal – some bloggers did that, and some still do, e.g. the Guess a Patent online ‘competition’ being posted every Friday, which is considered one of the most informal and entertaining posts on the blog. The informal guessing ‘competition’ is not related to the authority’s official communication, but a ‘relaxing point’ where external and internal users of the blog can meet on the blog about something not directly work related and hence less complicated to blog about and less bound to rise critical discussions. Some see this as a possibility to show another more personal side of the organization and the individual employees. There is the engineer who works with confidential cases and has little communication with the publics in relation to that kind of work tasks, and hence use the blog to post news stories within his field of expertise that are interesting to him and others. He calls it ‘a break’ and variation in the daily work, and hopes for constructive feedback from external (and internal) fellow knowledge workers. However, examples are also appearing of bloggers who wanted to use the blog for more informal and ‘amusing’ writings on boundary subjects, not directly relevant to specific work tasks (like the guessing competition) but who changed their blog behavior into writing more serious content as a result of social control of the critical voices inside the organization: Thomas: In the beginning I tried to keep my blog posts light-hearted and entertaining, but I have stopped doing that, or at least I am trying not to do that anymore [I: Why?] (long pause...) Thomas: I think there has been so many discussions on what we are going to use the blog for, that I did not want to keep on writing that way (Focus group 4, ll. 411-414)

What Thomas is referring to are the internal discussions in the organization about whether the blog should be used only for the official messages for the professional users of the authority, and/or the more informal, light-hearted and colloquial stories or diary-like posts about the daily life in a public organization which are not representing the directly official information, but more indirectly related or relevant. These discussions are centered around how to manage the blog transparency. What should be and what should not be transparent to the agency itself and the audience. I have chosen

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the light-hearted and more information blogs posts as one of the many examples of type of blog content that leads to discussions on whether to make visible this kind of information and potential communication or not. In its format and the blog strategy, management invites all kinds of blog posts, which means that it is the employee-blogger him-, or herself who decides the content, consequently giving rise to these discussions.

One of the main critics of the more informal, entertaining and light-hearted stories on the blog is Mads, considering these to be irrelevant and even damaging to the company to let the audience see such an informal and less official side of the organization. In this instance we find him in a discussion with his colleague Anna: Mads: I think there is a huge different between writing in a glib and superficial manner (…) We have to remember that our audience is a conservative industry, and consider how they see us. And I think we have crossed the border and have too much of the irrelevant and light-hearted content on the blog. So we need to make a clear decision on what we write about, when we write it, what we use it for and how we write it, etc. [Anna: But do you want the blog content to be all the same? Is it because you think it is messy?] Mads: It is one among many communication channels, and what is being written in one end of the blog affects the rest of the blog content. It affects all of us if the entertaining, light-hearted, not serious and, God knows what, that people post on that blog, content dominate the blog… [Anna: So that means you’re afraid of not being taken serious when a blogger writes an entertaining story with a not official message?] Mads: The organization is not being taken serious if we don’t act seriously. That’s the way it is (Focus group 4, ll. 546561).

This is just one example of the paradoxes and counter discourses in the blog usage that appear in the focus groups when the bloggers are asked to reflect on their blog practice.

There is a group of bloggers (Mads being one representative) who consider the manifold use of the blog for both directly relevant and official communication as well as the informal, light-hearted content, such as the ‘guess a patent competition’, to be noise. Furthermore, this group of bloggers oppose strongly to the internal bloggers who put in their guess and participate alongside the external audience in the Friday competitions. One blogger states that he finds it embarrassing when an organization is making itself visible by talking with itself on an external blog. On the other side, there is a group of bloggers who consider the multifarious usage of the blog for both the official and formal as well as the informal, light-hearted and entertaining communication, and both internal and external participating in the comments sections, as one of the greatest strengths of the blog. They would refer to the blog as ‘a box of chocolates’ with a varied and mixed content (mix of all kinds of news, both formal and serious and the more easy-going informal and light-hearted stories, news and competitions) (represented here by Anna). Transparency in the sense of visibility of corporate matters and matters that border to personal matters on the blog hence lead to the employee-bloggers having to make themselves clear on what side they are on, or stay neutral (like Thomas who changed his blog behavior). Because of this social control, the content on the blog is affected and the bloggers have to ask themselves (and management don’t do it for them) how far away from the official discourse do they dare to go in showing another and more personal side of their work and other more or less work related stories on the blog? Anna, on one hand, would have absolutely no problem

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in commenting on something that an internal blogger has written, whereas Mads (and quite a lot of the other bloggers) would not even consider it, and also call for the whole organization to not do so but instead stay formal and stick to corporate messages with a clear relevance to the audience.

Another bi-product of this dilemma is the discussion on the personal vs. professional schism that appear from the transparency on the blog. The blog in its format and style calls for a more personal touch than other communication forms in the organization, but it seems from the focus group interactions that the social control of the group is enacted. In the following example, a head of department who is not a very active blogger anymore, but instead inspires and motivates his employees to blog, is expressing his social norms and limits of blog content and his social validation of the allowed degree of personal touch: Kurt: (…) I think carefully about what I encourage them to write about. Because I might ask Steen to blog about the diploma degree he is taking in Sweden, but I do not encourage anyone to write about the course they are participating in because of a re-structuring in the department. I would never encourage anyone to write personally about his or her experiences of learning how to sell. Imagine what kind of blog that would lead to! You have to make a judgment of what should be on that blog [I: Is that because this kind of story would fit better on e.g. the Intranet, or not fit at all?] Kurt: Not fit at all… [Lennart: No, if people have a personal blog, they can damn well write it on that one] (Focus group 2, ll. 365-377)..

These kinds of internal discussions and negotiations on what to say and what not to say publicly are obviously very common in many organizations, but the interesting point in this case is that the discussions are reflections about an actual blog usage, i.e. they take place after and on the basis of actual writings publicly on the blog, and they very much arise due to the visible, open and social format of the blog, a communications form not seen and used before in the organization. This gives us an insight into the bloggers’ process of (re)defining their blog behavior and degree of transparency. In that way, the transparency becomes the catalyzer for the discussions, and internal disagreement, counter discourses and subgroups are emerging, i.e. the ‘skeptical ones’ and the ‘open ones’ according to their view on how transparent and on which content to be transparent. From a corporate communication perspective it is interesting that no coordinated plan or strategy seems to have been followed like the authority normally do in their communications, and hence the ‘open’ communication technology represented by the blog also leave the discussion of its actual usage open for discussion among the employees while they are in the process of blogging.

4. Conclusion This paper has presented and discussed empirical findings from focus group interactions and reflections on instances of how transparency on a government agency blog has led to social validation and social control, and ultimately leading to selfcensorship in the blog behavior of a large group of government agency bloggers at the Danish Patent and Trademark Office. The use of cultural discourse analysis on a communication instance like the organizational blog, can say something about the

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meaningfulness of a practice to participants, and can also be used to construct an interpretative account of the discursive practice. The analysis provides an understanding of how the micro-level culture within an organizational blog-community is shaping the blog-communication practice. Shedding light on the transparency that follows the organizational blog, a process through which a blog-culture is developed and the social implications of this organizational blogging process have appeared in the form of distinct discursive behaviors. In this present case study, particularly the social validation and social control are predominant effects of the blog transparency, leading to self-restriction behavior in expression among several of the organizational bloggers.

The thematic network analysis of their motivation shows that there is a constant evaluation going on in the blog-community of what the members consider to be allowed to be said publicly and what is not. Particularly the social validation and social control are predominant effects of the blog transparency.

The DKPTO-blog has proven to make transparent a social control system that has probably already been operating in the organization but becomes even more visible with the appearance of the blog. The increased transparency and involvement create counter discourses and conflicting views on how to operate in the internal blog community, and corporate cultural tensions emerge. The analysis shows how the employee-bloggers are affected. For some bloggers, the social validation of other bloggers has led to a shift in their blog behavior, others form subgroups and redefine their blog-behavior according to a socially controlled group of critics, pledging for at blog free of what they consider irrelevant and too light-hearted and informal information, and another group who consider the mix and variation in content to be one of the greatest strengths of the blog and a personal motivation for blogging. The analysis indicates that the corporate culture already dominant in an organization sets out the norms and validation, and in some cases overrules, the implementation of an open communication technology, like the organizational blog. The communication practice of the DKPTO-employees is culturally shaping the blog, and not the other way around.

The main contribution of the paper is to show this ‘hidden’ side of the transparency of blogging, the normally hidden cultural discourses that are affecting a communication-practice like organizational blogging, and the ‘other’ side of transparency as an embedded part of an organization’s communication with the external publics. Issues of transparency emerge such as social control and self-censorship.

Another contribution of this paper is enlightening the issue whether the blog is helping or hindering transparency in a particular organization, and for the organization to be sensitive to these organizational norms that are appearing and how they affect employees. The employees’ reflections on the organizational blog allow the organization to (re)define their strategy of transparency and their boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between openness and closure.

In this study I consider the people behind blogging as the primary interest, and interview talk is the main data resource, analyzing the underlying motives and the participants interpretation of their practice. In light of this, future research should be an analysis of the external stakeholder’s perspective on the blog communication and its implications through an analysis of the external contributions to blogging. Given the extrinsic influence on how the publics perceive the blog, which several bloggers indicate as crucial for their blog behavior and decisions on transparency, insights on the

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external audiences’ perception of the blog and its varied content would be relevant for future analysis. A systematic empirical analysis of blogs themselves would likewise be highly relevant to get a more complete insight into the social practice of blogging.

References Bernus, J. S. & Chase, M. A. (1990). Decision making in a networked environment. In H. Eschenauer, J. Koski and A. Osyczka (Eds), Technology and Communication (pp.376-396).

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Agerdal-Hjermind, A. (2010). En eksplorativ kontekstuel analyse af en gruppe interne blogaktørers anvendelse af en organisations weblog som ekstern kommunikationsplatform.

PhD Dissertation: Aarhus University Bruns, A. & Jacobs, J. (2006). Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Carbaugh, D. (2007). Cultural Discourse Analysis: Communication Practices and Intercultural Encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36 (3), 167 Christensen, L. T. (2002). Corporate Communication : the challenge of transparency. Corporate Communications : An International Journal, 162-168.

Clarke, A. E. (2005). Situational Analysis–Grounded Theory after the Postmodern Turn.

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Efimova, L. (2009). Passion at Work: blogging practices of knowledge workers. Enschede: Novay PhD Research Series, No. 024.

Fine (1995): Public Narration and Group Culture: Discerning Discourses in Social Movements.

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Kline, D. & Burstein, D. (2005). Blog! How the newest media revolution is chaning politics , business, and culture. New York: CDS Books.

Li, Ying (2012): Exploring the Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivations in Blogging: A Survey on Hong Kong University Students. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies. Vol.1 – Issue 4 – January 2012.

Lomborg, S. (2011). Social Media. A genre perspective. PhD Dissertation, SUN-TRYK Sunhedsvidenskab og Humaniora, Aarhus University.

Miller, C.R. & Shepherd, D. (2004). Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.

Into the blogosphere, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.

Russel, A. & Echchaibi, N. (2009). International Blogging. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

White, H.C. (2008). Identity & Control. How Social Formations Emerge. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Wetherell, M./Taylor, S. (2001). Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis. London: Sage Publications.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 393-409.

E-LEARNING AS A CULTURAL ARTIFACT An empirical study of Iranian Virtual Institutions DAVOUD MASOUMI* Department of Education, Communication and Learning University of Gothenburg. Box 300, SE-40530 Gothenburg, Sweden, davoud.masoumi@ped.gu.se. *Corresponding author AND BERNER LINDSTRÖM Department of Education, Communication and Learning University of Gothenburg, Box 300, SE-40530 Gothenburg, Sweden berner.lindstrom@gu.se

Abstract: Choice, design and use of technology in education settings can be dependent on culturally embedded norms, i.e., assumptions about the nature of knowledge, ways of communications, kinds of teaching and learning strategies and methods, etc. By discussing the culturally inscribed norms in this article, it is argued that on the design and use of e-learning in the perspective of globalization it is critically important to recognize, understand and thus take into account the cultural situatedness. Drawing on the literature, we present a model of culturalpedagogical paradigms in higher education in general and e-learning in particular.

We use this model to explore cultural-pedagogical orientations in Iranian Virtual Institutions as an instance of a developing country. This is done in a comparative perspective, looking for similarities of the teacher’s and learner’s points of view.

Introduction Cultural1 discourses play an important role in shaping educational practices. They are embedded in a specific culture at different levels, from the individual level, the interpersonal level, to institutional, regional and national levels. It could even be argued

1

Culture has been alternatively defined as “Shared patterns of behavior” (Mead, 2001), “Systems of shared meaning and understanding” (Geertz, 1973) “… those learned rules of behavior which bound acceptable practice in a group environment” (Groseschl & Doherty, 2000) and a means of marking differences and establishing boundaries; and thus it can be said that culture concerns systems of meaning, ideas, and patterns of thought and behaviours (Goffman, 1974).

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that education is important in “making” and “maintaining” culture. This is in specific ways reflected in policy documents, curricular documents, and teaching and learning.

When utilizing technologies or educational technologies in learning and teaching activities, it is important to note that these technologies are not a culturally neutral phenomenon; rather, they are cultural-specific ventures that are grounded and provided in a specific cultural context. By reflecting prevalent ideas of good practice,2 the embedded cultural-pedagogical norms are seen as an “unanalyzed totality” (Dewey, 1925) that are embedded in every aspect of an educational system, and thus cannot be “ghettoized” (Henderson, 1996, p. 95). Cultural-pedagogical norms in this article refer to more situation specific of shared patterns of behaviors, norms, understandings and preferences in educational settings that determine the way the educators (teachers, students, and other actors) approach learning and teaching, or the way the educators prefer to tackle the educational issues in the light of the perceived demands.

These technologies fulfill an important mediating function across cultures and generations. ICT-supported initiatives in education, accordingly, are seen as ‘cultural amplifiers’ heightening the cultural voices and ordinations that transform the nature of human productivity and favor specific cultural and cultural-pedagogical patterns in terms of communication, teaching and learning strategies, etc. (cf. Crook, 1996; McLoughlin, 1999).

In this sense, unlike the technological determinism, technological tools in education appear to be the primary structure influenced and shaped by macro systems to be culture, ideological, political, and educational trends (Lipponen, 2002). The key is thus to see cultural and technological infrastructure as aspects of infrastructure that are embedded within each other, not as two separate entities, one built around the other (Guribye, 2005). In the same line of reasoning, e-learning services and products, e.g., platforms, and resources, built in line with specific norms, pose characteristics of the culture of its originators: from the types of pedagogies (how knowledge should be acquired), communicative preferences to cultural expectations and preferences (cf.

Goodfellow & Lamy, 2010; Masoumi & Lindström, 2009; McLoughlin, 1999; Olaniran & Agnello, 2008). Thus, it can be argued that educational media cannot be passive structures, but rather evolve and develop a value and life of their own.

With rapid growth of ICT-based technologies, e-learning3 is becoming an important part of higher education across the globe in order to meet rising demands for higher education particularly in developing countries. In a similar way, international trade in educational services in terms of e-learning programs, platforms, learning resources, etc. in cross-cultural markets has expanded rapidly in recent years (Marginson, 2004; Rogers, Graham, & Mayes, 2007). These educational services and products mostly flow from the Western world to eastern countries (Mok, 2005).

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However, this does not mean that there are not conflicting ideas. For example, there is a tension between existing formal educational practices and media and alternative informal learning practices supported by social software. There are also differences between subjects regarding what counts as good practice.

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E-learning is a contested concept that evokes a range of images and responses depending on the context in which it is used and who is using it. Having a broader approach in this article, e-learning includes the whole range of an educational institution’s procedures and activities and relates more to the totality of an institution’s processes and standards than to individual activities and tools.

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Such services and products are developed in alignment with the Western countries’ cultural norms and preferences (cf. Olaniran & Agnello, 2008). These norms and preferences are often embedded and materialized in e-learning services and products, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and digital resources (cf. Dakers, 2006; Olaniran & Agnello, 2008; Van Dam & Rogers, 2002). Introducing culturally embedded technological products and services in education thus can challenge and even restructure the education of other countries that are using those services and products.

Cultural and cultural-pedagogical challenges in some cases have resulted in failure of educational institutions to accomplish their intended goals (cf. Duncker, 2004; Ess, 2010; Postma & Postma, 2001). Similarly, there have been many examples of technological products and programs from North America, Australia, Great Britain, and Europe that were purchased but never used in Africa and Asia because culturalpedagogical norms of providers become dominant, desirable, and used as the standard (Gunawardena & McIsaac, 2004). Such challenges and dilemmas can threaten the very survival of higher education institutions involved in e-learning (Coates, James, & Baldwin, 2005; Frand, 2000; Mok, 2005).

Culture, however, cannot be added onto to the e-learning services and products, rather than need to be built into. To build into and integrate cultural and culturalpedagogical issues, initially, this phenomenon in terms of what and how should be explained and known to all of the actors in educational settings. In other words, to build in and integrate the cultural and cultural-pedagogical norms when developing and then using e-learning setting, one needs primarily to examine and determine the current cultural-pedagogical norms. We also find support for carrying out a cultural recognition before implementing quality frameworks or similar initiatives, in order to identify potential barriers and to help in designing and the adoption of such initiatives (cf.

Davies, Douglas, & Douglas, 2007; McAdam & Welsh, 2000).

Despite increasing acknowledgment of the cultural and cultural-pedagogical issues, of fundamental importance in educational settings, these issues have hardly been addressed and thus may not be taken into account in the design and implementation of e-learning (Marginson, 2004; Olaniran, 2009; Remtulla, 2008). Similarly, a number of scholars point out that not enough is known about the ramifications of cultural inclusivity of design and use of e-learning systems and that further research is needed (cf. Dakers, 2006; Hase & Ellis, 2001; Olaniran & Agnello, 2008; Reeves & Reeves, 1997; Van Dam & Rogers, 2002; Wang & Reeves, 2006).

This study, therefore, focuses on exploring and understanding the culturalpedagogical norms and assumptions in Iranian virtual institutions.4 Understanding the embedded norms in such institutions is critical not only for productive design and implementation of e-learning products and services, but also for formulating and refining the learning goals and outcomes.

4

There are a variety of definitions of what a virtual institution is, but in this article it is considered to be a “higher education setting that offers a conventional university’s services (including teaching) through information and communication technologies.” Other concepts, which are occasionally used interchangeably to imply much the same, are “online university” and “e-university”.

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Theoretical Background of the Study The cultural norms and values in education are generally addressed in the work of anthropologists such as Hall (1976), Hofstede (1997), Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner (1998), who identify a number of dimensions of cultural variation to explain the ways members of different cultures communicate, behave, perceive time, or view themselves in relation to others and to the environment.

Considering this work, various models including Reeves’s (1992, 1994) Interactive Multimedia Model, Henderson’s (1996) Multiple Cultural Model, Reigeluth’s (1994) work on drawing Industrial Age Paradigm Versus Information Age Paradigms, and also Collis (1996) work on “Flexible Learning”) have been developed for exploring and understanding Cultural-Pedagogical dimensions in educational settings (cf. Masoumi & Lindström, 2009). It appears, however, that employing Henderson’s Multiple Cultural Model which grounded on Reeves’s (1999) Model, proposes a valuable framework for evaluating and judging an educational setting by plotting each of the dimensions on a scale and thus obtaining a profile of an e-learning program/virtual institution.

Henderson’s key addition to Reeves’s model is the “idea of incorporating multiple cultural perspectives into an eclectic paradigm, so that multiple cultures maintain their identities and can have their respective cultures accommodated” (Collis, 1999, p. 205).

Furthermore, her Multiple Cultural Model comprises particular elements from the modernist, postmodernist, and interconnectivity world views which is informed by Vygotskian learning theory (Henderson, 1996). This model, thus, can be considered as somewhat comprehensive, which has been undertaken as framework in numerous studies including Collis (1999), McLoughlin (1999) and Gunawardena et al. (2003). It could be said that, Henderson’s eclectic multidimensional approach provides a pragmatic typology of cultural norms, which might work as a tool for considering cultural norms when designing and implementing e-learning. In Henderson’s (1996) model two paradigms are described as polar extremes on a continuum from externally mediated reality (objectivism/instructivism) to internally mediated reality, i.e., constructivism (Jonassen, 1991). The extremes on each end are reminiscent of the continuum used by Hall (1996), Hofstede (1976), and Trompenaars and HampdenTurner (1986, 1997).

This model is restructured by Edmundson (2004) in which dimensions were merged into a singular dimension by combining certain dimensions or features (see Table 1). These dimensions give a picture of possible values in educational settings.

Table 1. Cultural-pedagogic dimensions.

UNDERLYING EDUCATIONAL PARADIGM

Instructivism: (Behavioral, Reductionist, Sharply Focused

Constructivism: Cognitive, Constructivism, Unfocused Goals

EXPERIENTIAL VALUE

Abstract: To what extent the learning activities are undertaken abstractly? (removed from real world)

Concrete: To what extent learning activities are concrete, experiential (apprenticeship) indicating relevance to the learner’s real world?

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ROLE OF INSTRUCTOR

Teacher Proof: Are the lecturers regarded as the “authoritarian” source and provider of knowledge? (teacher centered)

Facilitative: Does the teacher facilitate learning activities along with students without controlling outcomes?

VALUE OF ERRORS

Errorless learning: Ideal learning involves no errors. So students learn until they make no errors (like programmed instruction)

Experiential learning: Students have opportunities to learn through trialing; they also get opportunities to learn from their mistakes (as part of the learning process)

ORIGIN OF MOTIVATION

Extrinsic: Does motivation originate from factors separate from the learner’s interest, needs and so on (like the need to get an ‘A’)?

Intrinsic: Does motivation comes from within, from a true desire of students?

ACCOMMODATION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Non-existent: Are learners’ individual differences (affective and physiological factors) accommodated in learning environments?

Multi-faceted: Is knowledge and learning presented in a variety of ways so that learners can utilize what best suits their affective and physiological factors’ preferences?

LEARNER CONTROL

Non-existent: Do the learners learn along a predetermined path (complete program control)?

Unrestricted: Do learners have unrestricted control of the path?

Learners are allowed to choose what section, and/or what paths to follow.

USER ACTIVITY

Mathemagenic5: Do the learners access various representations of content (along a predetermined path)?

Generative: Do learners engage in the process of creating, representing, and elaborating knowledge?

COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Unsupported: Do the learning environments support Cooperative Learning? (learners work independently of others)

Integral: Are collaborative and cooperative learning embedded in learning environments?

These cultural-pedagogical dimensions can address the whole educational sphere and how learning and teaching practices can be built in educational settings. It needs to be mentioned that the range and quality of these core cultural-pedagogical dimensions

5

Mathemagenic environments enable learners to “access various representations of content,” whereas generative ones “engage learners in the process of creating, elaborating, or representing knowledge” (Blanchard, Razaki, & Frasson 2005).

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can vary from one context to another. It should also be noted that there may be other cultural-pedagogical dimensions that still need to be delineated.

Method METHODOLOGICAL DEPARTURE By addressing the main actors’ understandings, i.e., students and teachers about their educational settings, procedures, expectations, and preferences, the cultural-pedagogical orientations in Iranian virtual institutions are uncovered. In this sense, these actors are seen as mediators who mediate the voice of the institution.

DESIGN OF THE EMPIRICAL STUDY The cultural and cultural-pedagogical issues as multifaceted and multilayered constructs can be investigated in different levels from personal levels to institutional, national or even regional levels. The focus of this study, however, is situated in the institutional level, which is focused on portraying the facts and procedures (status quo) in the Iranian virtual institutions. It is assumed that what key actors, i.e., teachers and students in these virtual institutions “desire” is more likely to reflect a desired norm or what they actually do than what they consider “desirable.” . According to Hofstede (1997), a statement or question that asks participants to express what is “desirable,” , implies a request for what they view as ethically correct or reasonable; consequently, their answers are less likely to reflect the everyday practices they actually pursue.

To have a big picture of this complex phenomenon, the requested data were collected from different sources and by means of a variety of research methods (surveys and interviews with students and teachers).

A survey method was, initially, adapted and developed on the basis of Edmundson’s work (2004). In this survey, clusters (a set of two or three) of questions representing different cultural-pedagogical values were applied. Every one of the cultural-pedagogical dimensions is represented by at least two or three questions. Each question comprises two statements examining different dimensions in a two-fold continuum, i.e., instructivism or constructivism.

Two versions of the questionnaire were supplied: one for students and one for lecturers (see appendix for a copy of the questionnaire). The surveys were administered among students and faculty members of three Iranian virtual institutions including IUST virtual institution, Shiraz virtual institution and Hadith Science virtual institution in late of 2008 and early of 2009. In the administered surveys, the participants were asked to choose one of two possible statements that characterize their ongoing procedures (status quo), rather than what they considered desirable.

Participating Institutions and Individuals Participants in this study were students and faculty members of three Iranian virtual institutions including Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) virtual institution, Shiraz virtual institution and Hadith Science virtual institution. A total of 70 individuals (40 students and 30 faculty members) took part in this study. The

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participating students were enrolled in an e-learning program and completed at least two semesters (25 percent of his/her program) in one of these virtual institutions.

Almost all of the students who participated in this study from two virtual institutions were below 24 years of age. Seventy-two percent of them are perusing their studies in the field of “Information Technology” and 28 percent in “Industrial Engineering.” A few more male students (68%) participated than female students. More than 80 percent of the respondents were Bachelor students. Moreover more than two thirds of the respondents had already fulfilled around 60 percent (five semesters) of their program.

AN EXAMPLE OF AN E-LEARNING COURSE IN AN IRANIAN VIRTUAL INSTITUTION To bring in a broad picture of how an e-learning course is run in Iranian virtual institutions, an outline of a typical course is portrayed in this section. Such a picture is drawn based on the one of the researcher’s direct experiences in two Iranian virtual institutions.

The objectives and goals of the courses in these institutions were predetermined. In this sense, students should pursue a logical path to learn what they were expected to learn. This means that the learning resources and course materials are pre-packaged and delivered on a regular basis.

In e-learning courses, as in the case of conventional courses, there were synchrony sessions during the semester (once/twice a week depending on the course’s higher education credits). Lecturers usually gave their lectures at these synchrony meetings (see Figure 1 for a sample of the virtual environment). One-way interaction between lecturers and students often occurred during these virtual meetings.

Figure 1: A sample of the virtual environment in IUST virtual institution.

Similarly, students were not expected to make any contribution during the course.

The frequent interruptions due to poor infrastructure may partly explain this one-way

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interaction. Most of the students’ comments were concerned with the frequent interruptions and inadequate interaction between students and lecturers, such as missing audio, slides, etc. during these virtual sessions. On some occasions, students were given an opportunity to bring up (write) their questions or comments in synchrony sessions.

However, there was no interaction between students in the given virtual settings.

Lecturers in the classroom environment were regarded as sources of knowledge and expertise from whom students should learn. In the same vein, the lecturers’ authorities were not challenged in any of these virtual sessions. It can be noted that the students were usually asked to follow the course and complete the course assignments according to instructions.

The interaction between students and lecturers was often interrupted due to poor ICT infrastructure. In some courses, the lectures were recorded and presented on the institution’s platform, which meant that students could access these recorded learning resources asynchronously after the session. Students found this very helpful for keeping the track of the courses (see Figure 2 for a sample of recorded and presented courses in the institution’s LMS).

Figure 2: A sample of learning resources for a course at Hadith virtual institution.

As in conventional university procedures, the students at the virtual institutions were also asked to present a paper/complete a task, etc., as part of the midterm examination. At the end of the semester, however, students were also tested in the form of paper-based examinations. These examinations were held in virtual universities’ offcampus locations or their local offices.

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Results The results presented herewith are related to questions posed in the main study. The distribution of both students’ and lecturers’ answers concerning the current culturalpedagogical constructs in the given virtual institutions are reflected in Table 2.

Table 2: Comparison of Responses on Pedagogical Paradigm QUESTIONS¤

STUDENTS 6

Instr

LECTURERS Constr

7

Chi-square p-value

Instr

Constr

1

16(64%)

9(36%)

18(95%)

1(5%)

.017*

2

18(72%)

7(28%)

13(68%)

6(32%)

.528

3

24(96%)

1(4%)

16(84%)

3(16%)

.207

4

17(68%)

8(32%)

9(47%)

10(53%)

.143

5

19(76%)

6(24%)

12(63%)

7(37%)

.276

6

21(84%)

4(16%)

14(74%)

5(26%)

.320

7

18 (72%)

7 (28%)

14 (74%)

5 (26%)

.588

8

19 (76%)

6 (24%)

17 (89%)

2 (11%)

.229

9

12 (48%)

13 (52%)

7 (37%)

12 (63%)

.333

10

25 (100%)

0 (00%)

11 (58%)

8 (42%)

.000**

11

22 (88%)

3 (22%)

11 (58%)

8 (42%)

.027*

12

14 (56%)

11 (44%)

10 (53%)

9 (47%)

.533

13

22 (88%)

3 (22%)

17 (89%)

2 (11%)

.632

14

21 (84%)

4 (16%)

14 (74%)

5 (26%)

.320

15

20 (80%)

5 (20%)

13 (68%)

4 (32%)

.537

16

21 (84%)

4 (16%)

17 (89%)

2 (11%)

.475

17

23 (92%)

2 (8%)

18 (95%)

1 (5%)

.604

18

18 (72%)

7 (28%)

14 (78%)

4 (22%)

.475

19

17 (68%)

8 (32%)

12 (66%)

68 (34%)

.591

20

12 (48%)

13 (52%)

11 (59%)

8 (41%)

.365

21

19 (72%)

6 (28%)

12 (63%)

7 (37%)

.276

* Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level. ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level.

EDUCATIONAL APPROACH With respect to the Pedagogical Approach - which is addressed through three questions - the collected data, i.e. two-thirds of the students and almost all of the lecturers indicate that the students in their educational settings follow a well-defined, logical path to learn what they should (see Table 2). The lecturers’ answers are distributed slightly differently; such difference between students’ and lecturers’ standpoints could be explained as due to some of the students possibly exploring different paths to learn beyond their formal education.

6 7 8

Instructivism Constructivism One of the teachers did not answer this question.

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Similarly, almost two-thirds of both students and lecturers pinpointed that “students are usually tested with questions that are based on the stated goals and objectives of the course.” One-third of the participants, however, indicated that the “students are tested by applying what they have learned from the course to different situations.” Such a difference between participants could be explained by considering the field of study and type of course where some of the courses could be conducted in the laboratory.

Similarly, almost all the students and 84 percent of the lecturers stated that in their learning context “students are given predetermined learning goals (behavioral objectives).” However, 26 percent of the lecturers believe that “students learn as they go, depending on their own learning goals” in their educational settings.

EXPERIENTIAL VALUE With respect to experiential value, both groups, particularly the students, expressed that their learning is a function of the lecturers’ expectations. Similarly, fulfilling the teachers’ expectations is not in line with students’ real life, and thus it is hard to employ what they have learned in their educational settings.

This is aligned with other cultural-pedagogic dimensions such as Teacher Role and Motivation, in which students see lecturers as a source of knowledge that could identify their needs and thus supply them with relevant knowledge. On the other hand, it can relate to what motivates students to process their learning activities in a virtual institution.

Similarly, participants (76 percent of students and 63 percent of lecturers) indicated that students are not expected to relate learning activities and resources to their past or potential experiences (applying new knowledge and skills to the real world) and activities in their learning environments. As reflected in Table 2, 76 percent of the students pinpointed that the learning environments put emphasis “more or less on memorizing learning materials in reality and they are not expected to relate learning resources to their past or potential experiences.” There is a significant difference between the students’ and lecturers’ perceptions on this dimension. This variation among the participants’ approach could be traced back to their definitions of learning.

Some of them may have adopted traditional definitions of learning, involving ideas such as banking and transmission of knowledge, and some of them may have adopted more of a pragmatic approach to learning.

INSTRUCTOR ROLE As to the “Instructor role,” the sampling data indicate that students follow a path of learning determined by the instructor/course designer, as they believed that such a person (an “expert”) usually knew what the students needed to learn. Interestingly, lecturers (89 percent) strongly highlighted their role as “expert,” “source of knowledge” and a recognized authority who should teach (transfer) knowledge to students, not as a “facilitator” (Table 2).

Similarly, students wished to be taught by an “expert” in the field, rather than to be guided by an instructor toward learning activities. This is in line with the “Power Distance Index” in the Iranian context, in which the indicted figure is considerably higher than the European countries.

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VALUE OF ERRORS With respect to the “value of errors,” the students believed that their learning environments are strongly oriented to the instructivist thoughts in which students learn until they make no errors on the test or learning activities. Under an errorless learning approach, the interventions are validated and standardized and students learn until they make no mistakes, or the instructional method does not allow for errors.

However, lecturers expressed a mixed reaction on the addressed questions. They pointed out (see Table 2) that in their learning environments they use undertaken errors and mistakes as part of the educational process to some extent (giving opportunities to “learn from their mistakes”).

However, both groups indicated that lecturers or course designers are satisfied when they take a test without making any mistakes. There was a significant difference between the students’ and lecturers’ perceptions on this dimension as well as between lecturers’ thoughts and deeds. This variation could be because of their different perspective to the learning environments or might be due their different interpretations of errors in given questionnaires.

ORIGIN OF MOTIVATION In terms of the students’ “origin of motivation,” both groups (students with 56 and lecturers with 53 percent as presented in Table 2) indicate that the students mostly take part in e-learning programs when they have no other options (as in conventional programs).

This implies that if students had had other options in conventional universities, they might not have chosen e-learning programs. Correspondingly, it can be claimed that the motivation of the majority of the students for selecting an e-learning mode cannot be intrinsic (Masoumi, 2010). These results are in line with the gatekeepers’ arguments that most of the students in their e-learning programs are keen to earn a degree or higher education, particularly in some field such as engineering or medical science, but not necessarily to acquire new knowledge or skills (cf. Masoumi, 2010). In such contexts, earning a higher education diploma per se is an end in itself for most of the students, which may not be in line with the intended learning outcomes. It needs to be mentioned that this issue in which students view education as a way for earning higher social status and prestige rather than individual development can be considered as one of the blocking factors in the success of the virtual institutions.

Similarly, the vast majority of the students strongly indicated that they prefer to follow courses in which they are told what they need to learn. They prefer to pursue a defined and fixed way to pass the course or earn a degree rather than facing different challenges and exploring new ways. On the other hand the educational system poses its order (pre-defined program) to students that they should take e-learning courses when they were required to, not the in way that students want to (i.e., following predefined learning activities without any flexibility). This may signify that the control of the learning is mainly placed outside of the student.

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ACCOMMODATION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES On survey items related to “accommodation of individual differences,” both groups, particularly students, strongly indicated that the e-learning courses are usually presented by means of a few learning methods/activities.

This indicates that when delivering the courses at Iranian virtual institutions, the students’ individual differences are usually not considered. Lecturers, though, pointed out that they employ several instructional methods or learning activities when delivering e-learning courses. Likewise, the responses to the second question in this set indicated that both groups believe that students’ interests and needs are usually not considered in designing and providing courses.

LEARNER CONTROL In terms of “learner control,” both groups indicated that students are usually following learning activities sequentially in a fixed and timed frame, i.e., predetermined path.

Students, thus, have little control on their own learning (pace of learning). Such approach is in line with the students’ and lecturers’ perception and expectations about what and how learning activities should be arranged.

In addition, both groups indicated that the course’s features and learning activities are chosen by the instructor or course designer without the students’ contributions. In line with other cultural-pedagogical dimensions, e.g., teacher role, students are seen as passive recipients who need to be taught by an authoritative expert.

USER ACTIVITY With respect to “user activity,” both groups of participants strongly indicated that students have very little or no involvement in producing/representing the learning resources and activities. Accordingly, pre-produced and pre-packed learning recourses, activities, and/or skills are transferred onto the learner in as an efficient, predetermined and predigested way as possible.

Similarly, both groups pointed out (see Table 2) that students are not given any opportunity to apply course content in different activities or create their own uses for the information within the course.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING As regards the “collaborative learning,” more than half the students and lecturers stated that in their learning environments, students work and are encouraged to work with a group of peers on their learning activities or projects. This significant variation between participants’ perspectives can be explained by considering the participants’ field of study. As it was noted, the participants were from two Technical institutions and one social sciences oriented institution. Interestingly, students from technical fields indicated that they are working with a group of peers and classmates on learning activities or projects than other students despite the fact that there were little or no facilities to do so.

In addition, both groups (72 percent of students and 63 percent of lecturers) expressed that there are limited (technical) facilities and tools for cooperative and collaborative learning in their e-learning environments. Furnishing tools and facilities such as discussion forums, chat, file sharing, shared whiteboards, weblogs, wikis, etc.

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for collaboration among students can support a social constructivism approach to elearning. This implies that the figures for collaborative learning in the first question are not planned by the educational system but, rather, are regarded as contributions/initiatives from individual lecturers and students.

To provide an overview of students’ and lecturers’ perceptions of the culturalpedagogical paradigms in Iranian virtual institution settings, a three-dimensional approach was taken (see Figure 3). In this triangle model, students’ and lecturers’ perceptions of their e-learning environments are plotted in on the basis of the culturalpedagogical dimensions given.

INSTRUCTIVISM VERSUS CONSTRUCTIVISM 100

CONSTRUCTIVISM

90 80 70

Lecturers’ Perceptions 68:32

60 50 40 30

73:27 Students’ Perceptions

20 10 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

INSTRUCTIVISM Figure 3: Dominant cultural-pedagogical paradigms from students and lecturers’ perspectives.

As depicted in Figure 3, the participants believed that the educational system in Iranian virtual institutions placed a great deal of emphasis (mostly without being aware of doing so) on Instructivism principles when designing and holding e-learning courses.

The position of lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of their learning environments in this triangle model could accommodate with what Anna Sfard (1998) called the Acquisition Metaphor. Her description of the “Acquisition Metaphor” corresponds closely with the description of the cultural-pedagogical constructs in the scrutinized virtual institutions. By introducing the concept “quadrant of Injection,” Cronjé (2006), similarly, addresses the very similar mode of education in which pre-produced and prepacked “knowledge, skills and/or attitudes are transferred into the learner in as an

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efficient, predetermined and predigested way as possible” (Cronjé, 2006, p. 396). In such an approach, it was felt that learning could more readily consist of simple and shallow recall without real insight.

Discussion To build in and integrate the cultural and cultural-pedagogical issues when developing, implementing and formulating and refining learning aims and goals learning products, one needs primarily to examine and determine the dominant cultural and culturalpedagogical norms and avoid hegemonic premises and behaviors as well. Investigating such cultural-pedagogical dimensions in Iranian virtual institutions can inform and contribute to the knowledge of developing countries in general.

It can be concluded from the data that the educational system in Iranian virtual institutions placed great emphasis on Instructivism principles in the design and implementation of their learning activities. The majority of the students and teachers in these institutions expressed that the current norms and values in their e-learning environments are oriented towards instructivist notions rather than constructivist thoughts. In such an approach, it is felt that learning could more readily consist of simple and shallow recall without real insight. The findings of this study are in line with other studies in the developing world (cf. Edmundson, 2003; Fidalgo-Neto et al., 2009; Henderson, 1996; Hofstede, 2001; McCarty, 2006; Zhang, 2007).

This research also supports the findings in Hofstede’s (1997, 2001) study of national level cross-cultural values in terms of the dominant cultural norms. However, the participants’ comments on some of the dimensions were not in line with Hofstede’s findings. For instance, Hofstede’s studies have categorized the Iranians as collectivist rather than the individualist. However, the Iranian participants noted that they are also trying to be independent and everyone is looking after himself in virtual environments.

This may indicate changes in some of the cultural values, at least among students.

Further, it can be said the cultural and cultural-pedagogical norms and procedural climate of conventional universities are relocated and transferred to virtual institutions.

In this sense, digitizing the traditional learning resources and contents to e-content seems to be the only difference between traditional on-campus programs and their virtual (off-campus) counterpart. E-learning, however, is not just a neutral delivery medium along with other educational tools; rather, it ought to be viewed as a new approach to education, teaching and learning.

This may signify a number of the emerged challenges in implementing and running e-learning services and platforms in Iranian virtual institutions. Such challenges are that there does not appear to be a technological and cultural fit in the diffusion of elearning services and platforms. In other words, they could not be completely decontextualized from their cultural background (McCarty, 2006) because the appropriate design of e-learning platforms and services are a critical element in their effectiveness.

Given these distinctions and variations in cultural-pedagogical premises and values, we think it is necessary to adopt a more culture-sensitive approach to design, implementation, and use of the entire e-learning structure and process. To have such culture sensitive approaches, one needs to initially address the cultural-pedagogical values and then take them into account in the design, implementation and use of e-

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learning. It needs to be mentioned that cultural values are not a static entity but are constantly evolving, which means that they need to be continually investigated.

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EXPLORING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN HCI EDUCATION JOSÉ L. ABDELNOUR NOCERA, ANN AUSTIN, MARIO MICHAELIDES, SUNILA MODI AND CECILIA OYUGI Centre for Internationalisation and Usability School of Computing and Technology, University of West London St Mary’s Road, Ealing. London, W5 5RF {Jose.Abdelnour-Nocera, Ann.Austin, Mario.Michaelides, Sunila.Modi, Cecilia.Oyugi}@uwl.ac.uk}

Abstract. The discipline of human-computer interaction has become a subject taught across universities around the world, outside of the cultures where it originated. However, the intercultural implication of its assimilation into the syllabus of courses offered by universities around the world remains underresearched. The purpose of this ongoing research project is to provide insights for these implications in terms of the student and teacher experience of HCI. How this subject is socially represented across the different universities studied is a key question. In order to develop intercultural awareness of these questions universities from UK, Namibia, Mexico and China are collaborating in a multiple case study involving students and lecturers engaged in evaluation and design tasks. Findings will then be used to propose an international HCI curriculum more supportive of local perspectives. This paper describes the initial steps of this study and some preliminary findings from Namibia, India and Mexico about cognitive styles and cultural attitudes.

1. Introduction Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a well-established and important subject in computing, technology and design in universities across the world. HCI is taught in order to explore, understand and aid in improving the usability and user experience of interactive systems and products. Though each educational community refers to similar methodologies and frameworks in order to teach this subject, little is known of the student experience and how local perspectives have influenced their content and approach to teaching. In addition, different levels of ‘maturity’ in the adoption of HCI among different countries suggest that its representation and experience can take many forms. Therefore, a current challenge for this discipline is making visible the possible tensions created between local cultures and the assumptions, priorities and values embedded in HCI concepts and methods mainly developed under particular paradigms.

This project proposes to explore how HCI is socially represented, taught and experienced in different institutions spanning four continents in China, Namibia, Mexico and the United Kingdom. The project will begin by investigating how each

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educational community perceives what a usable system is through observation, discussion, and interviews in the context of a common evaluation and design task. An international and multilingual science education portal supporting middle school children will be focus of these activities. These will provide data on their benchmarks for what they view as good usability as well as identifying similarities or differences with other institutions and their attitudes to this subject.

The project will then progress to investigate their teaching approaches and methods, gathering data on all aspects such as the structure of their modules, the learning outcomes, the content, choice of literature, assessment methods, use of technology and their conduct in day-to-day teaching. Close attention will be paid to their perception on how HCI issues such as colour and metaphors are delivered, which will also offer data on the influences culture has had on their delivery.

The short duration of this project and its methodological design make it impossible to report on longitudinal accounts of appropriation of HCI by teachers and students.

However, we hope to provide insights on the nature of HCI education as an intercultural encounter and the opportunities this can bring to locally validate, question and enrich some of its key concepts and methods. Including these insights into an international HCI curriculum will form designers better prepared to support intercultural collaboration.

2. HCI Education in Different Countries Though there are numerous articles on HCI education and a few in relation to a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s delivery of the subject, there is no substantial body of literature which offers a thorough investigation into the influence that culture has on its delivery and in comparison with other countries/cultures. There are however a number of studies that discuss HCI education delivery in certain countries such as New Zealand (Sharkey & Paynter, 2004), Sweden (Gulliksen & Oestreicher, 1999), South Africa (Kotze, 2002), Brazil (Souza et al., 2008) and Costa Rica (Calderon, 2009).

These studies offer a brief view into HCI education. Sharkey & Paynter (2004) investigated the need and coverage of HCI in relation to their educational courses in New Zealand. Their research came to the conclusion that the use of design tools was the most common topic followed by task analysis. This contrast with Sweden (Gulliksen & Oestreicher, 1999) where design principles, processes and cognitive psychology are the two subjects deemed to be the most important. Both countries had different approaches in their decisions but it would be interesting to investigate this factor especially regarding the time lapsed since these papers were published. Also, students in Costa Rica (Calderon, 2009) offered their view that HCI should include more graphical design and heuristic evaluations, which the institution amended to accommodate.

In Brazil, a multicultural and developing country, challenges such as illiteracy and digital illiteracy impact on how HCI is implemented and ultimately how it is taught without discriminating against their fellow citizens being a important issue (Souza et al., 2008). Souza confirms semiotics has had a stronger influence, unlike traditions in Europe and North America, and that along with social inclusion are the two key areas that define Brazilian attitudes towards HCI. They are however disadvantaged in the fact

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that Portuguese HCI educational material is limited and is hindering understanding and development of this subject, a complaint shared by Gulliksen & Oestreicher (1999) and Calderon (2009) in regards to Sweden and Costa Rica.

Kotze (2002) looks at HCI education in South Africa, which in many ways shares cultural similarities with Brazil in terms of the range of ethnic, cultural, language and educational background issues. Kotze argues that HCI is a critical subject that needs to be taught but South Africa has been slow to embrace it. This is due partly to the ICT industry, which is characterised by systems development with little consideration for human factors. There seems to be a problem with institutions and cultures taking HCI seriously. This is echoed by Smith et al. (2003) who indicate that in India where a large IT industry exists, HCI education has been neglected which is having an effect on the population and on Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s global marketability. Though India produces high-class engineering graduates, very few courses address HCI. However, over the last few years the HCI community in India has grown and the topic begins to be addressed at national level through events such as the India HCI conferences taking place annually since 2010.

With the need for HCI apparent in order to aid the usability of systems at home and abroad, what are best strategies for teaching this subject? Smith et al. (2007) suggest that western HCI tools and techniques might not be effective in developing countries and that some degree of localisation or adaptation are required. Lazar (2011) has utilised community-based projects to enhance HCI education in Canada and has discovered that if students are involved with users they are in a better position to appreciate their needs.

Ultimately the literature available offers glimpses into HCI education in different environments though the papers vary in depth, content and publication dates. An aim of this project is to add consistency and contemporary analysis to this body of research, and to make sense of cross-country variations, convergences and emergences from a cultural perspective. In the next section we describe the main theories driving this perspective for us.

2. Culture and Cognition One area of consideration when discussing teaching and learning is that of the individual cognitive style of the learner. Cognitive, or learning style theory is a complex and contentious subject area with many conflicting theories and very many instruments to determine the different perspectives of cognitive style (Coffield et al.

2004; Cassidy 2004) and in addition, the cultural background of an individual may affect the outcome of any cognitive test (Witkin 1967). However, researchers in the fields of both culture and cognitive styles have identified a correlation between cultural characteristics and the holistic or intuitive versus analytical dimensions of cognitive style (Nisbett & Norenzayan 2002; Hayes & Allinson 1988).

Nisbettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s investigations into the relationship between culture and cognition investigate the cultural differences between East Asians and people from the Western world (Nisbett & Norenzayan 2002; Nisbett & Miyamoto 2005) and discuss how an inclination towards holistic or analytic reasoning is influenced by cultural identities.

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Building on Witkin’s definition of subjects as ‘field dependent’ or ‘field independent’ (Witkin et al. 1954), Nisbett differentiates between holistic and analytic reasoning, defining holistic thought as ‘an orientation to the context or field as a whole’ and analytic thought as ‘detachment of the object from its context’. (Nisbett & Norenzayan 2002, p.19). A later study that further focused on attention and perception discovered that the exposure of the subject to particular cultural icons or practices influenced the analytic versus holistic perception, particularly amongst bicultural subjects, concluding that the relationship between culture and cognition is not fixed, but flexible and dynamic (Nisbett & Miyamoto 2005).

Hayes and Allinson tested the hypothesis that culture would account for differences in learning style in a study involving managers from East Africa, India and the United Kingdom. Using Hofstede’s (1991) four dimensions of Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism-Collectivism and Masculinity-Femininity, and the Theorist/Pragmatist and Activist/Reflector scores of Honey and Mumford’s Learning Style Questionnaire, Hayes and Allinson identified two dimensions of learning style, Analysis and Action (Hayes & Allinson 1988). Further work in this area resulted in Allinson and Hayes’ Cognitive Style Index (CSI) (1996), a compact questionnaire which is designed to test whether individuals tends more towards an intuitivist (right brain dominant) or analyst (left brain dominant) approach.

3. Methodological Strategy and Initial Analysis Model The case study in each country includes a visit to a university where a group of around 15 undergraduate HCI students will be asked to engage in a workshop, which includes evaluation and design tasks for a science education portal for school children between 10 and 18 years old. The activity given to students will act as a cultural probe (Gaver et al. 1999) as it contains elements with different cultural affordances, e.g. heuristic evaluation as stimulating analytic thinking and prototype sketching as stimulating holistic thinking. The visit will also include meetings and interviews with lecturers and staff in charge of curriculum design. In addition, documents and course materials produced by the university will be analyzed.

Quantitative data on culture for each student group will be collected using Hofstede’s VSM instrument, and Hayes and Allinson’s CSI survey will be used to situated each student in an intuitive-holistic scale. We acknowledge the limitations of Hofstede’s model on national culture (McSweeney 2002) and are very careful not to make stereotypical interpretations or generalizations from the data collected. Even more we are not expecting students to match the national culture scores ‘predictions’ for their country. The fact that they are in different countries make them more likely to be contrasting. However, we still believe that it will be useful to find out the mean scores for each group on each cultural dimension, e.g. power distance, masculinity and collectivism, to enrich our comparative analysis of quantitative and qualitative data.

Qualitative data will be analyzed for manifestations of national culture dimensions (Hofstede, 1991), cognitive styles (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005) and high and low context cultures (Hall, 1993). While these different cultural models give us a top-down framework for analysis, a bottom up analysis of this data will also be developed. In this

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case the aim will be to uncover cultural patterns, themes and dimensions exclusively emerging from the HCI education domain.

Data gathering can be structured in three levels looking at different types of culture markers per group: a) Student experience will be studied through completion of VSM 94/08 and CSI surveys, individual ‘expert’ evaluation and interface design tasks producing quantitative and qualitative data on students’ performance and views on the use of heuristics, scenario and persona development richness and content, usability and user experience goals; focus groups aimed at exploring perceptions of the task given to them and HCI concepts and tools in the local context. Students’ evaluation and design rationale statements and sketches will be analyzed in terms of the dimensions holistic-analytic, and high and low context as well through development of emergent themes. b) Teacher experience will be studied through interviews and analysis of HCI course materials. We expect to obtain information on their role as HCI educators, the challenges and indigenous perspectives on the discipline.

Qualitative data obtained at this level will be analyzed in terms of the dimensions holistic-analytic, and high and low context as well through development of emergent themes. c) HCI in the curriculum: through interview and document analysis quantitative and qualitative data will be obtained with a view to find out about how HCI as a subject is represented in the course offer and discourse of each university. Its relative importance will also be measured in terms of its presence in the pathways of different courses. The teaching and assessment methods used and their rationale will also be studies and analyzed. We will look for evidence of holistic-analytic dimensions, and high and low context as well through development of emergent themes.

These activities will help us answer the following questions: a)

How does culture influence delivery of HCI education? i.

How is selection of teaching material influenced by cultural differences? ii.

Which topics do an institution choose to deliver in HCI curriculum – why? Any correlation to Hofstede dimension scores for the country and/or cognitive styles found? iii.

Institutional perception/representation in computing curriculum of HCI education. iv.

What is the HCI teacher perception?

b) How does culture influence the experience of studying HCI? i. ii.

What is the Student perception of HCI tools and concepts?

How do cultural dimensions and cognitive styles correlate with students’ preferences for learning HCI?

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What are the perceptions of HCI tools and methods vis-à-vis findings for cultural markers?

What is the community’s understanding of what constitutes a usable system?

4. Workshops So far, workshops have been conducted at the Polytechnic of Namibia, the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG). All 3 institutions are well respected within their country. According to the 4 International Colleges & Universities website (http://www.4icu.org), the IITG is ranked 44th out of 505 Indian universities, the ITAM 12th out of 374, and the Polytechnic of Namibia top out of 3, and both IITG and ITAM appear in the QS World Universities Ranking, (http://www.topuniversities.com) with the IITG being ranked at 296 for Engineering and IT. Within these institutions, HCI was a core subject in Namibia, an option in Mexico, and embedded within the whole curriculum in India.

The workshop involved the student in evaluating a learning node in the SEED science portal (www.planetseed.com), specifically Porosity. The target audience of this portal is schoolchildren aged between 10 and 18, and the HCI students were required to evaluate the node in this context. The SEED portal was selected as particularly appropriate for a multi-cultural project of this nature as it supports a number of different language options, allowing students who do not have English as their first language to use their preferred language option and concentrate on the task in question. The specific section of the SEED portal that the students evaluate was selected with two main considerations in mind. The subject matter should be equally relevant to all cultures, and the material provided in the learning node should be both diverse, and rich in multimedia content, allowing extensive interaction with the website. Topics such as malaria were rejected as being of more interest to regions where the disease is prevalent, and other topics were rejected as the supporting learning resources on the site were not sufficiently diverse.

These activities included a heuristic evaluation of a learning task in the portal to determine whether the design satisfied certain predefined characteristics, which requires an analytical approach. In addition, the students were asked to analyse and comment on the case study scenario. The next tasks required a more holistic and intuitive approach: the students were required to develop the persona of both a student and her teacher, and to redesign the portal in view of their findings from the heuristic evaluation. The final tasks related to analysing their redesign in relation to standard HCI theory and concepts.

5. Preliminary Findings from Namibia, Mexico and India In this section we report some of our findings in relation to the cognitive styles and culture surveys with the student groups in these three countries.

HCI practitioners act as an interface between the developer and the users during the development of computer application or website. In terms of cognitive styles this

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means they need analytical skills to understand the functionality of the website or application, but at the same time, they need to be able to see the ‘whole picture’ and put themselves in the shoes of the user. Some HCI evaluation techniques such as heuristic evaluations require an analytical approach. Others, such as the production of a persona need a more intuitive approach. In addition, whilst the developer may be more concerned with the functionality of the application, the HCI practitioner also needs to balance the need for the interface to be user friendly, and the layout, appearance and aesthetics of the interface will contribute to this. Given this, we would expect the most typical styles to be found in successful HCI students to be more balanced, ranging from quasi intuitive and intuitive to quasi analytic.

With the above expectation, the CSI was administered to a total of 70 HCI students in Namibia (n=21), Mexico (n=25) and India (n=23). Of these, 9 surveys had missing responses and were disregarded. Of these remaining 61 students, 82% were found to fall in the category of Quasi Intuitive (n=18), Adaptive (n=16) and Quasi Analyst (n=16). The remaining 18% were split between Intuitive (n=6) and Analyst (n=6). However, what is particularly interesting is the difference between the 3 cohorts.

Namibia and Mexico have 78% and 73% respectively falling in the categories of quasi intuitive, adaptive and quasi analyst; however, in the case of the Indian students, 95% fell into this range.

One possible reason for the difference in profile could be due to the unique nature of the programme at the IITG. The IITG has both a Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a Department of Design, and the students who took part in these workshops were Design students. Cohorts from Namibia and Mexico originate in engineering faculties. In the case of ITAM, a small proportion of students were enrolled in financial engineering courses, which might explain the lowest percentage.

Cloninger (2000) differentiates between usability (the masculine, the left side of the brain, rational, and logical action) and design (the feminine, the right side of the brain, emotional, and intuitive action), and with these particular cohorts we would expect to see both dimensions represented, which goes some way to explaining the unusual CSI profile where 95% of Indian students demonstrate styles around ‘adaptive’ middle point. After all, they are scientists with an aptitude for design.

The VSM data gave us interesting findings in terms of cultural dimensions for the student groups we studied. We do not claim in any way the scores are a reflection on national culture, but mainly use the scores obtained as top-level indicators of students’ attitudinal trends in particular dimensions such as power distance and collectivism. The groups of students who completed the survey were nationals of the same country, except in Namibia where we had two Angolans and one South African. However, our interest is on the mean scores for each cultural dimension per cohort rather than as nationals of a country.

For the cohort in the Polytechnic of Namibia (N=21), the mean scores for the VSM94 survey indicate the group is individualistic with very low power distance. This is in contrast with Hofstede’s scores for most of sub-Saharan Africa indicating collectivistic societies with a tendency to a high power distance. They seem to be consistent with South Africa’s scores but the latter represent respondents with British or Dutch background, whereas the Namibian cohort is fundamentally African. This might

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be a reflection of the cullture of Namibbian universitties founded aand developed d by Europeans.

Figure 1. VSM94 V Scores for Polytechniic of Namibia For students in ITAM (Meexico) (N=24) and (IITG) (N N=28), VSM 008 was used. The m to a moree recent instrum ment was basedd on the fact thhat it offered more m decision to move flexibility in establishing baseline b scores for compariso on of the groupps. The same will be applied fo or China, UK and Venezuela. This mean ns, however, we w cannot mak ke a direct score comparison c wiith the studentss in Namibia. Figure 2 preseents the resultss for both countriees and there aree some contrastts worth noting g.

Figure 2. Cuultural Dimenssions India andd Mexico Cohoorts D (PDII) dimension was evident particularly inn the relationsship The Power Distance between the students and thheir professor or ourselves as a researchers. The behaviou ur of students in Inndian and Mexico during the workshops refflects the differrence indicatedd by the survey: In ndian (PDI=622) students weere more respectful and distaant while Mexiican (PDI=47) stuudents were sligghtly more rellaxed. This hass a direct effecct on the reflecctive

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learning process required in concepts and methods in HCI where the student is required to approach users and stakeholders with different levels of authority.

Original Hofstede’s scores for Mexico and India indicate that the former is less individualistic than the latter. In our survey we have found the opposite (IDV: Mexico=89; India=69). This can be a reflection of the university culture in ITAM, where a lot of emphasis on individual success is evident in terms of financial awards in the form of fee waivers for the best performing students. While attempting the tasks, Mexican students displayed more independence and less interaction between peers than in India.

Uncertainty avoidance was particularly evident in the difference in the style of teaching between Mexico (UAI= -11) and India (UAI= 23). During the workshop in IITG, certain elements of the theory were revisited prior to the activity taken place.

These were delivered by us in the same style that they are delivered to UK, students which was to explain the theory and explain the task in relation to the theory. Feedback from the faculty staff indicated that this would not have been sufficiently structured for Indian students, who would expect a framework of theory, some examples, followed by a worked case study example. In contrast, Students in ITAM completed the activity independently at their own pace after a common induction and required minimum assistance to get them started.

6. Conclusions In summary, this project intends to enhance our knowledge of HCI Education from an intercultural perspective. It aims to find opportunities and challenges for the dissemination and enrichment of this discipline through eliciting and assessing the importance of local, disciplinary, national and HCI cultures. It does so by exploring the context, performance and views of stakeholders involved in learning and teaching. The preliminary findings presented above are only ‘the tip of the iceberg’ but help to make visible the values and assumptions shaping the experience of HCI education.

While Hofstede’s dimensions have been heavily criticized as valid indicators of national culture, we believe that their use at group level can introduce HCI educators to an initial reflection on the implications for students of the values, relations and interactions scripted in the content and delivery of HCI concepts and methods. In addition, our initial analysis of cognitive styles indicates an interesting tension between HCI as design subject and as an engineering subject. This leads us to another observation: the entry exams for some schools like ITAM will filter a particular type of student who will tend to be more of an engineer than a designer, therefore reducing the number of potentially ‘ideal’ HCI professionals.

Once the qualitative phase of the analysis of student work begins, we hope to obtain richer insights that connect their outputs with the cultural and cognitive profiles presented in this paper.

This multiple case study project is limited by the short duration of data gathering in each country and by not being able to observe first-hand experience of HCI education happening over a period of time. Nevertheless, this study provides a unique, and probably the first, opportunity to systematically compare and analyse data obtained

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from four continents. We are aware that it stands in different epistemological positions as it looks, on one hand, at performance and, on the other hand, at meanings used to represent and experience HCI. However, we see this as an opportunity for triangulation, co-validation and enhanced understanding of HCI education in a multicultural context.

References Calderon, M. E. (2009). Teaching Human Computer Interaction: First Experiences.

Cassidy, S. (2004). Learning styles: An overview of theories, models, and measures. Educational Psychology, 24, 419-444.

Cloninger, C. (2000). Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. A list apart, 74.

Coffield, F. et al. (2004). Should we be using learning styles? What research has to say to practice. Learning and Skills Research Centre, London.

De Souza, C. S., Baranauskas, C. C., Prates, R. O., & Pimenta, M. S. (2008). HCI in Brazil Lessons Learned and New Perspectives.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T. & Pacenti, E. (1999). Cultural Probes. ACM Interactions, 6(1), 21-29.

Gullisksen, J. & Oestreicher, L. (1999). HCI Education in Sweden.

Hall, E. T. (1993). An anthropology of everyday life: an autobiography, New York: Anchor Books.

Hayes, J. & Allinson, C. W. (1988). Cultural differences in the learning styles of managers.

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Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill.

Kotze, P. (2002). Directions in HCI Education, Research and Practice in Southern Africa.

Lazar, J. (2011). Using Community-Based Service Projects to Enhance Undergraduate HCI Education: 10 Years of Experience.

McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith - A failure of analysis. Human Relations, 55(1), 89-118.

Nisbett, R.E. & Miyamoto, Y. (2005). The influence of culture: holistic versus analytic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 467–473.

Nisbett, R. E. & Norenzayan, A. (2002). Culture and cognition. Stevens’ handbook of experimental psychology.

Sharkey, E. & Paynter, J. (2003). Computing Interaction Education in New Zealand Universities.

Smith, A., Ghosh, K. and Joshi, A. (2003). Usability and HCI in India: Cultural and Technological Determinants.

Smith, A., Joshi, A., Liu, Z., Bannon, L., Gulliksen, J. and Baranauskas, C. (2007). Embedding HCI in Developing Countries: Localizing Content, Institutionalizing Education and Practice.

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FACTORS INFLUENCING PERCEPTIONS TOWARD SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES IN CHINA WEN GONG Howard University 2600 6th Street, NW Washington, DC 20059

Abstract. Based on an online national survey of 503 respondents, this study empirically investigates factors influencing perceptions toward social networking websites (SNWs) in China. More specifically, user demographics and media characteristics were examined. While income was found to be a significant predictor of users’ attitude toward SNWs, gender, age, educational level and marital status were insignificant, suggesting that demographic divides may be diminishing when it comes to online social media in China. Both perceived risk and enjoyment were found to have significant positive effects. Managerial implications were discussed.

1. Introduction According to the latest CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) report (CNNIC, Jan 2012), the number of net citizens who use social network websites (SNWs) has reached 244 million by the end of year 2011, accounting for 47.6 percent of the whole net population in China and representing a 24 percent increase over the previous year (eMarketer, 2011). Although growth is gradually tapering off as penetration increases, China will boast 488 million social network users by 2015. The average number of networks a Chinese netizen is member of is 3.4, compared to an average of 1.9 worldwide (Insites Consulting, 2011). This new enthusiasm for SNWs is presenting a huge potential to brands and businesses who can understand their needs.

The rapid development of SNWs can be attributed to its unique characteristics such as the capability of providing a variety of internet services including blog, forum, video and game, etc.; screening and filtering information by friends, thus improving information quality and users’ utilization experience as well as enhancing users’ utilization cohesion on these websites. In addition, the high mobile penetration (73.6%) (Wikipedia.org, 2012) also fuels the social addition among Chinese users as mobile devices provide them with the means to connect on-the-go and interact in real-time.

About 46.7 percent of the users log on SNWs using mobile, showing promise in taking social networking even further (CNNIC, Jan. 2012).

The increasingly evolving social media market in China has encouraged strong marketing initiatives from companies who are keen to redesign their strategies to

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benefit from this platform (BRICDATA, 2012). While social media use in China is very similar to the rest of the world, it has a distinct Chinese flavor. Research has found that users in emerging markets such as China are more likely to view social networks as a good place to learn about and buy products than users in developed markets such as the US (TNS, 2011). It has been reported that following or friending a brand is the 2nd most popular activity on social networks in China, tied with sharing links (OgilvyOne Worldwide, 2010). Although Facebook dominates the world in terms of social network use, it is the home-grown networks such as QZone and Renren that are the most popular ones in China. Users have rapidly developed large online networks of friends and family. Word-of-mouth (WOM) on SNWs are considered as highly credible by Chinese users and they are more likely to consider SNWs a good source of WOM information on brand experiences than are users in the US (CIC, 2012; Jack Morton Worldwide, 2012). As such, for marketers who want to tap into these social networks for promotion and increased sales, it is of great importance to be knowledgeable of the users’ demographics in China and the factors that will influence their attitudes and behaviors on these social media sites in order to strategize, plan, and optimize their branding strategy. Therefore, this study tries to address these following research questions: • Is there any difference in terms of perceptions toward SNWs between gender, age, income, education levels and marital status among Chinese users?

• What are the antecedent beliefs that can influence users’ attitude toward SNWs? • What marketing implications will the results have upon business firms?

The following sections of the paper outline hypotheses development, methodology, results and discussion.

2. Literature Review 2.1. SOCIAL NETWORK WEBSITES (SNWS) With the exploded growth of online social media use worldwide, SNWs have become one of the most prominent features in the Web 2.0 era. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), Social Media is defined as “a group of Internet-based applications and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content.” Boyd and Ellison (2008) define SNWs as a web-based service that allows individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site. Simply put, SNWs enable users to build personal profiles, publish information, facilitate discussion, share networks, experiences and knowledge within a defined system (Boyd and Ellison, 2008; Constantinides and Fountain, 2007). Users of these SNWs are not only passive content consumers but also active content generators/contributors. As such, given their ever-climbing popularity and reach, SNWs have shown a great potential in terms of influencing the way people socialize, entertain, consume information, do shopping and make decisions, which, in turn, have increasingly driven

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marketers to develop marketing strategies that would allow them to shape and monitor users’ online communications on SNWs as well as engage them with their brands more voluntarily and interactively.

2.1. HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT Synthesizing studies on consumer online behavior from 1994 to 2002, Cheung and his colleagues (2005) provided a critical and comprehensive review of the theories and empirical results of consumer online behavior. According to their review, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) are the dominant theories in the examination of consumer online behavior and five major categories of determinants were identified: consumer characteristics such as consumer demographics, attitude, motivation, perceived risk and trust, product characteristics such as price and product type, merchants and intermediate characteristics such as brand, service, privacy and security control, environmental influences such as exposure, market uncertainty, and competition, and medium characteristics such as ease of use and information quality. Drawing upon Fishbein and Ajzen’s (1975; 1980) theory of reasoned action (TRA) which posits that beliefs influence attitudes, which lead to intentions, and finally to behaviors, our study chooses to concurrently focus on two dimensions identified as being significant determinants of consumer online behavior, namely consumer and medium characteristics. Specifically, our model includes five consumer demographic variables, namely gender, age, income, education and marital status, and two beliefs about the Internet medium, namely perceived risk, and perceived enjoyment, all of which are hypothesized to influence attitude toward SNWs. Users’ demographics: The effects of demographic variables on consumers’ online behavior are well documented and mixed results have been reported. For example, in terms of gender, men were reported to hold the same (Alreck and Settle, 2002) or even more favorable (Van Slyke, Comunale and Belanger, 2002) perceptions towards online shopping than their female counterparts, despite the fact that women usually have much more positive attitudes toward shopping in general and towards both store and catalogue shopping in particular. Younger consumers growing up as a digital generation have been the drive in the diffusion of many IT-related applications and services, providing strong indication of their positive attitudes toward these information and communications technologies. As for income, it is well documented that online shoppers tend to earn more money than traditional store shoppers (e.g., Mahmood, Bagchi and Ford, 2004; Susskind, 2004; Doolin et al., 2005). Common wisdom has it that better educated consumers are more likely to be exposed to the Internet technology and thus have more confidence in using the Internet as a medium for socializing, communicating and even shopping (Hui and Wan, 2007).

Based on the above discussion, the following hypotheses are proposed: H1: Chinese female netizens will have more positive attitude toward SNWs than their male counterparts.

H2: There is an inverse relationship between Chinese netizens’ age and their attitude toward SNWs.

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H3: The higher the income level of Chinese netizens, the more likely they will hold positive attitude toward SNWs. H4: The higher the educational level of Chinese netizens, the more likely they will hold positive attitude toward SNWs. H5: Single Chinese netizens are more likely to hold positive attitude toward SNWs than married ones.

Medium Characteristics/Antecedent Beliefs: Perceived risk plays a critical role in consumer decision-making and behaviors (Mitchell, 1999). Prior research has indicated that the probability of consumers’ choosing a channel increases significantly if their confidence in that channel is high and the perceived risk is low (Bhatnagar, Misra and Rao, 2000; Black et al., 2002). For example, several studies have illustrated the impact of perceived risk on consumer online purchase decision-making and behaviors (Comegys, Hannula and Vaisanen, 2009; van der Heijden, Verhagen and Creemers, 2003).

According to Curran and Meuter (2007), perceived enjoyment can have an important influence on the adoption of a self-service technology. Prior research have shown that enjoyment to be a key element for consumers’ online surfing and even shopping behavior (Eighmey and McCord, 1998; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001).

Curran and Lennon (2011) found that the level of enjoyment derived from using social networks is the strongest positive influence on users’ attitudes or intentions with regard to social networks.

Therefore, the following hypotheses are proposed: H6: Perceived risk will be negatively related to Chinese netizens’ attitude toward SNWs. H7: Perceived enjoyment of surfing online will be positively related to Chinese netizens’ attitude toward SNWs.

3. Research Design and Methodology This study will use an online survey with 503 respondents. The sampling frame included e-mail addresses collected from major Internet sites in China. After developing and pre-testing the questionnaire (including translation and back-translation to ensure semantic consistency between Chinese and English versions), the questionnaire in Chinese was administered. The dependent measure, attitude toward SNWs, comprises two statements that were measured using 5-point Likert scales bounded by “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”: “Social network websites are good places for people to share opinion and information” and “Social network websites allow me to make better shopping decisions”. Regression analysis was performed to address the above research questions. Table 1 presents the demographics of the sample.

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Table 1. Sample demographics.

N=503 Gender Men Women Age 16-17 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75+ Marital Status* Single Without Children Single With Children Married Without Children Married With Children Education Below secondary Secondary High School Junior College Undergraduate Graduate and above Monthly Income under RMB 500 RMB 501 to 1000 RMB 1001 to 2000 RMB 2001 to 3000 RMB 3001 to 4000 RMB 4001 to 5000 RMB 5001 and above Don't know or refused No income * Missing value for 2 cases

73.6 26.4 1.0 29.8 50.5 15.5 2.2 1.0

54.3 1.4 9.7 34.2

1.2 8.0 24.7 57.3 8.9 5.4 5.4 19.9 18.5 17.3 10.3 16.7 2.4 4.2

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4. Results The hypotheses proposed were tested using regression analysis. Table 2 summarizes the results.

Table 2. Regression Results (Standardized Coefficients & t-Values Shown).

DV: Attitudes toward SNWs Constant

Standardized Coefficients Hypotheses & t-Values 6.309 *

Gender Age Income Education Marital Status

.053 -.023 .128 -.048 -.005

1.303 ns -.464 ns 2.914 * -1.144 ns -.090 ns

H1 – not supported H2 – not supported H3 – supported H4 – not supported H5 – not supported

Perceived Risk Enjoyment

.121 .416

2.974* 10.113*

H6 – supported H7 – supported

F-value (df1,df2) F(7,481) = 19.775 * 2 2 R (Adjusted R ) .223 (.212) Significance levels (one-tailed test): * = p < .01; ** = p < .05; *** = p < .10; ns = not significant

5. Discussion and Managerial Implications Summarizing the results concerning demographics, income (H3) was found to be a significant predictor of Chinese users’ perceptions toward SNWs. The hypotheses related to gender (H1), age (H2), education (H4) and marital status (H5) were not supported. This is not totally surprising, considering that about 80 percent of the users of China’s top social networking sites are quite young, between 20-34 years old (the age distribution of this sample is in line with the national demographic profile) (Chinainternetwatch, 2011). The finding that gender is not a significant predictor may be a result of the remarkable growth of Internet use and other network applications in China, which may have evened out the gender aspect of the ‘typical’ user, something certainly worth further investigation. The uniqueness of China’s social media scene may help explain why education and marital status did not show a significant effect on attitude toward SNWs. China has a “long tail” of specialized social networks targeting just at children, gamers or lovers, in addition to the top homegrown networks (Kai, 2011). As such, users of different educational background and marital status may all be attracted and engaged. Further, the high penetration of mobile phones and rapid growth of mobile Internet in the 3G age have also helped drive the Chinese netizens across different segments to engage in social media.

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Perceived risk was found to be negatively related to Chinese netizens’ attitude toward SNWs, thus H6 was supported. This is in line with the literature on consumers’ online behavior. According to CNNIC (July, 2010), about 31 percent of the netizen’s accounts and passwords were stolen and 59 percent experienced virus or Trojen attach during the first half of year 2010. Chinese consumers also expressed many concerns towards e-com websites (Lee, 2009). The significant effect of perceived risk on users’ perceptions toward SNWs suggests the strong urge for construction of a more trustable and reliable network environment.

Echoing the finding from Curran and Lennon (2011), perceived enjoyment was found to have a significant positive effect on attitudes toward SNWs. China was reported to be the only country in the world where people say they have more friends online than offline (Fenn, 2011). There can be little doubt that SNWs have provided a great deal of enjoyment and created a sense of connectedness among users. This is especially true when considering the rural-to-urban migration that has separated families and the loneliness of one-child generation in China (Crampton, 2011).

Despite that most of the previous studies indicated the demographic difference in attitudes toward information and communications technologies, findings from this study does not lend much support to confirm those results. Instead, it offers evidence that demographic divides may be diminishing when it comes to online social media in China. In other words, Chinese netizens’ perceptions toward SNWs are converging regardless of their gender, age, educational level and marital status.

In addition, results from this study reveal that 77 percent of respondents agree that social networking helps them make better comparisons in online shopping – this is in line with what have been reported about Chinese users’ joining social networks for finding information about brands and trusting reviews and insights on social media more than a recommendation from an acquaintance in a bar (Fenn, 2011; TNS, 2010).

It has been reported that 54.7 percent of netizens in China own or visit blogs, 47.3 percent have a page on one or more SNWs, 92.3 percent visit social media pages at least three times a week and the average Chinese Mediaphile has 2.78 different accounts (Fenn, 2011). No doubt, Chinese users are showing a voracious appetite for online social media, which highlights the eminent need for international marketers to deepen their knowledge of these new digital platforms when optimizing their media plans and fine-tune their media strategies to local needs. Marketers should take advantage of the shift in Chinese users’ media consumption habit and their general positive attitude toward social media. The significant effect of income on perceptions toward SNWs suggests it is vital for marketers to understand income levels of the end users whose online behavior may differ because of varying attitudes. In a time when the Chinese government has tightened their restrictions on broadcast advertising, marketers and advertisers should realize the opportunities embedded in these social media and capitalize on the huge potential they have to offer by building contents that Chinese users can trust and enjoy to surf.

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6. Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research Several limitations of this study should be mentioned. First, despite the fact that a nationwide survey was conducted, males and older consumers are over-represented in our sample, compared to general online customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; profile depicted by CNNIC (2008).

As such, the sample may not be representative of the Chinese online population as a whole. Second, despite numerous factors that help drive Chinese users to engage in social media, only consumer characteristics and medium characteristics were examined for their effects on attitudes toward SNWs. Taking these into consideration, the results are to be interpreted in light of the limitations outlined here.

This study provides empirical evidence that user demographics have little effects on perceptions towards SNWs. In light of this finding, the author suggests that future research investigates different countries/cultures as potential sources of variation in attitudes towards SNWs. Future research could also examine the effects of mobile infrastructure on access and adoption of social media and identify appropriate ways that brands should interact in this environment. Insights gained should help marketers and advertisers more effectively target Chinese users and design viral and e-WOM marketing strategies on SNWs in launching new product offerings and monitoring brand image.

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GLOBALIZATION OR LOCALIZATION? A longitudinal study of successful American and Chinese online store websites GUO ZHANG AND SUSAN C. HERRING School of Library and Information Science Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405-3907, USA

Abstract. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of 2562 images on the homepages of successful American and Chinese online store websites,with the goal of determining whether cultural factors impact their visual presentation and evolution. Descriptive and statistical content analyses reveal that the U.S. and Chinese online store sites showed significant cross-national image differences from their inception; moreover, the Chinese sites diverged further from the U.S. sites over time, strengthening their own cultural identity and suggesting a trend towards localization in a diverse and dynamic world market. These findings support the view that although English-speaking Western culture is widespread in today’s Information Age, other cultures are not necessarily undermined.

1. Introduction Shopping, a traditional human activity embedded in larger processes of information sending, receiving, exchanging, interpreting, and decision making, has evolved with the development of information technology. In today’s digital era, online shopping has become increasingly popular. Moreover, with the rapid growth of e-commerce, companies are increasingly targeting foreign online consumers. However, since the arena that hosts online store websites—the World Wide Web—was created and is based primarily in the U.S. and Europe and “tends to exemplify the values and norms of these advanced industrial countries” (Simon, 2001, p. 19), tensions emerge “between Internetled globalization and an increased need for local culture and language” (Dor, 2004, p.

101) in e-commerce environments.

Studies of this issue can help companies optimize their marketing strategies and extend their e-business globally—by launching standardized websites (i.e., universally appealing global sites) and/or localized versions (i.e., culturally and consumer specific sites). Specifically, research can shed light on the possible impact of web format and content on information use online by measuring the use of graphics, design elements, colors, and organization of information (e.g., Callahan, 2005; Zhang et al., 2001).

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of 2562 images on the homepages of successful online store websites in two cultures, China and the U.S., focusing on the differences and similarities in their approaches to presenting

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information visually, in order to investigate empirically to what extent differences between the cultures exist and whether trends over time are in the direction of localization or globalization. The study builds on a theoretical foundation that incorporates concepts of store atmospherics (East, 1997; Engel et al., 1990; Koufaris et al., 2002) and cultural distance (Zhao et al., 2003).

One way to test the possible tendencies towards globalization or localization is to compare the design and content characteristics of websites in countries that are distant in cultural terms. According to Hofestede and Bond’s (1984) dimensions of culture, Chinese culture tends to be masculine and mainly collectivistic, while American culture tends to be less masculine and mainly individualistic(see also Hsu, 1981). Thus, five successful American and five Chinese online store websites, which belong to the genre of web-only retail and auction B2C websites that sell all kinds of products, were selected as data sources. The Wayback Machine (http://archive.org) was used to collect five snapshots of the homepages of each website in different periods: the earliest record (between 1998 and 2003, depending on the website), 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2011.

Visual content analysis (Bell, 2001) was conducted to analyze all 2562 images on the homepages of the sample sites.

The analysis reveals two main results: 1) The U.S. and Chinese online store sites show overall cross-national image differences, and 2) the evolution of the Chinese websites tends to be in the direction of localization rather than globalization. This trend does not apply to the U.S. sites because they, as the founders of the online store web genre, were already “localized” to start with. We interpret these results as evidence that the dominant role of English-speaking Western culture in today’s Information Age does not necessarily lead to a homogeneous world or undermine other cultures. Rather, the results suggest that other cultures may borrow/learn from American culture yet still strengthen their own identities.

2. Literature Review Researchers (e.g., Dor, 2004; Gary, 2000) have investigated issues of globalization and localization in terms of language, culture, and business. Dor (2004) proposes that “native linguistic identity plays a crucial role in consumers’ decision-making processes” (p. 102), thus the process of Englishization can be regarded as the process of economic globalization, and local language as “local resistance to economic (and cultural) globalization” (p. 97). He discusses the tension between economic globalization based on the Internet and the increased need for local culture and language, concluding that the Internet is becoming increasingly multilingual “because the agents of economic globalization have realized that adapting to local cultures and languages is a necessary component of staying competitive” (p. 115). Empirical research has lent support to Dor’s claim. For example, Callahan and Herring (2012) report that even in the domain of higher education, which is dominated globally by English, websites are becoming increasingly multilingual.

Business researchers investigating the global/local issue have found that the rapid development of Internet technologies encourages companies to expand globally across different cultures, political systems, and economies (Zhao & Levary, 2002). This triggers a debate as to whether to adopt a standardized approach to web communication (a transnational web style) or a localized-specialized approach, i.e., by launching

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foreign-language websites (Singh et al., 2004). In general, this debate endeavors to answer two questions: Can a single website serve a global marketplace? Or should a company set up a separate site in each country where it has a significant presence (Gary, 2000)? Luna et al. (2002) propose that culturally congruent web content decreases the cognitive effort required to process information on a site, leading to easier navigation and more favorable attitudes toward the website. Some studies provide evidence of cross-cultural differences in the design of and response to websites and support the use of localized (i.e. country-specific) sites (e.g., Gary, 2000; Luna et al., 2002; Simon, 2001; Singh et al., 2004). In contrast, some other studies (e.g., Yang & Kang, 2002) indicate that the role and impact of culture on designing and perceiving a website is not significant, and they propose a standardized approach to web communications.

The above studies focus on language use; other studies have analyzed graphical aspects of localization. For example, Cutler et al. (1992) reported significant differences between European countries and the U.S. in the visual components of magazine advertisements. Callahan (2005) examined cultural differences and similarities in the design of university websites from eight countries and found differences that corresponded to Hofstedeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (1991) cultural dimensions. Schmid-Isler (2000) studied news sites and reported differences in site organization between the home pages of Chinese and Western news sites.

Some researchers focus in particular on the cultural differences between U.S. and Chinese business websites. There are two reasons for this special emphasis: First, the U.S. and China differ greatly in terms of cultural background, which potentially impacts the layout of their websites. According to Hsu (1981), the American way of life is "individual-centered" and is a variant of Western individualism, characterized by a greater emphasis on "self-reliance,â&#x20AC;? equality, resentment of class-based distinctions, and rejection of the past, while the Chinese way of life is centered on a set of relationships defined by Confucian doctrine, including women's chastity, fidelity, and virtue, benevolent fathers and filial sons, submission to authority, and ancestor worship.

Second, both the U.S. and China are giant economic entities and boast a dynamic and prosperous e-commerce market. comScore reports $37.5 billion in the second quarter of 2011 for U.S. retail e-commerce spending, up 14% compared to one year ago. The IResearch Consulting Group (2011) reports that China's business-to-business trade revenue rose to RMB 2.9 billion ($444 million) in the first quarter of 2011, 7.7% more than the previous quarter's 2.7 billion and up 40.9% from one year earlier.

Previous studies have shown that visual differences indeed exist between U.S. and Chinese websites; however, some results are contradictory. For example, in a study of web-based business sites by Simon (1999), Asians overwhelmingly suggested the use of less bold colors, while Westerners preferred bright colors with more images to make the site appear more modern. In contrast, Singh et al. (2003) compared cultural adaptations on American companiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; domestic and Chinese websites and found that Chinese websites used more bold colors and animation, traditional themes, and cultural symbols, and exhibited a higher contextuality and oneness with nature. However, the U.S. websites tended to use more realistic themes, less fantasy and imagery, as well as more superlatives. Similarly, Zhao et al. (2003) analyzed the 100 most popular websites in 2000 (50 Chinese and 50 American) and reported differences in design and content characteristics: The presence of a search engine, site map, and help function show no

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statistical difference between American and Chinese websites, but the Chinese sites used more animated content and floating banners.

Based on these findings and debates, culture as a variable in designing online environments is becoming increasingly important, especially for online store websites, which incorporate traditional business activities conducted in embedded cultural backgrounds and modern Internet technologies. However, designing an online store website and doing online business is very different from running or visiting a conventional physical store. One major difference is closely associated with “store atmospherics” (Engel et al., 1990), which refers to the physical layout and designing of a store—colors, background music, shelves, exhibition of goods, and so on. According to East (1997), store atmospherics have a direct effect on customer mood and behavior.

However, the atmospherics of online store websites exclusively depend on “a computer monitor that usually displays only two-dimensional pictures and text” (Koufaris et al., 2002, p. 120). Therefore, visual presentation of information on the web becomes crucial (Singh et al., 2004). That is, images function as the main way to present information, to meet users’ expectations and predictions in a web-based environment, and to represent the visual and emotional appeal of the online store’s atmospherics.

3. Methodology 3.1. SAMPLING AND DATA SOURCES Judgment sampling was used in order to select websites for analysis that are successful and hence, presumably, influential. The judgment criteria employed were: Location: Rank: Genre: Products History Five U.S. websites and five Chinese websites that met these criteria were selected as the data sources, coded as U1 to U5 and C1 to C5, respectively. Table 1 lists the sample websites and their URLs. Table 1. Sample websites with URLs and logos Country U.S.

ID U1 U2 U3 U4 U5

Link www.amazon.com www.overstock.com www.qvc.com www.gooddeals.com shopping.yahoo.com

Country China

ID C1 C2 C3 C4 C5

Link www.taobao.com www.dangdang.com www.360buy.com www.paipai.com Shop.qq.com

The Wayback Machine (http://archive.org) was used to retrieve five snapshots of the homepages of each website in different periods: the earliest record (between 1998 and

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2003, depending on the website), 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2011. Each snapshot was coded as U1a, U1b, C3c, C5d, and so forth.

3.2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES For the website sample, the following research questions were posed: RQ1: How, if at all, do the U.S. and Chinese online store sites show image differences?

RQ2: If they do, what are the longitudinal trends in the evolution of such differences?

RQ3: Is there evidence that culture impacts the differences, and if so, how?

The expectations for the outcomes of the analysis were articulated as the following hypotheses: H1: The U.S. and Chinese online store sites will show cross-national image differences in terms of the total number, color saturation, realism, main ethnic preference, and representations of gender and social distance of images.

Specifically: H1a: The Chinese sites will have more images than the U.S. sites.

H1b: The Chinese sites will have more images of high color saturation.

H1c: The Chinese sites will have fewer images of high realism.

H1d: The Chinese sites will have more images of Asian people, while U.S. sites will have more images of White (Caucasian) people.

H1e: The Chinese sites will have more images of females.

H1f: The Chinese sites will have more images of far social distance.

H2: Over time, such differences will tend to become more pronounced.

H3: Image differences will reflect cultural differences between the U.S. and China.

These hypotheses are grounded in the findings of previous research. According to Hofstede and Bond (1984), China shows a low level of uncertainty avoidance, while the U.S. shows a medium level, suggesting that Chinese sites would provide more choices (a larger total number of images) than would U.S sites (H1a). According to Singh et al.

(2003, 2006), Chinese websites use more bold colors and animation than U.S. websites (H1b), whereas U.S. websites have more realistic themes(H1c). Singh et al. (2006) also report that Chinese customers show greater preference for highly adapted (i.e., localized) websites, which means they may prefer websites that they are familiar with and that are consonant with their own culture, e.g., using Asian faces (H1d). In terms of gender and social distance, based on Hofestede and Bondâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (1984) dimensions of culture, Chinese culture tends to be masculineand collectivistic. Masculinity suggests the possibility of more images with males than with females (H1e). Collectivism suggests a preference for group activities, leading to a likelihood of more images with a group of people than only one individual. Such images can be coded as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Bell, 2001; Hall, 1966; Kress et al., 1996), which is a far social distance (H1f). Since shared cultural schemas and cultural congruity can facilitate web communication (Luna et al., 2002), such image differences should reflect cultural differences between the U.S. and China (H3) and will tend to become more evident over time (i.e. localized, or divergent), so as to adapt to the local culture and attract and serve local customers (H2).

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3.3. ANALYTICAL PROCEDURES Based on Bell’s (2001) framework, visual content analysis was conducted to analyze all images on the homepages of the sample sites.

3.3.1. General measurements for all images The total number of images on each website and the average number of images on the U.S. and Chinese sites were calculated to provide a general quantitative description.

Then ways of representing images were analyzed in terms of realism and color saturation (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). According to Bell (2001), modality can be defined as the represented 'realism' of an image, given the sensory coding orientation, based on degrees of color saturation. In this research, realism and color saturation of an image were coded separately, with three values for each: high, medium, and low.

3.3.2. Specific measurements for images with human objects Images with human beings were further analyzed in terms of their gender, race, and social distance to shed light on embedded cultural preferences.

Human beings appearing in these images can be regarded as idealized exemplars to promote purchase. Their gender and race (Kapidzic & Herring, under review) can indicate the ideal, or preferred, self-presentation in the two cultures. These variables are coded with the following values: gender (Male, female, both) and race (white, Asian, black, more than one race).

Social distance (Bell, 2001; Hall, 1966; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) can indicate the invisible boundaries and psychological space that are accepted and preferred in interpersonal interaction between people of a certain cultural background, and thus it can suggest the communicative traditions embedded in different societies. Social distance can be defined in terms of how much of the (human) participant's body is represented in the frame of an image (Bell, 2001; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Bell divides this variable into six values: intimate, close personal, far personal, close social, far social, and public. However, in order better to highlight the differences between the two cultures, these six values were condensed into two categories in this paper: close (intimate, close personal, far personal) and far (close social, far social and public).

3.3.3. Statistical tests to identify globalization and localization Statistical tests (T-tests) were conducted to measure the differences between images on the U.S. sites and the Chinese sites over time. In this study, globalization is operationalized as convergence—that is, if statistical significance exists concerning the use of images in the earliest records, but no statistical significance exists concerning the latest snapshots, globalization can be said to have occurred. Localization can be operationalized as divergence—no statistical significance exists in the use of images on the earliest records of the U.S. and Chinese sites, but statistical significance exists in the latest snapshots. In this way, the tendency over time of the websites—whether they are becoming increasingly similar (convergent) or different (divergent)—can be identified.

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3.4. RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT Two coders were involved in the research. For the whole sample, the percentage of interrater agreement is 88.7%, and Holstiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s coefficient of reliability is 0.895. This high level of agreement suggests a high reliability of the variables coded in the study.

5. Results A total of 2562 images, including 317 images with humans, were collected and analyzed from the five U.S. and five Chinese online store websites from 1998 to 2011.

Figure 1 charts the total number of images on each site over time. For each site, the total number of images increases. Comparing the first record and the 2011 snapshot, the increase is stable and smooth, except for three Chinese sites (Dangdang, Qqshop, and Paipai) which exhibit sharp increases from 2008 onwards.

400

Amazon Overstock

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QVC Gooddeals Yahoo Taobao Dangdang

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33 31 20

24 22 17

0

Paipai

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QQshop

163

124

100

360buy

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185

2004

71 34

2006

92 40

2008

2011

Figure 1. Total number of images on each site over time Figure 2 shows the average number of images on the U.S sites in comparison to the Chinese sites. Linear trendlines indicate that the Chinese sites exhibit a stronger tendency to present many images than do their American counterparts: There is a dramatic increase from 20.4 images in the first records to 172.8 images in the latest records. In contrast, the U.S. sites exhibit a slower and more stable increase, from 12.4 images on the earliest version to 35 images on the latest version.

200 100 0

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12.4

21.2

33.6

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35

Chinese sites

20.4

31.4

65

90.4

172.8

2011

Linear (U.S sites) Linear (Chinese sites)

Figure 2. Average number of images on the U.S vs. the Chinese sites over time In terms of color and brightness, the Chinese sites always use more high color saturation images than the American sites. Both the U.S and Chinese sites show a stable tendency and there is no dramatic change over time: High color saturation images on

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the U.S. sitess always accouunt for a relatively low proportion (less than 50%), wherreas the majority of o images pressented on the C Chinese sites (m more than 70% %) have high co olor saturation. Thhis is shown inn Figure 3.

150% % 100% % 50% % 0% %

U.S. sites C Chinese sites

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2 2004

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40.0%

10.7%

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36.0% %

Chinese sittes

100.0%

70.0%

88.6%

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80.8% %

Linear (U.S. sites) Linear (Chinese sittes)

Figure 3. Avverage % high color c saturationn images on th he U.S. vs. the C Chinese sites over o time Figures 4, 5, and 6 show the perrcentages of high, h medium, and low reallism t U.S. and Chinese sites. The trend liines indicate that images, respectively, on the although bothh the U.S. and Chinese sites tend to presentt more high reaalism images over o time, the Chiinese sites show w a clearer and stronger tenddency and endd at a much higgher percentage. For F medium realism r imagess, although booth the U.S. and a Chinese sites s decrease in use u of such imaages overall, thhe U.S. sites teend to use morre medium reallism images since 2008 and sho ow a higher perrcent of usage than the Chinnese sites. For low realism imagges, the U.S. sites tend contiinuously to usse more such iimages over tiime, whereas the Chinese C sites dramatically d decrease in use of o such images (65% vs. 8.7% %).

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Linear (Chinese sittes)

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10.0%

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Figure 4. Average % high realism imaages on the U.S S. vs. Chinese sites over timee 100% % 50% % % 0%

U.SS. sites Ch hinese sites First record

2004 2

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Lin near (U.S. sites) Lin near (Chinese sitess)

A % meddium realism im mages on the U.S. U vs. Chinese sites over tim me Figure 5. Average

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100% % 50% % % 0%

U.SS. sites Ch hinese sites First record

2 2004

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65.0%

7.0% 57

45.7%

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8.7%

Figure 6. Average % lo ow realism imaages on the U.S S. vs. Chinese ssites over time b were fuurther investigaated in terms oof the featuress for Images with human beings M section. Figures 7, 8, and 9 show the averrage humans desccribed in the Methodology percentages of o “female,” “m male,” and “booth” images on n the U.S. and C Chinese sites over o time. Both thhe U.S and Chiinese sites tendd to use more female f images and fewer imaages with both gen nders. The perrcentage of maale images on the latest snappshots of the U.S. U and Chinese sites is not drramatically diffferent from th hat on the first records (39% % vs.

3% vs. 40%), although a the peercentages flucctuated in betw ween: After greeater 46% and 32.3 use in the eaarliest period, both cultures’ sites tended to t use fewer male m images until u 2006. After thhat, the percen ntage of male im mages increaseed again.

100% % 50% % 0% %

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2 2004

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2011 1

Linear (U.S. sites)

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14.0%

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53.7%

45.5% %

Linear (Chinese sittes)

Chinese sittes

30.0%

59.1%

63.6%

59.4%

56.1% %

Figuree 7. Average % female imagees on the U.S. vs. v Chinese sitees over time 60% 30% 0%

U.S. sites C Chinese sites First record

2004

2006

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2011

Linear (U.S. sites)

U.S. sites

46.0%

28.0%

21.2%

32.0%

39.0%

Linear (Chinese sittes)

Chinese sites

40.0%

16.9%

26.4%

36.8%

32.3%

Figurre 8. Average % male imagess on the U.S. vss. Chinese sitess over time

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60% % 30% % 0% %

U.S. sites Chinese sittes

U U.S. sites Chinese sites First record

2004 2

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Liinear (U.S. sites)

40.0%

10 0.7%

18.3%

14.3%

15.5% %

Liinear (Chinese sitees)

30%

2 24%

10%

3.80%

11.60% %

Figure 9. Average % booth gender imaages on the U.S S. vs. Chinese sites s over time how the averagge percentagess of As regaards social disttance, Figures 10 and 11 sh “social close”” and “social far” fa images on the U.S. and Chinese C sites over time. Both h the U.S. and Chiinese sites exhhibit a fluctuatting tendency: From the first record periodd to 2006, they bo oth tended to use u more “sociaal close” imagees and fewer “ssocial far” images.

From 2006 to o the present, however, h both tended t to decreease “social cloose” images while w increasing “social far” imagges. Overall, thhe U.S. sites show more obvvious trendlinees of increase and decrease, while the Chinese ssites tend to bee more stable.

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47.6%

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20..0%

Chinese sittes

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64.8%

45.5%

29..7%

Chinese sites Linear (U.S. sitess) Linear (Chinese sites)

Figure 10. Average % “social close” im mages on the U.S. U vs. Chinesee sites over tim me 100% % 50% % 0% %

U.S. sites Chinese sittes

U.S. sites Chinese sites

First record

2004

2006

66.0%

3 37.30%

52.40% %

56%

8 80%

80%

3 33.40%

35.20% %

54.50%

71 1.30%

2008

2011 2

Linear (U.S. sites) Linear (Chinesee sites)

Figure 111. Average % “social “ far” imaages on the U.S S. vs. Chinese sites over timee Figures 12, 13, and 14 show wstrong race ddifferences betw ween the U.S. and Chinese siites: y of images onn the U.S sites are of White people (more than 80% at most m The majority times), with few f Black imaages and no Asian images att all. In contrasst, the majorityy of images on thee Chinese sitess are of Asians (more than 800% in most yeaars), with no Bllack images at alll. However, th he Chinese sitees also use som me White imagges. Although the percentage drropped from 20 004 to 2008, it increased agaiin to 23.6% in 2011.

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100% % 50% % % 0%

U.SS. sites First record

2004 2

2006

2008

2011

U.S. sites

88.0%

66 6.7%

91.0%

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80.0%

Chinese sites

20.0%

14 4.0%

5.0%

7.5%

23.6%

Ch hinese sites Lin near (U.S. sites) Lin near (Chinese sitess)

Figuree 12. Average % Whiteimages on the U.S. vs. v Chinese sitees over time 100% % 50% % % 0%

First record

2004 2

2006

2008

2011

U.S. sites

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

Chinese sites

80%

8 86%

95%

92.50%

76.40% %

Ch hinese sites Lin near (Chinese sitess)

Figuree 13. Average % Asianimages on the U.S. vs. v Chinese sitees over time 60% % 30% % % 0%

First record

2004

2006

2008

2 2011

U.S. sites

12%

3 33.30%

9%

20%

20%

Chinese sites

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

U.S. sites Linear (U.S. sitess)

Figuree 14. Average % Blackimages on the U.S. vs. v Chinese sitees over time Table 2 summ marizes the statistical signifficance (T test results) of diffferences betw ween images in thee earliest and laatest snapshots of the U.S. annd the Chinese sites.

Table 2. Staatistical signifiicance (T test rresults) of diffeerences betweeen images on thhe earliest and latest l snapshotts of U.S. sites and Chinese siites *p<0.05, **p< <0.005, ***p<0.0 0005 Differencees in: Average nuumber of images Percent of high color saturatiion images Percent of high realism imagges Percent of medium realism im mages Percent of low realism imagees Percent of female images Percent of male images Percent of "close" images Percent of "far" images Percent of White images Percent of Asian images

First record 0.108 0.0074* 0.242 0.253 0.022* 0.15 0.634 0.916 0.701 0.029* 0.016*

20011 0.0021* 0.00009** 0.00023** 0.0009* 0.0012* 0.5579 0.5545 0.6667 0.5537 4.33E-05*** 5.22E-05***

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6. Discussion Based on the descriptive patterns and the statistical analysis, two main findings can be identified: 1) The U.S. and Chinese online store sites show cross-national image differences, and 2) the extent (and number) of such differences increases and becomes more significant over time.

Hypothesis 1 is partly supported. The U.S. and Chinese online store sites indeed show cross-national image differences in terms of the number of images, their color saturation, realism, and main ethnic preference, although no differences in terms of representations of gender or social distance in images were found.

For each site and on average, H1a and H1b are supported. Chinese sites use more images than U.S. sites at all stages studied. This is true even though bandwidth limitations in China are greater than those in the US., and have been since the earliest stage of our data collection (TeleGeography, 2011).Chinese sites also exhibit a strong preference for using high color saturation: They have more colorful and brighter images than the U.S. sites from the very beginning. Images on Chinese sites tend to be light, bright, and colorful, with high color saturation, while those on U.S. sites tend to be monochromatic or dark colored, with low color saturation.

H1c is not supported. At the very beginning, Chinese sites used more low realism images than the U.S. sites. This finding is consistent withSingh et al.’s (2003) research, where Chinese sites used more fantasy and imagery images, while U.S. sites had more realistic themes. However, the reverse is evident in 2011: Chinese sites present many more high realism images and fewer low realism images than their American counterparts. This conflict with the previous findings is understandable when considering the risks associated with online business environments: Establishing credibilityis especially crucial for e-commerce websites. Such sites can only provide a virtual shopping environment; users cannot physically see or touch products but have to make their purchase decisions completely based on information they encounter online— images, text, video, and audio. Thus, an essential function of these websites is to provide sufficient and reliable visual product information. However, at present, fraud occurs more often in China than in the U.S. According to BBC news (2011), more than 1,000 fraud cases on Taobao were claimed in both 2009 and 2010, and two executives at Alibaba resigned after a rise in fraudulent sales. Therefore, Chinese websites tend to provide images of high realism as much as possible to demonstrate the credibility (and, hopefully, the high quality) of their products.

Uses of White, Asian, and Black images on U.S. and Chinese sites are also very different; thus H1d is supported. In this respect, American and Chinese sites are designed and presented differently, based on their customers’ preferences for familiarity: Human beings of the same race, corresponding to the ethnic make-up of the offline local society, may make customers feel more comfortable and facilitate their purchasing decisions. It is notable, however, that Chinese sites still use some White images, which suggest a tendency to orient to Western culture and Western fashion.

However, H1e and H1f are not supported. No statistical difference was found for the use of male and female images, or for “social close” and “social far” images, in the first record or in the latest snapshots of the U.S. and Chinese sites. Both U.S. and

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Chinese sites show a consistent trend to increase female images and slightly decrease male images, as well as to increase far images and decrease close images, over time.

The consistency of gender and social distance representation can be interpreted in terms of gender roles and web genre. Traditionally, females are responsible for shopping for the family. In order to attract female shoppers and stimulate their purchasing, it is necessary to present more images with female models. In addition, online store sites can be regarded as an “adapted genre,” since they emerge by “modify[ing] a genre and communicat[ing] in a way that invokes only some of the expected aspects of a form” (Crowston & Williams, 2000, p. 203). They represent the adaption of offline commercial activities and traditional commercial sites to the growing digital domain. This genre is still closely related to the offline genres (department stores, shopping malls, etc.), and they share a similar main purpose—to provide product information. Far images (presenting most parts of a human body, or more than one human being) can present more comprehensive information about the “whole” product than close images (showing only a face or a few parts of a human body). In addition, most images are embedded with a “zoom” button, so customers can use this button to see a larger version and more details of a product.

Hypothesis 2 is supported, as shown by the contrast between the statistical significances of the first and latest records reported in Table 2. The evolution of such differences is in the direction of localization rather than globalization for the Chinese sites. For the total number of images, the difference between the U.S. and Chinese sites becomes significant over time: In the first record, the difference did not achieve statistical significance at the level of p< 0.05; however, by 2011 it was significant. For the use of high color saturation, the statistical significance increases from p=0.0074 in the first record, which means it was strongly evident from the very beginning, to p=0.0009 in 2011, which means it became even stronger. In terms of realism, at the very beginning, only the difference in low realism showed statistical significance; however, by 2011, the differences in all levels of realism were significant. Finally, for both the first and the latest records, different uses of White, Asian, and Black images on U.S. and Chinese sites show statistical significance, and these differences became increasingly significant in 2011 compared to the first records.

In fact, the results show three types of longitudinal trends: 1) the average number of images, percent of high color saturation images, and high/medium realism images shift from no difference to divergence; 2) the use of low realism images and the percentages of White and Asian images start out divergent and become more divergent; and 3) the gender and social distance presented in images are similar and remain stable over time. Based on the operationalization given at the outset of this paper, therefore, no trend towards globalization (i.e., from difference towards convergence) is evident, while a trend towards localization (i.e., towards divergence) for Chinese sites is significantly evident in 1) and 2) above. This trend does not apply to the U.S. sites, because the Chinese sites started out on the U.S. model, whereas the U.S. sites were already “localized”—i.e., oriented to American users—to start with.

Hypothesis 3 is partially supported. Cultural differences indeed impact some image differences, as discussed above. For example, based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, China shows a low level of uncertainty avoidance, while the U.S. shows a medium level, consistent with there being more choices (a larger total number of

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images) on Chinese than U.S sites. However, the masculine and collectivist Chinese culture does not significantly impact the visual information presented on Chinese online shopping websites in terms of gender and social distance. This finding mirrors that of Zhao and Jiang (2011), who did not find expected evidence of collectivism in profile photographs on a Chinese social network site. Technological developments and today’s rapidly changing global environment may be causing some modifications to China’s traditional values, contrary to Hofstede’s (1991) claim that cultural dimensions are stable (Jones, 2007). Alternatively, the similarities in terms of gender and social distance across cultures can be interpreted as features determined by a common web genre—online store sites—which remained constant over time. In addition, economic and psychological factors (e.g., fashion, the business environment, requirements of credibility, desire to emulate Western culture and Western fashion) play important roles.

7. Conclusion This longitudinal study of images on the homepages of successful U.S. and Chinese online store websitesshed light on the impact of cultural factors on the evolution of online store websites and revealed a tendency for Chinese sites to diverge increasingly from U.S. sites over time in how they present visual information.

Descriptive and statistical content analyses showed that the U.S. and Chinese online store sites exhibited some cross-national image differences from the outset, and the evolution of such differences was in the direction of localization rather than globalization for the Chinese sites: At the very beginning, Chinese sites tended to resemble U.S. sites, which were the founders of online stores, but they became increasingly divergent and culture specific over time. At present, Chinese sites exhibit different features compared to their earlier versions and compared to their American counterparts: more images, higher color saturation, higher realism, and more Asian images. At the same time, the American and Chinese sites share some common features in terms of gender and social distance. In these latter respects, the web genre itself may determine the presentation of visual information and outweigh cultural differences.

These conclusions are limited by the small number and the types of websites analyzed (they are large, famous, and successful, but are they representative?), as well as the types of image features analyzed in this research. In an expanded study, the effects of other image variables (e.g., the social behaviors and social roles of people in the images) and their associations with cultural differences should be taken into account. In addition, further research is required to confirm the findings by analyzing more (e-commerce) websites in other cultures, as well as by investigating user perceptions of the websites. For example, a study of users could be conducted to examine whether Chinese users feel more comfortable with the current versions of the Chinese shopping sites than with the U.S. sites or the older Chinese sites.

Still, the findings in this paper are important in that they illustrate that globalization need not occur at the expense of localization. Although English-language Western culture is widespread in today’s Information Age, and other cultures tend to borrow especially from U.S. culture, those other cultures are not necessarily undermined. Some, like China, use the Internet to strengthen their own identities, leading to an increasingly diverse and dynamic world market.

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Singh, N., Furrer, O., &Ostinelli, M. (2004). To localize or to standardize on the Web: Empirical evidence from Italy, India, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. The Multinational Business Review, 12(1), 69-87.

Singh, N., Fassott, G., Zhao, H. X., & Boughton, P. D. (2006). A cross-cultural analysis of German, Chinese and Indian consumers' perception of web site adaptation. Journal of Consumer Behavior, 5, 56-68.

Singh, N., Zhao, H. X., & Hu, X. R. (2003). Cultural adaptation on the Web: A study of American companies’ domestic and Chinese websites. Journal of Global Information Management, 11(3), 63-80.

TeleGeography (2011).Global Internet geography. Retrieved April 7, 2012 from http://www.telegeography.com/page_attachments/products/website/researchservices/global-internet-geography/0002/4222/japan-internet-profile.pdf Yang, C. C. K., & Kang, Y. (2002).The influence of cultural factors on consumers’ reaction to Internet advertisements. Developments in Marketing Science, 25, 148-151.

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Zhao, C., & Jiang, G. (2011). Cultural differences on visual self-presentation through social networking site profile images. Proceedings of CHI 2011.http://research.microsoft.com/enus/um/beijing/groups/hci/pubs/1774_chi2011_chenzhao.pdf.

Zhao, H. X., & Levary, R. R. (2002). Evaluation of country attractiveness for foreign direct investment in the e-retail industry. Multinational Business Review, 10(1), 1-10.

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HOW VISIBLE WILL OUR HISTORY BE? JULIA KNIGHT University of Sunderland Sunderland, UK

Abstract. This paper explores some of the factors that determine what cultural material becomes available and visible on the internet via the example of moving image culture. It does this in two ways. Firstly it offers an overview of the shift from analogue to digital moving image distribution. This is based on an AHRC funded historical research project which examinedartists and independent moving image distributors in the UK. All distributors studied were non-commercial and committed to expanding the diversity of moving image culture. The aim of the research project was to explore both the constraints they operated under and the strategies they developed for building audiences for the work they distributed. An unanticipated outcome of the research was the identification of many parallels with emerging online distribution practices – contrary to claims for a digital distribution revolution, many of the promotional strategies are very similar to those employed in the analogue era and equally need resourcing. At the same time, the rapidly developing abundance of online resources, artifacts, collections and information has led to the internet being compared to a massive archive.

Drawing on the experience of setting up an online Film and Video Distribution Database, the paper goes on to examine how whatever is made available online is only ever a selection from what is available offline. It discusses the factors that impact and shape that process of selection, including selection criteria, digital rights management issues, the time consuming nature of digital resource creation, and resourcing levels. Finally the paper concludes by examining the problem of ensuring the sustainability of online resources once they have been created.

1. Introduction In recent years there have been frequent references to the impact digitisation has had on preserving our history and cultural artefacts. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (2009, back cover) have, for instance, observed that YouTube in particular ‘has rapidly developed into the world's largest archive of moving images.’ 1 In their 2011–15 Delivery Plan, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2011, p.11) in the UK makes reference to ‘the potential for an “infinite” archive’. Such observations suggest that we now have the ability to preserve all aspects of our culture and history 1

The book also includes a section on ‘Storage’ in which contributors discuss various ways in which YouTube can be viewed as a form of archive.

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for immediate reference by ourselves and for future generations. Staying with the example of moving image, the internet now provides a superabundance of film and video material uploaded by distributors, broadcasters, archives, museums, galleries, artists, political activists, DIY practitioners and hobbyists. Furthermore, as each generation becomes more media and computer literate, and as search engines become ever more sophisticated, digital technology can appear to democratize our access to information. Yet, such assumptions are fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons, which this paper seeks to highlight. The insights offered here are based on my experience of undertaking two related AHRC funded moving image research projects.

The first was a study of the distribution activities of a number of UK distributors who specialised in distributing artists’ and independent moving image work from the 1970s through to the end of the 1990s. These included the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, The Other Cinema, London Video Access, Cinema of Women, Circles, the Film and Video Umbrella, Cinenovaand Lux2 The second was an e-resource creation project undertaken in collaboration with the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, which produced the Film and Video Distribution Database (http://fv-distributiondatabase.ac.uk/). The Film and Video Distribution Database is an online resource which makes freely available a selection of documents – including committee meeting minutes, proposals, reports, correspondence, budgets and funding applications – from the organizations examined in the first project in order to help researchers understand the institutional context that facilitated the circulation of experimental and independent moving image work in the UK and to promote further research.

2. The Shift from Analogue to Digital Distribution The first project was initiated in the early 2000s and undertaking that research at a time when the YouTube and social media ‘revolutions’ were on the horizon forced me to question the relevance of trying to better understand historical activity if everything was about to change. While much of the initial hype around digital technology was about cheap production equipment, in 2005–06 it suddenly shifted to talk of a ‘distribution revolution’, viral marketing and Chris Anderson’s (2006) analysis of the internet as a form of ‘long tailed distribution’. In short, digital distribution had suddenly become a hot topic, and speculation about its future potential was rife.

However, it quickly became evident that the historical research could help us better understand contemporary activity. Indeed, much of the discussion around digital distribution directly reiterated the interests and aims of the organisations we were studying – a concern with finding alternative means of reaching audiences, expanding audiences for non-mainstream work, and maximising the potential offered by new 2

The research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the titles ‘Independent Film and Video Distribution in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s’ (2002–04) and ‘The Contemporary Promotion of Artists’ Film and Video in the UK’ (2004–05). See http://alt-fvdistribution.net/ (information website), as well as the recently published book Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Intellect, 2011), coauthored by Julia Knight and Peter Thomas.

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media technologies. Over the last 5–6 years, I have been struck by the frequent reporting of distribution practices and promotional activities now being developed online by young DIY practitioners, activists and entrepreneurs that are very similar to those developed in the analogue era. Just as the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and London Video Access were set up by the film/videomakers themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, circumventing existing distributors and returning as much distribution income as possible to makers, online distributors such as OnlineFilm.org (set up in 2000) and VoDo (launched in 2009) have been informed by very similar motives. And just as the history of the independent sector is littered with publishing initiatives – such as Cinim, Afterimage, Undercut and Independent Video – to help promote the visibility of its work, online distributors Reframe and MUBI (both launched in 2008) have set up discussion forums to help promote the work they distribute.

More recently, other issues have also begun to emerge which suggest further parallels with past distribution and promotional activity. While the internet has certainly increased the speed and scope of distribution activities, they nevertheless remain highly time-consuming ones and as before, they still need supporting through external funding, earned income or volunteer labour. Indeed, speculation around the apparent potential of digital distribution shifted relatively quickly in most sectors to serious questions about how to monetise the activity. Partly because of this, and partly due to the superabundance of moving image material now available, ‘attention grabbing’ – attracting users and consumers to your material – has become more rather than less crucial. However, since resources are always finite even when operating via the internet, this limits the range of material that can be actively marketed to a target audience and suggests that the internet replicates the uneven economic relations that exist offline.

Indeed, although Chris Anderson (2009: 254) discovered that however far you go down the long tail of the internet products continue to sell, it is in very small numbers and thus does not necessarily provide a commercially viable distribution model for smallscale or specialist producers.

It’s also easy to forget that not all moving image material has been digitised. As users increasingly shift to consuming moving image work via digital platforms – with, for instance, BBC iPlayer available via the Wii platform and MUBI via PlayStation 3, together with mobile platforms such as the iPod Touch – despite the above-mentioned abundance, the diversity of our moving image culture also narrows as some work becomes far less accessible. This happens whenever a new media format emerges – the massive take off of VHS in the 1980s eclipsed some distributors’ catalogues of 16mm films because many of the films were never transferred to video. It is being repeated now as DVD supplants video.

Thus, while far more cultural material and information is indeed more easily accessible via the internet to a greater number of people across the world, it nevertheless remains a selection from what is available offline. The range of factors that impact and shape that selection were made very visible during the course of managing my second project, the online Film and Video Distribution Database (FVDD).

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3. Some Factors Impacting Online Availability Firstly, the selection is determined by the interests of those uploading the material.In the case of the FVDD, for instance, our interests were centred on how experimental and independent work was distributed and promoted by UK organisations and how audiences were created for it. But several of the distributors we studied, such as the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and London Video Access, also engaged in production and training. Because of our particular interests, documents relating specifically to those activities were excluded from our selection and thus the FVDD offers only a partial history of those organisations. Our choices were very specific to the purpose of the FVDD, but this basic issue of selection from pre-existing offline material is one that besets most online resource creation projects. Some projects are set up to digitize preexisting collections and thus at one level the process of selection has already been undertaken. This is the case with the Arts On Film Archive (http://artsonfilm.wmin.ac.uk/) which provides online streaming of all 450 films made by the film department of the Arts Council England between 1953 and 1998. Yet, even in this case, a decision has been taken by both the project team and the funder – which was again the Arts and Humanities Research Council – that this particular collection should be made available to a wider audience via a digitisation project. However, in many instances, resource creators are faced with making a selection from a more extensive collection or range of material, and most set up an advisory board to help make those decisions. But inevitably opinions differ, and those that win out help shape any history that can be constructed using the resulting online resources.

However, the choice of what to include in an online resource is further limited by what rights the creators of online resources can obtain. In the case of the FVDD, several of the organisations we studied no longer existed – such as the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (LFMC) and Circles. Thus a first hurdle was establishing who owned the rights to the surviving material. In some cases the documents had been inherited by successor organisations. But for those successor organisations to be able to grant us online publication rights, we had to first establish that a formal transfer of assets had taken place. In other cases, there were no successor organisations and access to the documents had been facilitated through personal contacts. Thus we also had to develop a policy to deal with the eventuality of being unable to identify or locate a rights holder.

This process of digital rights management (DRM) also covers the extent of public access to the electronic artefact(s). Some material may be out of copyright and can be made freely available, while we were fortunate in that our rights holders were supportive of our aims and the FVDD is likewise freely available. But rights holders’ willingness to grant online publication can vary enormously. This means that in some cases, some work or artefacts – even when digitised – can still only be accessed offline or can only be sampled online via taster clips or restricted access. The Arts on Film Archive is one example of the latter. While a database of information about the films is freely available online, the digitised films can only be viewed by users based in UK institutions of further and higher education due to copyright restrictions imposed by the Arts Council England.

Furthermore, creating online resources like the FVDD require careful planning and development which involves not only addressing the processes of selection and digital

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rights management, but also the issues of digitizing content, optimizing it for web display, designing and constructing the resource, trialling its functionality, designing the web interface, uploading content, trouble-shooting and user testing. Not only are all these tasks highly labour intensive, but the planning and development stages invariably take longer than anticipated. This is partly due to having to deal with unforeseen eventualities. With the FVDD, a number of problems arose that could not have been anticipated. Firstly, the intention was to employ the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection’s existing research administrator to undertake the digital rights management work. However, just as the project was awarded funding, she became unavailable, which meant we had to recruit and train a replacement. Secondly, complications arose with the server hosting arrangements put in place at the start of the project, which necessitated finding an alternative. In the process we also lost the provision made for constructing the FVDD’s user interface and had to outsource that work elsewhere. And thirdly, the freelance software consultant we had employed unfortunately became ill during the course of the project and was unable to complete the necessary work within the original timescale. These combined factors contributed to significant delays, and what had been planned as a two year project became a three year project. With no access to additional funding, this meant that less content than originally planned could be uploaded to the database prior to its public launch and reduced its potential historical scope.

An obvious solution to these kinds of problems might seem to be to budget for longer planning and development stages. But the single largest cost in these kinds of projects is usually salaries, making them expensive projects to fund. Any lengthening of a project’s duration can significantly increase the already high costs. Since all funders look at value for money, increasing the costs can also reduce the chances of being funded in the first place. These issues can make unfunded online resources produced by DIY activist volunteer labour an attractive alternative. However, such projects are dependent on the availability of that volunteer labour which can be highly unpredictable and variable in terms of commitment. With no access to funding, such projects – as is the case with any volunteer sustained cultural initiative – can also be limited in terms of their capacity to grow or develop.

The need for access to resources also raises the issue of how to ensure the sustainability of online initiatives. While e-resources like FVDD and Arts on Film which offer collections of historical material will not really date in terms of their content, others – like the Internet Movie Database – will need constant updating if they are to remain ‘fit for purpose’. Some resources can generate income through an advertising or subscription model and become self-sustaining, but many others – such as the FVDD – which have been conceived as specialised research resources and have much smaller user bases cannot. In some cases hosting institutions are willing to bear the financial burden of maintaining and developing a resource’s content, but others have to rely on recruiting volunteer labour, which can make the process of updating content very random. However, it is not just a question of content. Online resources date at a technological level as well, and this can also make them less ‘fit for purpose’ since they no longer provide what users have come to expect of digital resources.

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4. Implications for the Future of Digitisation Projects Thus, while the internet may appear to present a huge, global archive, what is available online is still selective and its availability is constrained in a number of ways. Most eresource creation projects are undertaken in order to make more available material that would otherwise be relatively inaccessible. Indeed, the AHRC’s original funding of projects like the FVDD was designed precisely to ‘enhance access to and the availability of research materials and resources’ (Arts and Humanities Research Board, 2004, p.3). But that emphasis on availability and accessibility functions to conceal the process of selection. In order to better understand the limitations of online resources and collections, it may be useful to think about some internet content in terms archival documentation strategies. Archivists have been grappling with the issue of selection – what to make available – for years. As early as 1986, Helen Samuels argued that in a modern and information-rich society, only a small portion of the vast documentation produced by institutions and cultural activities can be kept. This has meant that archivists now have to take a far more active role in selecting what to keep and she advanced the idea of ‘documentation strategies’ as a means of doing that.3 In particular, such strategies are initiated to remedy the poor documentation for specific sectors of society, as well as for ongoing issues, activities, or geographic areas. Rather than the traditional archival practice of appraising and managing existing collections, a documentation strategy involves choosing and defining the topic to be documented, as well as selecting the documentation to be included.4 Although not necessarily conceived as such, many online resources – like the FVDD and the Arts on Film Archive – can be viewed as documentation strategies, since they improve the documentation of marginalised areas of cultural activity. It is possible to argue that this approach may be more productive in helping us develop our understanding of the shift from analogue to digital distribution than viewing such online resources simply as part of a culture of super-abundance facilitated by the internet.

However, there are also key differences between archiving practices and making material available on the internet. The central purpose of a traditional archive is to preserve the documents and artefacts in its care, and this is done by restricting public access. Thus, while archives preserve particular aspects of our past, they also control who has access to and can learn from those histories. The internet, in and of itself, does not guarantee the preservation of the work it makes available, but can make far more material (and histories) available to many more people – indeed, in contrast to traditional archives, the effectiveness of a website or web-based resource is to a large extent judged on how well used it is.

3

Her ideas about documentation strategies were formed while working with Larry Hackman and were subsequently developed and clarified through a number of publications. See, for instance, Hackman and Warnow-Blewett (1987), Alexander and Samuels (1987), Cox (1989), and Samuels (1991-92).

4 Two further activities are also involved: selecting advisors and establishing the site for the strategy; and structuring the inquiry and examining the form and substance of the available documentation. See Samuels (1986, p.116).

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Preservation of digital and digitised material has become an issue of increasing concern in recent years. Whereas many digitisation projects have been initiated over the past decade or so – including the FVDD – in order to preserve fragile or dispersed paper records and cultural artefacts, it has become very evident that digital files can be highly unstable, resulting in the loss of data and artefacts.5 Indeed, film archivists now readily acknowledge that 35mm film is a far more stable and longer lasting preservation medium for moving image work than any digital format. The only way to ensure the long term availability of digitized material is to migrate it to new formats as they emerge, something which is frequently beyond the means of small-scale resources like the FVDD. Nevertheless, few would dispute the benefits of the increased availability of documentation and cultural artefacts via the internet. Yet, due to the technological issues noted above, the existence of some online resources could also be very transitory.

A key factor in ensuring their continued existence is building usage. The more a website is visited by users, the more visible it becomes, creating a community of interest. This can in turn help secure the continued availability of an online resource or collection, by making it an asset of value to the hosting institution or by building up a user base of volunteer activism to support it. Ironically, in contrast to traditional archives, online collections or ‘archives’ of materials have to ensure that they are used as widely as possible in order to secure their own long-term survival.

While social networking tools have proved very useful in building audiences and user bases for cultural work and activities, it does not necessarily create an even playing field. The REWIND project (http://www.rewind.ac.uk/), which was set up to preserve early British video art through an offline digitisation project and to provide an online information database, has reported that their website user stats peak when there is a related real world event being staged. This suggests offline visibility still plays a crucial role in building usage. 6 Major organisations, such as the BBC or the British Film Institute in the UK, already have extensive real world visibility and hence far greater potential for attracting media coverage in addition to online word of mouth. This in turn means that they are usually able to build far larger user bases for their online resources than can be achieved by specialist online resources like the FVDD. More worryingly perhaps, the very act of building usage for the growing number of online resources and collections tends to condition users to look only online, which can in turn marginalise the material and information that remains offline (Horak, 2007; Prelinger, 2009). If we are to preserve our history and culture for future generations, it will be necessary not only to safeguard existing online resources (and of course develop new ones), but also to actively promote those that (may always) remain offline.

5 The best known example of this is probably the loss of some of the original animation files for Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), which was only discovered when the film was to be re-released on DVD. 6 Adam Lockhart, REWIND archivist, email correspondence with the author, 24 March 2011.

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References Alexander, P. N. & Samuels, H. W. (1987). The Roots of 128: A Hypothetical Documentation Strategy. American Archivist, 50 (Fall), 518–531.

Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand.

London: Random House.

Anderson, C. (2009). The Longer Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand.

London: Random House.

Arts and Humanities Research Board, Details of the Resource Enhancement Scheme, September 2004.

Arts and Humanities Research Council (2011). Delivery Plan 2011–2015. Available at http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Policy/Documents/DeliveryPlan2011.pdf (accessed 1 February 2012).

Cox, R. J. (1989). A Documentation Strategy Case Study: Western New York. American Archivist, 52 (Spring), 192–200.

Hackman, L. J. & and Warnow-Blewett, J. (1987). The Documentation Strategy Process: A Model and a Case Study. American Archivist, 50 (Winter), 12–47.

Horak, J.-C. (2007). The Gap Between 1 and 0: Digital Video and the Omissions of Film History.

Spectator, 27(1), 29–41.

Prelinger, R. (2009). The Appearance of Archives. In P. Snickars, P. and P. Vonderau (Eds), The YouTube Reader (pp. 268–274). Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.

Samuels, H. W. (1986). Who Controls the Past? American Archivist 49(2), 109–124.

Samuels, H. W. (1991–92). Improving Our Disposition: Documentation Strategy. Archivaria, 33 (Winter), 125–140.

Snickars, P. & Vonderau, P. (Eds) (2009). The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 454-468.

LOCALLY SITUATED DIGITAL REPRESENTATION OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE Co-constructing a new digital reality in rural Africa HEIKE WINSCHIERS-THEOPHILUS AND KASPER JENSEN School of Information Technology Polytechnic of Namibia AND KASPER RODIL Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University, Denmark

Abstract. Digital re-presentation of indigenous knowledge remains an absurdity as long as we fail to deconstruct the prevalent design paradigm and techniques continuously re-framing technology within a western epistemology. This paper discusses key challenges in attempts of co-constructing a digital representation based on experiences from a longitudinal community-centred research project in rural Africa. In a quest to shape design from a locally situated viewpoint, we codesign a 3D visualization of an African village with its inhabitants. Prior invisible local perspectives, as well as dominant designer’s views are brought to light within the design interactions. A new digital reality is created at the periphery of the situated knowledge through continuous negotiations and joint meaning making.

1. Introduction The digitalisation of indigenous knowledge (IK) is pursued on all continents by numerous agencies, yet with different motives and sensitivity toward tensions arising in representing indigenous knowledge digitally and the factors that contribute to these tensions. With a critical view on technology design’s promoted western epistemological and methodological perspective we identify key challenges of establishing a locally situated indigenous design paradigm in which appropriate technology can be created. In the following section we explore the Southern African situation further to contextualise our own attempts of digitally representing African indigenous knowledge as part of a long term collaborative research project. We intend to adjust our perspective from “somewhere else” to a local perspective through an on-going dialogue around technology, in order to design a representation which is meaningful to the community.

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POSITIONING (AFRICAN) INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IK has been receiving diverse kinds of attention from different viewpoints over the last decades. In development thinking, the dominant standpoint has been a reduction of IK to practical techniques and artefacts (van der Velden, 2010). Globalisation, as manifested in formal education, technology design, development of diverse sectors and intellectual discourses has endorsed a dominant ‘western scientific’ view of the world sidelining IK. International organizations such as World Bank, United Nations Development, the World Intellectual Property Organization deploy worldwide legal standards and rules without engaging into ontologies underlying IK (van der Velden, 2010). This has led to obvious incompatibilities with locally appropriate formulations of policies, such as the commodification of IK, ownership and benefit sharing models as has been recently discussed at a SADC conference1. Meanwhile African intellectuals and governments have re-discovered the value of their own local and traditional valid knowledge and are now actively challenging established paradigms and processes.

Southern African governments have requested for an integration of African IK into formal education, while in other sectors such as health and agriculture we observe an increased informal dual system with the application of both knowledge systems. While governments and NGO’s are committed to preserve, document, and disseminate IK to the benefit of local people, they are largely unaware of the hidden power of data structures and information architectures in the technologies chosen to support those endeavours.

MISREPRESENTATIONS THROUGH ABSTRACTIONS African IK fundamentally differs from the knowledge system which has governed mainstream technology development. Generally IK has been described as dynamic and adaptive, heterogeneous and distributed, social and collective, and experimental (van der Velden, 2010). While some of those features can be supported by current technology, we observe that catering for fundamental different values requires a major shift in design thinking. Most importantly, we need to deconstruct the conceptual framework under which we repeatedly ‘dislocate’ Africans and their knowledge system by maintaining a Western reference point before launching into design activities.

Asante (1990) institutes the Afrocentric paradigm as the building block of Africa’s own intellectual movement propagating a conceptualization from an African view point.

“Such a position is critical in Africa as researchers may misrepresent indigenous cultural practices and thus continue to perpetuate myths about the indigenous African culture” (Mkabela, 2005). Adopting an afro-centric method in design suggests cultural, social and intellectual immersion as opposed to scientific distance (Mkabela, 2005).

While, the "scientification" of IK strips away the detailed, contextual, applied aspects of knowledge that might be critical” (van der Velden, 2010), digital representation thereof further enforces loss of essentials. In our design endeavours in rural Africa, we are continuously reminded of an African worldview deeply rooted in a consciousness of connectedness with an overarching holistic approach, and viewed in contrast to this the 1 Fourth Southern African Development Community's

(SADC) Indigenous Knowledge Systems Workshop, Windhoek, Namibia 18-20 October 2011

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limitations of our own technological thinking stands out. This has become more evident than ever in our long-term involvement with one of the rural traditional healers in eastern Namibia. In an attempt to minimize our own judgement of priorities and control within recordings of oral and performed narratives, we provided the traditional healer and alternatively his apprentice with a flip-camera to capture what he deemed to be relevant. However we observed that the traditional healer himself is as much part of the narration as the plants he could film, touch and administer. Thus we realized that recordings would suffer a major loss of information burdening the traditional healer with recording and thereby missing his very own body language as part of the narrative (Bidwell et al., 2011). The healer suggested being equipped with a tripod and a remote control so that he could capture himself in action. In a latter trial of a story-based multimedia tool in which the healer re-constructed a previous real-life healing process, during which audio, video and still pictures were taken by a number of observers, we noticed that he only selected multimedia files in which he was present. Many western accounts of traditional healing have been reduced to knowledge on plant extractions which is even undergoing scientific validation processes. The recognition of a holistic and spiritual view expressed in the relationship of the healer, the plant, the patient and the environment has been deliberately devalued and ignored. In the process of this abstraction and modelling it is not surprising in which way current databases and repositories of so called traditional medicine have erased fundamental links and views of the originating knowledge system. The knowledge is then represented episodically rather than preserving its semantic and contextual relevance.

Cultural logics and literacies are embedded in the strategies privileged by technology design, thereby replicating ways to organize, make sense of, and communicate about the world (Dourish and Bell, 2011). “Not only does the information architecture reflect a particular politics of knowledge but it also somehow enacts it.”

(Christie, 2004). As current technology design is deeply rooted in a Western epistemology, it is intrinsically invested with a partiality which privileges certain assumptions, values, definitions, techniques, representation, models, and available technology devices. It becomes questionable, to what extend external (to the communities) IK repositories are able to preserve the integrity of the IK and what their role is in every day life of marginalised communities in view of the fact they have limited access to these repositories, and of the fact that the traditional IK systems are still the most relevant and most immediate for these communities. Can technology preserve the dynamic nature and social-embeddedness of IK? Can the inherent and deep human values and cultural philosophies embedded into the stories and traditions be preserved in the digital IK repositories?

EMBRACING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE INTO DESIGN PARADIGMS Over the last three years we have established profound collaborative relations with rural African community members in our active pursuit to embrace IK systems into the design of a community-centred IK management system. Based on the recognition of an erroneous and widely claimed universality of technology design principles, we attempt to contemplate processes and design decisions through “the eyes of the locals”, thereby opening new design spaces and a common platform for dialogue. We accept key values

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embedded in African IK, such as the interconnectedness of all, the holistic view including spirituality, and oral and performed transmission (Bidwell et. al. 2010). The local way of life and conceptualization of the world determines our design processes and decisions, in which our roles as designers are continuously re-defined and where at times we find ourselves “being participated” rather than facilitating design activities (Winschiers-Theophilus et. al 2010) while oscillating towards a common understanding of an appropriate digital representation of IK. The purpose of the IK management system is to create a digital platform where the village elders can represent and share their knowledge in a meaningful way to them and the youth, who have migrated to urban areas. In Namibia, as in many other parts of the world, the younger generations have migrated to cities thereby interrupting the traditional generational knowledge transfer. In a previous phase of the project, coresearchers as well as community members have captured rich multimedia recordings of indigenous practices, which they considered to be relevant. Attempts of mapping local communication and thought patterns have guided design sessions and past prototype implementations and evaluations (Kapuire et al. 2010). A major breakthrough in terms of community members’ engagement has been achieved with the prototype in which the videos were embedded into graphical scenarios featuring within a 3D representation of the communities’ own village (see figure 1) (Rodil et al. 2011). While the idea of developing a shared 3D platform, bridging a generational, conceptual and technical gap between the village elders and the urban youth has been adopted, a number of fundamental questions arose around the validity of common principles of perception, (3D) representation and recognition in their application to this rural African village.

Evers and Hinds (2010) have previously challenged the universality of design rules which were erroneously based on the assumption of common human sociopsychological functioning inconsiderate of cultural variances. Thus our design thinking had to be continuously questioned during the co-construction of the 3D representation.

As we encountered the unexpected we retrospectively deconstructed our own assumptions and looked for supporting literature. In the scarcity of the latter we conducted our own intermediate studies to verify specific hypotheses. Although our examples and experiences centre on visual representations, the reader can derive guidance for constructing any representation considering culturally distinct worldviews.

2. Located Representation DESIGN FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE Our discussion is based on the understanding that any representation, be it digital or other, is an actively constructed account of a perceived reality from a specific viewpoint. We need to be conscious of the fact that our conceptualisation and “our vision of the world is a vision from somewhere – that it is inextricably based in an embodied, and therefore partial perspective – which makes us personally responsible for it” (Suchman, 2002). While each individual construct their own worldview, through conscious explorations of viewpoints or less cognizant acculturation processes, we observe commonalities of perceptions within societies and subsets sometimes expressed

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in terms such as “feminist perspectives” or “African perspectives”. Thus we can assume that a close to common perspective of the world can be obtained through socialization processes over an extended period of time. In the context of our design project in the African rural village, we have observed very distinct perspectives between the community members and us the designers “from outside”. Those differences appear in discussions about the world or representations of it, such as our chosen depictions within the first visual prototype demonstrated in the village.

Community members pointed out mis-representations of scenarios in which body postures and gestures were simply “wrong”, or the walking style and trajectory of the cattle was inappropriate and specific trees were misplaced, etc, (Rodil et al. 2011). Thus we need to ask ourselves “whose images are seen, presented and promoted and whose aren’t?” (CATAC 2012 call for papers) or rather “how can designers from “somewhere else” adjust their perspective to the one of the community if the representation constructed aims to be meaningful to the community?”

Having acknowledged the differences in perception we now consider the second part of the design process, the “construction of a representation” which in itself is also highly dependable on the designers, their skills, their intentions, as well as active interpretation of the perceived reality and user needs. Thus the question of the abilities, the role and interactions of an ‘outsider’ in the design of a system supposed to represent a local perspective arises. While each participating member of the design team plays their role in colouring the design outcome, often the designer controls the process (Winschiers-Theophilus, 2009). Depending on the methods selected, individuals, community members and designers’ voices and views influence the final outcome.

Thus theoretically, the most appropriate technological representation of the reality of an indigenous community would be if led by the community members themselves assuming necessary technical skills within the community or co-opted with the additional premise of the pre-designed technology already flavoured with its origin of context. It is important to note that any representation with new media and technology is a construction of a “new reality” by the people involved in the design, the technology and the usage context.

DESIGNERS’ INTENSIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS At this point in time, unfortunately very few indigenous people have actively engaged in representing their worldview digitally - at least in Southern Africa. In most instances, designers ‘from somewhere else’ collaborate with indigenous people in constructing a new digital reality. But conscious of the designer’s influence and possible dominance on the design outcome, we ask ourselves, if activists or designers “are using new media to represent realities of, say (oppressed) indigenous people in a given country, is this better than no visibility at all, even if the people in question do not have access or skills to present themselves as subjects?” (Catac 2012 call for papers) Directly asked for their opinions in this regard, our village elders and other community members expressed gratitude for having been engaged in this project, pride in our acknowledgement of their wisdom and IK while at the same time hope that their voices would be heard by government and other agencies to facilitate their desired developments. Moreover, urban migration, formal education and other global developments have undermined and

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disrupted the traditional oral transfer of still valid and applicable IK from the wise elders to the next generation. Thus we find many initiatives around the world, where idealistic designers support the digitalisation of IK for the purpose of preservation, documentation, and many other genuine reasons. Yet no matter how noble the goal, the questions remains whether the knowledge is “truthfully” represented and whether it will adequately communicate the ideas and values of the indigenous cultures (Christie, van der Velden).

Beside the many classical approaches of videos and adapted databases, we witnessed a presentation of an artful story interpretation by Heyes (2011). Based on the notion that stories can be meaningfully represented in built form, Heyes, a landscape architect, intents to revive and celebrate ‘real’ Inuit stories still circulating in the Kangiqsualujjuaq (Nunavik territory) community through the design of a virtual storytelling space. Numerous visits over many years, listening to stories, observing local artists, as well as discussions and co-design sessions with the Inuit elders, inspired Heyes’ artful creation, which captures the human, spiritual, and natural elements of the Arctic landscape and seascape thereby enabling the next generation of Inuits and others to experience, feel and re-interpret Inuit legends. Although the artefact clearly demonstrates Heyes’ very own interpretation of Inuit stories, it has to be seen as yet another example of a synergized new representation, which is nothing like the one in the past, yet promoting the same intention of transferring timeless stories from one generation to the next, re-shaped by its tellers or designers. As knowledge and rituals, themselves are continuously adapted to new circumstances, technology is yet just another medium contributing to the transformation of representation. Despite a heated debate during the conference on the validity of a new interpretation from ‘elsewhere’ we consider a representation to be "acceptable" if the community in question recognises it to be appropriate and to be reflecting their fundamental human values and the essence of being. As more and more technology design collaborations with the involvement of indigenous people emerge, existing paradigms will be questioned and pave the way for further initiatives. However the validity of any externalized representation and if and how it can be validated within the indigenous cultures remains a challenge.

TOWARDS AN INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE Various Indigenous communities have appropriated audio-visual media to convey their knowledge to wider audiences (Bidwell et al. 2008). However, reconciling media with a non-Western episteme must account for the situated nature of information transformation as communities appropriate media. Knowledge, narrative and representation flux and entwine in an on-going dynamic process. People create meanings with, and about, new representations continuous with their original concepts, values and beliefs and contemporary culture (Bidwell et al., 2011).

Martinez (2011) further emphasizes that although “colonization is endemic to the use of electronic technology […] cultural and rhetorical expression of digital media is necessary for indigenous peoples to exercise their sovereignty in a digital age”.

Martinez, with Northern New Mexican Mestizo roots, embraces “the importance for indigenous peoples to consider culturally responsive uses of digital media as an emergent aspect of indigenous culture” in his own design endeavours. In his co-

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intentional collaboration with indigenous people, Martinez creates indigenous media, which facilitates epistemologically situated learning experiences, such as the digital Ayayote rattle.

In our long term collaborative development of an IK management system, we chose to closely work with a co-researcher who finds himself at the intersection of the two worlds, originating from the village yet having undergone a full information technology education. However on the one hand he struggles to merge the two contradictory conceptualizations of the world, on the other hand he is unable to reflect on his own cultural immersion. Thus his role becomes the one of a facilitator and interpreter at the ‘contact zone’ (Van der Velden, 2010) with the designers ‘from elsewhere’ and the community members. Although genuinely trying to reconstruct the world through the eyes of the local community members we have really drawn a new joint picture of the local reality. Not only have we transformed representations through many verbal translations but also visual translations and thereby reconstructed a new meaning of local stories. Having accepted the unavoidable fact of metamorphosis through technology design we recognize the nature of co-construction a designercommunity branded artefact which immanently redefines meanings. We can only strive towards refining our co-creation and participatory methods to minimize the footprints of our external techno-centric culture. While in the long run we strive for an Afrocentric design, which promotes cognitive self-determination of indigenous peoples in regard to further technology development and research in IK systems.

3. Co-design of a Visual Representation In the following section we will share project specific experiences and realizations we had along the co-construction of a 3D representation of our pilot village in Eastern Namibia in our attempt to locally situate the design perspective. The process is based on a number of prolonged stays in the rural community for up to a week at the time; each trip being a combination of design sessions, technology probe evaluations and more controlled experiments.

AWAKENING – COGNIZANCE OF DIFFERENCES Considering a prevalent oral and performance based knowledge creation and transfer process in rural Southern Africa, we renounced from textual dominated technologies and launched into the exploration of visual and location based representations as a virtual context for digitalized IK. Prior studies of our collaborative rural community have established the significance of place, location, and navigation interweaved with social activities (Bidwell et al. 2011). This community has demonstrated established rituals observed across other rural Herero (ethnical group) communities in the region, such as placement of the holy fire in relation to the house and the kraal (fenced enclosure), appropriate location for slaughtering of goats, cooking of white versus red meat, etc. Thus we embarked on a first implementation of a 3D visualization of the village to embed pre-recorded videos. The graphic designer from far away (Scandinavia) launched into an approximation of building graphical elements based on

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photos and videos, such as houses, fire places, goat and cow kraals as well as representations of scenarios such as a group of people healing a cow, for which a community recorded video could be displayed (Rodil et al. 2011). The relative placement was informed by the co-researcher originating from the village. However the first demonstration of the prototype and feedback session (see Figure 1) with the community unveiled a number of unexpected results. While on the one hand the villagers were for the first time, after the start of the project, thoroughly criticizing details and discussing further design ideas, we also observed that although the villagers could recognize the individual elements on the screen they did not realize that it was supposed to be a representation of their very own surroundings. While we the outsiders could immediately relate to the representation, the villagers themselves would only identify specific known indicators after multiple promptings.

Figure 1. Left: Prototype screenshot with embedded video Right: Villagers responding to the 3D representation.

An extensive discussion within our research group started on the principles of 3D representation and recognition. Different questions arose such as how to represent the village and the individual homesteads in particular to ensure easy and immediate recognition. Did we depict the wrong elements or did we mis-arrange them? Did we mis-represent them? Did we choose the wrong viewpoints? A number of different opinions and hypotheses emerged in our design team, yet all coloured by our western scientific mindsets. We decided to explore two main aspects further in the next phase.

Firstly, to explore from a larger number of community members how they would visually represent their immediate environment and whether they have a shared understanding of visual representations. Secondly, we wanted to investigate which factors hamper or enhance recognition in 3D, e.g. should we strive for more “realistic” or abstract representations, does colour or the angle of view matter?

A LOCAL REPRESENTATION In the first prototype the 3D graphics designer selected which elements to include in the model and which not. His major focus was on man- made objects, such as houses, fire places, fences, water pump objects which his eyes are trained for to differentiate easily, unlike bushes and trees. Yet each person or group may ‘narrate’ a place differently: emphasizing particular features, events or characters, and arranging relationships between these in different temporal or causal orders. Often the meaning of a place is

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contested locally (Byrne 2008); Thus unsure about the relevance of the chosen elements we decided to further explore the villagers’ suggestion on representations.

Methodological approach During a four day stay in the village we ran individual drawing sessions with 21 community members of different ages, asking to draw their own homestead, once from the front and once from the top (through the ‘eyes of a bird’) (Jensen et al. 2012). The main objective was to investigate which elements they would draw (see Figure 2).

Secondly we gave them a generic shape of an animal which they were requested to turn into a cow and another into a goat. Here we wanted to see the details the villagers considered to be of relevance. In yet another session we had a group of elders and later youth play the game of Pictionary, where terms were chosen from local narrations. The idea was to investigate whether there would be a shared representation which would lead to easy and fast recognition.

Figure 2. Leftmost: Elder drawing. Left: Young girl drawing. Right: Elders playing Pictionary. Rightmost: Young girl drawing while playing Pictionary.

On the next field trip we brought an Android tablet with a prototype implementation of a HomeSteadCreator. By touch interaction the user selects objects and drags them into place on the ‘empty canvas’, and through previously established camera perspectives inspect the creation. A wide range of modelled objects, such as houses, animals, trees, fences and pots, informed by prior villagers’ drawings, could be selected by the user (see Figure 3). The short term goal was to investigate and how the villagers would represent their homesteads, and how these would correlate with previous drawings. A long term goal is to design a tool, which enables the villagers to recreate the context for recorded IK as shown on Figure 1. Informed by villagers’ drawings and feedback on prototypes, we hope to gradually build a creative space allowing for in-situ design of community determined graphical representation – unhinged from our design decisions.

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Figure 3. Left: Screenshot of the HomeSteadCreator Right: An example of an individual drawing made by a villager depicting objects important to the homestead.

What matters?

We analysed the drawings for the occurrence of different objects, sequence of which objects were drawn and the chosen perspectives. We observed a gender bias in terms of the majority of male participants drawing fences and cattle, while the female participants drew cooking utensils. The houses were drawn very similarly across all participants. Most drawings had a tree next to their house as well as the fire place in front, just like in reality. Neither objects’ size nor distance relations correlated with reality. In the goat and cow drawings great similarities were found across the participants’ drawings in the details, which can directly inform further modeling of those animals in 3D. In the Pictionary case we observed wide recognition of drawn scenarios as well as similarities across the groups in terms of depicting, which suggests that there is a shared agreement on recognizable representations. Most importantly the drawings facilitated discussions about the representation of objects in the environment as well as possible representations of user interface objects.

RECOGNITION Puzzled about the low recognition of the representation of the villagers familiar surrounding we wanted to investigate specific features which we assumed could have hampered recognition.

The perspective Previous findings in the project questioned the perspective users should have within the representation. This manifests itself through the choice of camera angle in the 3D visualization. To further explore the effect on recognition, we modified the first prototype to allow for changing the perspective to three different camera angle views.

In the evaluation session users expressed a strong rejection towards a top down view, confirming findings in the literature (Mangan, 1978), yet they expressed almost equal appreciation for the front or tilted view (35 degrees) (Jensen et al. 2012).

Previous evaluation sessions were conducted in smaller group settings thereby obtaining a consensual community feedback. However in this instance we measured 25 distinct individual’s recognition rates of graphical representations of houses, varying the perspective and the colouring. For this purpose, we developed a prototype on a

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tablet, where a photograph taken of a house in this specific village was displayed in the top-left corner. The remainder of the screen featured 9 different modelled houses, of which the user was asked to select the one being similar to the one on the photograph (see Figure 4). The test series consisted of five photographs with four different representation types, e.g. front, tilted, coloured and black and white of the same houses.

While the colouring did not substantially influence recognition, the recognition rate varied from 80% in front view to 65% in tilted view. The results re-established our previous findings regarding preferences of and recognition in different perspectives.

Once more we realise that we cannot assume that common design guidelines are based on universal human functioning but that we need to explore cultural variations before taking final design decisions. In the absence of reliable literature resources we need to engage in basic experiments confirming the appropriateness of our design. We further believe that many “odds” discovered in the high-fidelity prototype evaluations could not always have been anticipated and therefore following an oscillation design process seems adequate.

Figure 4. Left: House recognition tool. Right: A Herero woman is finding the match.

The standpoint/viewpoint matters A South African skilled 3D graphic student was contracted to model a number of trees from the village as depicted on photos taken during a previous trip. All modelled trees were recognized by a local colleague from the agriculture department. Yet the villagers all agreed that those trees are nowhere to be found in their own surroundings. Once more although they looked perfectly comparable to the real trees to us, something about the representation was “wrong” that made them unrecognisable. Again a number of speculations arise, which we will explore in a successive phase of this project. A possible explanation could be that the photo was taken from a standpoint where villagers would usually not look at the tree. Another possibility are specific details on local trees, colour, shape, such as one branch longer, certain cut, etc, which we have not realized. In this case we suggest an ‘extreme’ design approach where the villager looks over the shoulders of the designer indicating necessary changes until community recognition is guaranteed.

How realistic?

The designer originally defended the position that everybody "sees the same" and therefore recognition is only about designing the representation as "realistic" as

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possible. Yet we well know that perception of reality differs from person to person but also across cultural lenses which determines the foci. Thus equally in a visual representation as designed by an external to the community we need to ask ourselves who’s reality is represented and how do we facilitate for the designer to “see through the eyes of the others” in order to represent the local essentials. Can 3D graphic design be based on photos and be as a realistic as possible lead to higher recognition? The problems experienced in the evaluations cycles were that the more detailed the more peculiar the villagers become. Much emphasis was put by the designer on modelling the houses as “realistically” as possible. Numerous discussions on which detail he considers to be essential for recognition would not necessarily be the details the house owner or neighbours would consider essential. In one instance the owner of the modeled house said that his roof sheet is not placed in the modelled way, while the photo taken by the much taller designer clearly does depict this sheet placed as modeled. But of course the house owner never saw his house from this standpoint. Also between two trips in which the houses were modeled, the one got painted thus again the owner said the depicted house is not his house. Once more we realise that no matter how close we approximate the representation to our perspective of the reality, the perceived reality of the local community is based on a different frame of mind about what is important and how things should look; so any ‘realistic’ representation remains a partial and biased view and only holds ‘true’ in the eye of the designer.

MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE The technology probes and various system prototypes together with the drawing sessions have proven to be immensely valuable as "tools" around which to facilitate interaction with the local community members. It has helped making the invisible visible through a process of interaction and dialogues around the visualizations.

Common methods, such as contextual inquiry, interviews, and standard prototype evaluations only cannot reveal the unexpected facts. The issue at it's core is: How can you see and discover what you are not looking for, and how to ask the right questions which will shed light on the thought processes and perceptions that are so natural to people, that it will never occur to them to explain it to anybody, assuming that other people must surely see it the same way? As technology designers, we are ourselves often the culprits of such assumptions.

We want to stress that our findings are not merely mappings of simple objects, details and their relative importance but fundamental and holistic ways of thinking about the local environment and what "makes sense" to the people inhabiting it. An illustrative example can be drawn from the aforementioned "HomeSteadCeator" prototype (as shown in figure 3), which included a way for the users to get rid of any object that they had mistakenly put into the virtual homestead. In an effort to "contextualize" the design of the interface, a garbage dump site was added to the one side of the virtual homestead being a near photorealistic representation of an existing garbage dump in the village - the rationale being that the villagers would not understand a "Western" metaphor like the trashcan used in many operating systems. While the recognition of the dump site and it's intended purpose was almost instant, the resulting reactions were highly surprising: the villagers was disturbed and outspokenly

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disapproving the concept, saying that they would never even consider to throw something away, everything can be reused; and the mere thought of throwing a cow or a chicken (even virtual) into an (equally virtual) garbage pit was highly abhorrent to them.

Only in the interaction with the representation did the discussion around a metaphorical “delete” occur which otherwise would have be assumed to be a universal function of nearly any computerised application. Thus we argue that our continuous introductions of technology probes and discussions around them with the community facilitate a mutual understanding of each others knowledge systems thereby informing the design at the 'contact zone' and revealing what would have remained invisible.

4. Conclusion LOOKING BACK While numerous initiatives aim to enable diverse, and often remote, communities to share their wisdom and practical know-how with conventional digital technologies; however, often, these endeavours overlook their mis-match with the very systems that indigenous people use in daily life to organize and make sense of the world. To design digital infrastructures for currently unserved knowledge systems we must account for the transformations that occur as technology interacts with the ways of knowing, doing and being that constitute IK systems. The entanglement of knowledge, worldviews, representation and recognition directly affects technology design. We need to ensure that we strive towards a common view of the world and agreed upon shared representations to ensure recognition and acceptance by the target community.

Cognitive self-determination of Indigenous Peoples must not be compromised within any further technology development and research in this area. However a critical observation of the design interactions and dialogues illuminates the initial dominance of the designer’s perspective which can only be adjusted to a local perspective over continuous interactions with the indigenous people involved in the co-design process.

The whole process is a dynamic and organic construct full of pitfalls for we shall make no claims to have uncovered all of these nor shall we pretend to know the right methods to use. We do, however, in the context of the reported studies, believe that we have learned lessons that can be generalized across design of digital representations of IK systems. Thus even in the case of designing a non-visual system, visualisation can be used to elaborate differences and oscillate toward a common meaning within the design process.

FINALE Having been involved over a long time period in co-designing processes, we have realised our own limitations in figuring out how ‘the others’ perceive the world and anticipate a respective representation. We come to understand that the technological artefacts cannot be based on our preconceived blueprints and guidelines, but have to evolve as part of a co-owned process and continuous negotiation between the external holders of technology knowledge and the internal holders of IK. We do not believe that

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there are a determined set of universal methods for gaining access to the mind's eye of any culture, but from our experiences we have discovered that over multiple interactions around the technology we together can shape the representation towards a meaningful and recognisable abstraction for all parties involved. In the absence of valid guidelines and research results we pioneer a development process oscillating between high-fidelity prototype evaluations and basic experiments, to reveal the invisible views of the indigenous people we design with, attempting to approximate a representation through their eyes.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the community members with whom we were involved for shaping our new perspectives and abilities to see what was invisible to our eyes. Also we would like to thank all our co-researchers who have been part of our journey into a new world of representations.

References Asante, M. (1990). Afrocentricity and Knowledge, Trenton: The African World Press Bidwell, N. J., Standley, P., George, T., & Steffensen, V. (2008). The Landscapeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Apprentice: Lessons for Design from Grounding Documentary, Proc. Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 271-280 ACM Pr. Bidwell, N. J., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Koch-Kapuire, G., & Chivuno-Kuria, S. (2011).

Situated Interactions Between Audiovisual Media and African Herbal Lore. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 15, 609-627.

Bidwell, N. J., & Winschiers-Theophilus, H. (2012). Extending Connections Between Land and People Digitally: Designing with Rural Herero Communities in Namibia, In Giaccardi, E. (Ed). Heritage and Social Media: Understanding and Experiencing Heritage in a Participatory Culture. Taylor & Francis/Routledge Byrne, D. (2008). Heritage as social action, In G. Fairclough, R. Harrison, J.H. Jameson, & J. Schofield (eds.). The Heritage Reader (pp.149-173). London & New York: Routledge.

Christie, M. (2004). Computer Databases and Aboriginal Knowledge. Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts. 1, 4-12.

Evers, V., & Hinds, P. (2010). The Truth about Universal Design: How knowledge on basic human functioning, used to inform design, differs across cultures. In Proceedings of the ninth international workshop on Internationalization of Products and Systems: Building Global Design Communities (pp. 33-42). London, UK. Heyes, S. (2011). Recovering and Celebrating Inuit Knowledge through Design: The Making of a Virtual Storytelling Space. In Bidwell, N. J. & Winschiers-Theophilus, H. (Eds), Proceedings of IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm. (pp. 62-71). ISBN: 978-99945-72-37-3 Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference 2011, Namibia Jensen, K., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Rodil, K., Winschiers-Goagoses, N., Kapuire, G., & Kamukandjandje, R. (2012). Putting it in Perspective: Designing a 3D Visualization to contextualize Indigenous Knowledge in Rural Namibia. In Proceedings of DIS. Kapuire, G., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., ChivunoKuria, S., Bidwell, N. J., & Blake, B. (2010). A revolution in ICT, the last hope for African Rural Communities' technology appropriation.

In Proc. IDIA (4th IDIA Conference).

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Mangan, J. (1978). Cultural conventions of pictorial representation: Iconic literacy and education.

Educational Communication and Technology, 26(3), 245-267.

Martinez, C. (2011). Digital Ayayote Rattle: The Design of a Portable Low-Cost Digital Media System for a Mediated Xican Indio Resolana. In Nicola J Bidwell & Heike WinschiersTheophilus (Eds), Proceedings of IKTC2011: Embracing Indigenous Knowledge Systems in a New Technology Design Paradigm. (pp.88-97). ISBN: 978-99945-72-37-3 Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference 2011, Namibia Mkabela, Q. (2005). Using the Afro centric method in researching indigenous African culture.

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Rodil, K., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Bidwell, N. J., Eskildsen, S., Rehm, M. & Kapuire, G. (2011). A New Visualization Approach to Re-Contextualize Indigenous Knowledge in Rural Africa. In Proc. Interact 2011. vol. 6947 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chap. 23 (pp. 297-314). Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

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Van der Velden, M. (2010). Design for the Contact Zone. In Proceedings of the Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication Conference 2010.

Winschiers-Theophilus, H. (2009). The Art of Cross-Cultural Design for Usability. In C. Stephanidis (ed.), Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Addressing Diversity, vol. 5614 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (pp. 665-671). Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

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Being Participated: A Community Approach. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2010. Participation: the Challenge (pp.1-10). Sydney, Australia: ACM.

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COPYRIGHT, CULTURE, AND COMMUNITY IN VIRTUAL WORLDS DAN L. BURK School of Law University of California, Irvine 401 East Peltason Drive Irvine, CA 92797-8000, USA

Abstract. Communities that interact on-line through computer games and other virtual worlds are mediated by the audiovisual content of the game interface.

Much of this content is subject to copyright law, which confers on the copyright owner the legal right to prevent certain unauthorized uses of the content. Such exclusive rights impose a limiting factor on the development of communities that are situated around the interface content, because the rights, privileges, and exceptions associated with copyright generally tend to disregard the cultural significance of copyrighted content. This limiting effect of copyright is well illustrated by examination of the copied content appropriated by virtual diaspora communities from the game Uru: Ages of Myst. Reconsideration of current copyright law would be required in order to accommodate the cohesion of on-line communities and related cultural uses of copyrighted content.

1. Introduction Copyright law is intimately bound up with culture and community. The express purpose of copyright is to foster the development of art, music, literature, movies, and other cultural creations. Successful copyrighted works add to the fund of cultural content and practice, but generally do so through the mechanism of commodification. Ownership and sale of copyrighted content is intended to provide a monetary reward to spur cultural creation. Indeed, copyright holders frequently target their creative and distributive efforts toward cultural adoption, and profit from the promulgation of their works as part of popular culture.

Consequently, the copyright system has been criticized with increasing frequency for somewhat paradoxically failing to make allowances for access and re-interpretation of cultural materials (Lessig, 2004, Vaidhyanathan, 2004. Graphical, musical, audiovisual, and literary works constitute key components of shared culture. Full participation in society is impossible without access to such works, but access is controlled by an unsympathetic copyright regime. Some types of participation, such as criticism, commentary, and parody, are privileged under user privileges or exceptions, the American fair use doctrine. But many, indeed most, types of participatory recreation of copyrighted works are not contemplated within either fair use or other legal exemptions.

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This failure of the copyright system holds as true for participation in virtual communities as for society generally; indeed, given that virtual communities are largely mediated by copyrighted works, it poses a particular problem for such communities. In this paper I illuminate this problem by means of a case study, following the migration of copyrighted content away from the defunct on-line game Uru: Ages of Myst to Second Life to other venues. Graphics from the Uru game were reproduced on new servers by departing players attempting to maintain their distinctive virtual community and culture through shared iconic images. The unauthorized appropriation of content from the Uru game was crucial to maintenance of the virtual community but, as I show here, almost certainly constituted copyright infringement.

2. The Uru Diaspora Digital communication technologies may be the object of existing culture, or may be the subject of new emergent culture. Virtual worlds are increasingly recognized as focal points for complex social interactions, leading to the development of distinct communities (Taylor, 2006). Such communities in turn give rise to the development of distinctive cultures (Boellstorff, 2008; Nardi, 2010). Among the more striking examples of on-line community and culture is that of the Uru diaspora, which has been studied in detail by Celia Pearce (2010).

Pearce describes the unique gaming community that formed around the virtual environment of the Uru: Ages Beyond Myst game, an on-line extension of the popular Myst and Riven computer games. The on-line game proved unprofitable and was shut down by the provider. Although not a financial success, the game attracted a highly devoted cadre of players, who, in the face of the gameâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imminent closure, determined to retain and foster the community they had developed during their virtual association.

In advance of the game closure, they identified and eventually colonized other virtual worlds where they could continue their community, importing with them into the alternative computer venues the distinctive design motifs of the architecture and artifacts from the Uru game interface.

As a result, a number of other on-line environments acquired regions of virtual territory, constructed by Uru migrants, that to a greater or lesser extent resembled the design of the Uru graphical interface. Uru look-alike images comprising buildings, fountains, and other distinctive architectural icons began to appear in the virtual worlds of Second Life, There.com, and elsewhere. For example, Figure 1 shows a distinctive fountain that was copied from the Uru game and reappeared in diaspora communities in Second Life and There.com.

In the interim, the Uru game itself has undergone a series of incarnations under a variety of proprietors. The game has reopened under a new sponsor on new servers, subsequently closed again, been hosted on player-maintained servers, and the game code has been promised to its users for maintenance as an open source project.

Additionally, during this period, some of the venues to which the Uru diaspora migrated, such as There.com, have themselves encountered financial difficulty and closed their servers.

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Figure 1. Uruvian Diaspora Fountain This saga of the Uru diaspora makes for provocative social and cultural study, but it hinges to a large extent on the appropriation of intellectual property. The culture carried by migrants from the initial Uru game ultimately revolves around intellectual property, in the form of distinctive images and audiovisual works that they encountered on the initial server; their culture is in some sense owned by the developer of the game where the community first formed. The reproduction of images from the Uru game in Second Life, There.com and elsewhere implicates copyright in the original game. The original images – and despite the spatial façade of the game interface, at the end of the day, the virtual world “structures” are indeed images – were part of the Uru: Ages Beyond Myst game, both as the software of game and the audiovisual output of that software, and so subject to copyright by the developers of that game. The disappearance of the original game does not change the property status of the images; such intellectual property is transferable and devisable, and presumably passed via sale or bankruptcy to the new owners of the Uru game properties.

3. The Copyright System Much of the creative material that constitutes computer games is subject to copyright law (Burk, 2006; Lastowka, 2010). Both individual components of the game and the overall combination of those components may constitute copyrightable works.

Graphics, music, and sufficiently original sound effects all fall within copyrightable subject matter. The animated combination of sound and graphics constitutes a copyrightable audiovisual work. The underlying software that records and controls the audiovisual output also falls within the ambit of copyright. The libraries of game components, as well as databases of character information that undergird virtual environments, may constitute sufficiently original compilations for copyright to attach to them as well (Burk, 2010a).

Copyright vests in the copyright holder the right to legally exclude others from engaging in certain activities vis a vis the protected work. In the United States, these activities include the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, adaptation, public performance, and public display of the work (17 U.S.C. § 103, 2006). Other jurisdictions grant similar exclusive rights. The exclusivity of the copyright holder does not extend to the idea instantiated in a protected work, but to the particular expression of that idea in the protected work. Infringement of the exclusive rights renders the perpetrator liable for monetary damages, and usually subjects the perpetrator to a court order enjoining further such activity.

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Thus, reproduction of the Uru images – indeed, conscious and wilful reproduction of the images – is rather clearly a violation of the copyright owner’s exclusive right of reproduction, the “copy right.” Some of the re-created images are literal copies of content from the Uru game, some are substantially similar or derivative of the content from the Uru game, and some have the “look and feel” of Uru content. And, liability for the infringement might not be limited to the subscribers who create potentially infringing images in the new server locales of the Uru diaspora. A credible argument could be made that the proprietors of Second Life and There.com are liable for contributory or vicarious infringement, “aiding and abetting” a copyright violation by hosting the images on their servers. As the operators of e-Bay, YouTube, various filesharing services, and some ISPs have discovered, simply providing a forum for copyright violation, without directly participating in the infringing activity, can sometimes create liability for infringement (Yen, 2006).

Of course, copyright liability attaches only to unauthorized uses of a work. One solution to the threat of liability is to seek permission or authorization for use of the work; but this is often not simple, practical or even feasible. An example related to this paper illustrates the point: the argument of this paper benefits from inclusion of an example of the kind of graphic material reproduced in the Uru diaspora, specifically the image of the iconic fountain that appears in Figure 1. Use of the image in a scholarly work is permissible under the copyright laws of many – although by no means all – countries. Any uncertainty as to the use of the image could be clarified by obtaining the permission of the copyright owner. But it is entirely unclear who one would even begin to approach to gain permission – the original image has been modified by largely anonymous players, and moved from server to server; control of the content has been transferred multiple times, and several of the entities that might own or control the content have gone into bankruptcy. The difficulty of determining whom one would approach to clear the rights for inclusion of an Uru diaspora image in a CaTaC paper indicates the similar difficulty that a user community would have in obtaining permission for their use of an iconic cultural image or motif.

4. Failing Fair Use Like other property rights, copyright is not absolute, but is subject to a variety of privileges, exceptions, and exemptions that limit or curtail the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, often in particular contexts or situations (Burk, 2004). The copyright exemptions differ from nation to nation, but the majority of jurisdictions offer only a discrete list of limited uses, such as news reporting, educational use, or private use, that qualify as legally permissible without authorization of the copyright holder. Such uses are typically narrow and specific and unlikely to apply to cultural appropriations such as those considered here, or for that matter to other takings for purposes of cultural or communal meaning.

Virtual community poses a particular challenge for the application of such exemptions. Certain copyright exemptions might accommodate cultural uses of tangible objects, but often the fit of the exemptions to digital objects is poor. For example, most countries include in their copyright law some form of “first sale” doctrine that exhausts

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the control of the copyright holder over a particular copy after it has been lawfully transferred (17 U.S.C. § 109, 2006). The owner of a copy thus has the right to gift, resell, or even publicly display that particular copy of the work. But this right extends only to the transfer of a particular copy, and not to the generation of additional copies.

Digitized materials are peculiar in that transfer of bits is affected by the generation of new copies – in RAM, on magnetic media, and elsewhere over multiple networked machines. Thus, it is unclear how or whether first sale might apply to the transfer of bits (Lemley, 1997). The first sale doctrine may accommodate the distribution or display of tangible cultural items, but not the digital cultural items on which virtual communities rely.

In the United States, the best known of the copyright user privileges or exemptions is likely the statutory fair use provision, which allows context specific uses of the protected work without authorization of the copyright owner (17. U.S.C. § 107, 2006).

The applicability of fair use is highly flexible, rather than constrained in the manner of most copyright exemptions. Often the first instinct when an unauthorized use seems compelling is to rely on the “fair use” provision to justify the use, as for example in the case of unauthorized cultural appropriation of copyrighted works (Tushnet, 2007).

However, the fair use provisions were not necessarily intended to accommodate such takings, and have not necessarily been interpreted in a manner that would justify them.

The U.S. copyright statute indicates four factors that are to be weighed in deciding whether a given use is fair: first, the purpose for which the material is being taken; second, the type of work from which the material is taken; third, the extent of the material taken; and fourth, the impact of the taking on the market for the work from which the material is taken. Courts have at times given extra weight to the final factor.

The Supreme Court has also suggested that fair use is one of the statutory features necessary to mediate between the constitutional demands of free speech and the exclusive rights to expression granted by copyright: although copyright constitutes a governmental constraint on speech, fair use provides a measure of activity free from the constraint (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 1985). Consequently, uses of copyrighted material for purposes of public discourse, such as criticism, commentary, and parody, are given particular preference when considering whether the use is fair.

Depending on the factual context of these criteria, it may be permissible to use some, all, or none of a copyrighted work in a given situation without authorization. The determination of fair use has both the virtue and the vice of being highly fact-specific.

Such context specificity makes the provisions highly plastic, adaptable to a wide range of situations, including new and unforeseen situations; but at the same time, because the outcome varies with the context, the application of the provisions is often unpredictable. But however flexible it may be, fair use is like a rubber band: you can only stretch it so far before it snaps. Whether or not a use will be judged fair in a given situation is frequently a matter of some doubt until a court renders a verdict on the question. But certainly maintaining the cultural integrity of a virtual diaspora is not a use that courts would immediately recognize as fair.

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4.1. PURPOSE AND CHARACTER OF THE USE In assessing the first factor, courts will tend to ask whether the unauthorized use is “transformative,” that is, whether the appropriated material is the basis for a new or altered work (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 1994). The transformativity test essentially constitutes an inquiry into whether the unauthorized use is a socially valuable use, at least in the dimension of originality. Uses that produce new works are favored; presumably if the goal of the use is simply to re-cycle or re-use the existing work, society is gaining little, and the courts assume that the appropriator could just as well seek the owner’s permission.

It is unclear how often the use of cultural icons, in a situation such as the Uru diaspora, will fit the transformativity test, as the test makes assumptions about unauthorized uses that are orthogonal to cultural or community uses. In some cases an image or motif will be incorporated into a new design or graphic representation, but just as often it will reproduce the initial image from which it was drawn. Indeed the diaspora uses may be intended to reproduce the previous image as faithfully as possible.

Novelty is not at all the point of such takings, but fidelity. The goal in appropriation of a cultural icon is frequently not to transform it into something new, but rather to preserve its existing social meaning, even in a new context.

4.2. NATURE OF THE COPYRIGHTED WORK Neither is the second fair use factor likely to favor diaspora uses. Certain types of works receive “thin” or minimal copyright protection if the expressive content is sparse, and the majority of the content is unprotectable under copyright. For example, the copyright protection for factual compilations is typically “thin,” as the facts themselves cannot be protected by copyright, but only their original selection and arrangement.

Unauthorized use of minimally expressive works is more likely to be fair, as there is less protectable expression. More creative, expressive works receive more robust copyright protection, and so are reciprocally less amenable to fair uses.

The images taken in the Uru situation are not factual or minimally expressive; quite the contrary, they are likely to be creative and original in the sense of copyright law – that is, they originate with their authors. The images are not factual; they do not depict or collect indicia about the state of the world (Durham, 2001). They are largely the product of the originator’s imagination. Consequently, they are likely to receive full copyright protection, militating against a determination of fair use.

4.3. AMOUNT AND SUBSTANTIALITY USED Assessing the weight of the portion taken from the copyrighted work presents a problem in defining the work in question. As indicated above, an audiovisual work like a computer game comprises a constellation of individual copyrighted works, as well as constituting a copyrighted work in total. Thus, it is difficult to assess what the work at issue may be for purposes of fair use; the appropriation may be fractional or total, depending on the quantum chosen for analysis. For the most part, players in the Uru diaspora did not take the entire audiovisual work – although eventually they ran the full game on private servers, this was done with the acquiescence, and perhaps the formal

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permission, of the game publisher. Rather, players tended to appropriate particular images from the game for replication in other virtual worlds. One might argue that the relevant work is the game as a whole, and lifting a discrete image out of the entire game constitutes a minimal taking. On the other hand, the image itself may be considered a copyrighted work, and taking that image could constitute taking that work in its entirety.

Courts have also taken into account the qualitative dimension, rather than the quantitative dimension, of unauthorized takings for fair use. This type of scrutiny recognizes that different portions of a work have different degrees of significance, regardless of the amount of material. Even if the quantum of material taken from the copyrighted work is small, it may be that the material taken constitutes the “heart” or essential aspect of the work (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 1985). Unauthorized taking of essential material may be more intrusive on the rights of the copyright holder than would be a more extensive unauthorized taking of nonessential material. In such cases, even a relatively small taking may disfavor fair use.

Here again, when considering the qualitative aspects of this fair use factor in the Uru diaspora, the analysis may turn on the definition of the work under consideration.

If the work at issue is the Uru game as a whole, then the copying of certain culturally evocative images or motifs hardly seems to go to the heart of the work. Certainly the players who were relocating to new servers were consciously trying to reproduce the “essence” of the game they had left, but this is probably not the kind of core feature that the fair use test is intended to assay; it is looking rather for the unauthorized taking of some feature that gives the copyrighted work its value. The images of buildings or architectural motifs that migrated with the Uru diaspora are probably not core features of the Uru game in this sense.

However, the analysis likely changes if the focus moves from the audiovisual work of the game to the individual components of the game, which constitute copyrightable works in their own right. If the works at issue are the particular images that comprise the visual features of the game, not only does the scale of the fair use comparison change, but perhaps also the level of significance for a given taking. A particular motif from an Uru image, copied to Second Life or elsewhere, might well constitute the “heart” or gist of that particular image, even if it were not the “heart” of the game as a whole.

4.4. EFFECT ON THE MARKET The final statutory factor in the fair use analysis is the impact of the unauthorized taking on the market for the copyrighted work. Here again, the definition of the work at issue is critical, as is the definition of the market. Courts have in some cases tended -somewhat tautologically -- to define the market in question for this factor as the market for licensing the portion taken (American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 1994).

And, of course, it follows from this definition that an unauthorized taking of material necessarily displaces sales in the market for licensing of that particular material, making damage to the market something of a foregone conclusion. This seemingly inevitable outcome is somewhat ameliorated by consideration of whether a mechanism exists to facilitate licensing in such a market – whether there exists a clearing house or intermediary or set of commercial practices that would allow potential licensees to find

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and negotiate with the copyright holder (Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc., 1996).

On the one hand, it might be argued that the appropriation of content from the Uru game is likely to have minimal impact on the market for the game. In the diaspora, there seems to be no market for the game; players appropriated the images because the market failed. Players would clearly have preferred to continue playing the original game were it available; images from the game were transferred to other venues only because the original was unavailable. No real mechanism is apparent by which former players could instead have licensed the game or its contents.

At the same time, one can imagine scenarios in which the migration of the Uru content could be said to damage the actual or potential market for subscriptions to the game. As described above, ownership and control of the game passed through several different hands, with repeated attempts to re-launch the authorized version of the game.

This is not particularly unusual; game providers come and go; they sometimes experience bankruptcies, and the assets of the company, including its content may well be acquired by a new owner. When a new owner attempts to re-launch a defunct game, or to attract players to refurbished content, the presence of copied alternates in other venues might prove a deterrent to success of the re-launch. Removal of copied content from Second Life or similar diaspora sites, perhaps under threat of legal liability, might encourage former players to return to the authorized version of the game if it becomes available once more.

5. Conclusion In the actual Uru diaspora, the game publisher who holds the copyright to the appropriated content has been surprisingly indifferent to the unauthorized uses by former players (Pearce, 2010). But it need not have been, and other copyright owners in other situations likely would not be, as has been demonstrated in the case of on-line appropriation of copyrighted film and broadcast media content by fan communities (Consalvo, 2003). Additionally, the Terms of Service for most virtual worlds forbids infringing activity; to the extent that the unauthorized uses of Uru graphics in Second Life and other diaspora communities constitute infringement, the Uru migrants could be barred from their new places of residence for ToS violations (Burk, 2010b).

The analysis offered here suggests that even the most flexible exception to copyright, the American fair use provisions, offers little hope of validation for unauthorized cultural uses of virtual world materials. Thus, adoption of iconic graphic elements by on-line gaming communities presents something of a â&#x20AC;&#x153;Catch-22â&#x20AC;? situation.

To the extent that the success of multiplayer games depends upon social networking, that network is necessarily built upon the sounds, graphics, and software that constitute the game, all of which are the subject of copyright. Yet this detailed analysis of the disposition of cultural icons in the Uru diaspora demonstrates the antipathy of copyright law to such unauthorized uses of material found in MMORPGs and similar virtual environments. The use of the iconic components of the game by the communities that are built upon those elements is restricted under the current copyright regime.

Commentators have argued in favor of recognition of such communal and cultural uses

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of copyrighted works (Chander and Sunder 2007) but the legal system has yet to adopt such arguments.

References 17. U.S.C. ยง 103 (2006).

17. U.S.C. ยง 107 (2006).

American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 60F.3d 319 (2d Cir. 1994).

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.

Burk, D. L. (2010a). Copyright and Paratext in On-Line Gaming. In C. Wankel and S. Malleck (Eds), Emerging Ethical Issues of Life In Virtual Worlds (pp.33-53). Information Age Publishing.

Burk, D. L. (2010b) Authorization and Governance in Virtual Worlds, First Monday, 15(5) http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2967/2527.

Burk, D. L. (2005). Electronic Gaming and the Ethics of Information Ownership. International Review of Information Ethics 4, 39-45 http://www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/004/burk.pdf Burk, D. L. (2004). Legal Consequences of the Cyberspatial Metaphor. In M, Consalvo et. al., Internet Research Annual: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, 2000- 2002 Vol. I. (pp.17-24). New York: Peter Lang.

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994).

Chander A. and Sunder M., (2007). Everyone's a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of 'Mary Sue' Fan Fiction as Fair Use, California Law Review 95, 597-625.

Consalvo, M. (2003) Cyber-Slaying Media Fans: Code, Digital Poaching, and Corporate Control of the Internet. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 27, 67-86.

Durham, A. (2001) Speaking of the World: Fact, Opinion, and the Originality Standard in Copyright, Arizona State Law Journal, 33, 791.

Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985).

Lastowka, G. (2010). Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lemley, M. (1997). Dealing With Overlapping Copyrights on the Internet. University of Dayton Law Review, 22, 547-86.

Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press.

Nardi, B.A. (2010). My Life As A Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of Play, Emergent Cultures in MultiPlayer Games and Vitual Worlds. Boston: MIT Press.

Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996).

Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tushnet, R. (2007). Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author. In J. Gray, C. Sandvoss, & C.L. Harrington (eds.) Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. (pp.60-71). New York: New York University Press.

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2004). The Anarchist in the Library: how the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system. New York: Basic Books.

Yen, A.C. (2006). Third-Party Copyright Liability After Grokster. Minnesota Law Review 91, 184-240.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 478-492.

ROBOTS AND PRIVACY IN JAPANESE, THAI AND CHINESE CULTURES Discussions on Robots and Privacy as Topics of Intercultural Information Ethics in ‘Far East’

MAKOTO NAKADA University of Tsukuba Tennoudai1-1-1, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki, 305-8571 Japan

Abstract. In this paper, I will analyze ‘cultural meanings and values’

associated with some of the important IIE(intercultural information ethics) topics in ‘Far East, ’i.e. ‘human and robot interaction(HRI)’ and ‘privacy.’ By focusing on these relatively newly emerging topics in ‘Far East,’ I will attempt to make the cultural Ba (locus/place where different meanings of things, events, people’s experiences come together; or frameworks for understanding meanings of phenomena and events) visible through analysis of research data done in Japan, Thailand and China in the past several years. The research data shown in this paper suggest that we can’t understand people’s attitudes toward robots and privacy in ‘Far East’ without taking into consideration people’s broader views on ‘what is a good life?’ and ‘what is a virtuous life?’

1. Introduction ‘Human-robot-interaction (HRI)’ and ‘privacy’ in the information era are among the most important topics in IE (information ethics) or IIE(intercultural information ethics) in at least ‘Far West.’ A lot of scholars and authors as well as journalists are eagerly engaged in discussions on these topics in Europe or the USA. According to Veruggio and Operto, “the name Roboethics was officially proposed during the First International Symposium of Roboethics (Sanremo, Jan/Feb. 2004), and rapidly showed its potential (Veruggio and Operto, 2006).” In fact, so far as I took a look at the related papers or journals, I have to agree with Veruggio and Operto with regard to importance and necessities of discussions in this new field. But with a few exceptional cases, as far as I know, this topic has been being discussed mainly by ‘Western’ scholars. For example, as Kitano says, Japanese scholars in robotics tend to ‘focus on enhancing the mechanical functionality with having little ethical discussion on the usage of robots, while in the West, the robotists often discuss the social and ethical problems for applying robots to human societies (Kitano,2006).’ The tendency

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regarding poverty of discussions on ‘HRI’ seems to be similar in other societies and cultures in ‘Far East.’

Concerning the other topic, ‘privacy,’ the situation is somewhat better in ‘Far East,’ compared to ‘Robots.’ But generally speaking, in this case too, the discussions are very limited within small groups of scholars, in particular, in the case of discussions on privacy grounded on our(their) own cultural perspectives. The following discussions are among these exceptional cases.

In one of his papers on IIE in ‘Far East,’ Rafael Capurro has attempted to deal with the distinction between direct and indirect speech in the “Far East” and the “Far West (Capurro, 2010).” (‘Far West’ is a term suggested by the French sinologist François Jullien.) Capurro insists in this paper and in other papers about comparison of ‘Far West’ and ‘Far East’ (for example, Nakada and Capurro, 2009; Capurro, 2005) that we can’t fully understand to what extent people in ‘Far West’ and ‘Far East’ are able to communicate with each other using the same terms ‘privacy,’ ‘public and private,’ unless we see the whole communication structures including human relations, political structures, people’s ways of life and the sense of ‘what is a good life?’ Even in ‘Western’ cultures, people might not be aware of the fact that ‘the tension between the public and the private is deeply rooted in the Greek distinction between oikos and polis but conceived from a modern perspective.’ Or they might not be aware of the distinction between ‘sphere of intimacy’ and ‘the private sphere’ described by Hanna Arendt (Arendt, 1983). This might mean that people in ‘Far West’ don’t know the complex meanings of privacy in which they are involved in their every day life.

Similarly, ‘Eastern’ people might not be aware of complex of meanings regarding to ‘privacy’ in Japan until they (or we Japanese ourselves too) know the contradictory meanings of Watakusi combined with privacy. Watakusi is often regarded as something or some realm with negative meanings such as egoism, selfishness, unfairness. But at the same time, in different situations, Watakusi is regarded as something leading to inner values or emotional meanings (Nakada and Capurro, 2009; Capurro, 2005). This tension of Watakusi goes back to the Kokugaku tradition in the feudalistic era of Tokugawa or even to the era of Heian when ‘the Tale of the Genji’ was written (Morse, 1974). (Kokugaku is an indigenous discipline in Japan born in Tokugawa Era the purpose of which is to look back to Japan’s own traditional cultural origins apart from Chinese influence.)

Capurro’s discussions are important in the sense that we need to see the cultural and historical structures in order to know the meanings of ‘privacy’ and ‘public and private’ in ‘Far East’ as well as in ‘Far West.’

Charles Ess is another exception of scholars in the ‘West’ who show strong interest in comparison of ‘East’ and ‘West.’ While examining the differences between ‘East’ and ‘West’ regarding the meanings of privacy and the related ethical topics, he seeks to find out common points on which people in ‘East’ and ‘West’ as well can see the presuppositions of understanding their differences and similarity. For example, he focus on the potentiality of ethical pluralism between contemporary Western ethics and Confucian thought or he tries to look into individualism and collectivism traditions strongly determining the directions of discussions on privacy in ‘East’ and ‘West’ (Ess, 2005; 2006).

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Lü Yao-huai’s discussions on people’s ways of understanding of privacy in China, which have changed dramatically since the 1980s, follow the line or frameworks of discussions set by Charles Ess, Soraj Hongladarom and Krisana Kitiyadisai putting emphasis on subjects of ‘individualism and collectivism’ and ‘privacy as instrumental goods or intrinsic goods’ in ‘Eastern’ cultural surroundings.

Lü says that ‘contemporary notions of privacy in China’ is characterized by ‘a dialectical synthesis’ of traditional Chinese emphases on the family, the state, collectivism and Western emphases on individual rights. In this situation, in China today, privacy, Lü says, is justified as an instrumental good, rather than an intrinsic good (Lü, 2005).

Reflecting on the context of Thai culture in which people have been wondering of merits and demerits of introduction of a digital national identification card into Thailand with no specific law protecting personal information, Soraj Hongladarom tries to describe how their own cultural tradition, in particular, Buddhism, more specifically Buddhism tradition under influence by Nagarjuna, the founder of the Mahah y na Buddhism, and Nagasena, explicitly and implicitly determines the direction of debate on privacy in Thailand. Hongladarom says that from an absolute Buddhistic standpoint, the distinction between subject and object, on which the discussions on privacy in ‘West’ rest, has no meaning any more but at the same time Thai people don’t reject the idea of privacy in their culture. They believe that the concept of privacy is important to develop and keep democracy. In this sense, in Thai culture, privacy has an instrumental value rather than an intrinsic value (Hongladarom, 2007).

Krisana Kitiyadisai puts emphasis on Buddhistic culture in Thailand and on the views on privacy reflecting Buddhism as well as other cultural tradition in Thailand including Confucian values and the feudal heritage of Thai society. According to Kitiyadisai’s explanation, we have to see these cultural complexities in order to understand the meanings of discussions on privacy in Thailand. In the Thai culture which is based on consensual collectivism and non-confrontation, people are always concerned about keeping and losing face (dignity of self tied to face). Under such circumstances, the concepts of privacy helps people with avoiding to lose their face because, in this case, ‘privacy’ works as the right of ‘non-interference’ to keep other people away from one’s face-related-matters as well as one’s appropriate who-status.

Along with feudalistic tradition, Buddhism is important too. According to Kitiyadisai, in Buddhism, human rights are not intrinsic to human individuals but are necessary for conducting a virtuous human existence (Kitiyadisai, 2005). In this sense, if my understanding is correct, privacy in Thailand lies in-between instrumental values and intrinsic values.

2. Robots and Privacy in Ba as Cultural Contexts or Locus 2.1. HRI AND PRIVACY IN ‘FAR EAST’ As I mentioned above, the discussions on HRI (human-robot-interaction) and privacy in ‘Far East’ are characterized by scarcity of authors and scholars being engaged in these discussions. This might be explained in many ways like the one of Paolo Dario. He said that religious and philosophical differences have influenced the development of

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anthropomorphic machines in Europe and in Japan. In ‘Western’ cultures with JudeoChristian religious tradition, creating human-like machines is a daring act against the God, as God created the human kind in his shape (Dario, 2005). Lack of this sort of religious and cultural reluctance might influence the need for ethical discussions on robots in ‘Far East.’

Or we might take into consideration the possibility of Eastern people’s unawareness of newly emerging concepts or schemata in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, i.e. ‘connectionism,’ ‘oscillation,’ ‘resonance’ and so on. At least in Japan, as I wrote somewhere else (Nakada, 2011), the ‘out-of-date’ frameworks on robots, artificial intelligence and information studies in the 1970s or 1980s,which are based on ‘symbolism,’ ‘classical symbolism’ or ‘computationalism,’ have strongly influenced the scarcity of ethical discussions on ‘autonomous’ robots in Japan.

And concerning privacy, ‘Eastern’ orientation to collectivism rather than individualism might influence people’s relatively weaker interest in the discussions on privacy in ‘Far East.’

2.2. BA AS POTENTIAL LOCUS FOR IIE IN ‘FAR EAST’ But this (scarcity of discussions on HRI and privacy) doesn’t mean that people in ‘Far East’ live in a different world where there are no serious ethical problems. On the other hand, as the cases of Paro, Aibo, Asimo suggest, people in ‘Far East’ already live in the world where ‘autonomous’ robots play an important role. And people’s preference for CMC, Twitter, Blogs and SNS has clearly entangled people of ‘Far East’ in potentially serious ethical problems regarding ICTs and CMC. And as I have shown with my previous research data on Japanese people’s awareness of ethical and ontological issues on disasters, privacy, robots, business ethics, good ways of life and concerns for important social problems, we can think that in ‘Far East,’ at least in Japan, there is a potential Ba (place, locus) for discussions on important IIE topics. In my view, Ba is the place or locus where people are motivated by orientation to virtuous life, the pursuit for the ideal aims of life, searching for the answers to ‘what are the meanings of our better life?’ In addition, Ba is the place where things and various material meanings including means for communication are interpreted and evaluated by humans. In Japanese Ba or cultural context(s), mobile phones are considered to be as means for communication strongly characterized by phatic function (the term used by Roman Jakobson) (see: Nakada and Capurro, 2009).

In this sense, Ba is the place where virtue, people’s ways of life, things and interpretations of things come together.

Originally, Ba (Basho) is one of the central topics for Japanese scholars and authors who seek to find out a philosophical, theoretical and ontological basis for discussions beyond the limits of subject-object-separated-world views. In our Japanese culture, there is a tendency to urge people to look for existential or ontological criteria for understanding of better life and of meanings of this world, in spite of its highly developed industries, technology, science and social systems. Thoughts of Mu (nothingness), oneness and Ba are considered to be related to these criteria by various scholars and authors.

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For example, Yujiro Nakamura tries to urge us to turn our eyes to thoughts of Mu and oneness. According to Nakamura, Mu is not mere emptiness but as a source of beings (Yu) on which articulations of beings are founded. Nakamura insists that oneness of Mu and Yu (beings or Being), or oneness of subjects and objects, oneness of events (Koto) and words (Koto=Gen) needs Ba (or Basho) (Place, Field) where these things (Mono), meanings, beings come together (Nakamura, 2001). (Basyo is the term used by Kitaro Nishida.) Koto and Mono are used by Bin Kimura, a Japanese psychiatrist who is influenced by Kitaro Nishida, Zen-Buddhism and Heidegger.

Kimura tries to overcome the limitations of subject-object-separated-world views by saying that we ourselves lie in-between Mono and Koto (Kimura, 1975).

At first glance, Ba might be considered to come from pre-modern and non-rational ways of thinking. But the recent tendency of studies and researches on robotics and artificial intelligence shows us that Ba, even if we don’t use this term itself, is latently useful. For example, Brooks’ robots’ ‘autonomy’ depends on the process or mechanism of interdependency of modules or parts and this interdependency needs Ba or place in which a certain sort of environment-adaptive function of robots is made possible. These environment-adaptive-functions of robots can be explained by the terms such as ‘resonance,’ ‘oscillation,’ ‘entrainment’ (and so on) of modules or functions. In the case of artificial intelligence too, a set of networked artificial neurons need Ba where interdependency of these artificial neurons are possible. In this sense, ‘connectionism’ can’t be separated from Ba (see Nakada, 2011).

And as I discussed somewhere else (Nakada, 2011), ‘intention’ and ‘intentionality’ (these terms are used in Deborah Johnson’s papers) might be incorporated into robots through Ba (Johnson, 2006; Johnson and Miller, 2008).

If we can interpret the meanings of Ba from broader perspectives which are not confined to Japanese cultural perspectives, Ba might be considered to be potential locus in which people in ‘Far East’ can discuss ethical and ontological topics or in which people’s understanding of HRI and privacy come together with their ethical, critical and existential understanding of life. In fact, if we follow Hongladarom, Buddhistic tradition in Thai culture suggests people that ‘privacy’ has to (can) be interpreted on the views about ‘what our life means in this transient world and also in the other ‘real’ world?’

Concerning Mu, we know that Mu comes from at least partly from thoughts of Lao-tse and Zhuangzi. In this sense, Ba might (can) be seen from broader cultural perspectives potentially spreading out through ‘Eastern’ cultures.

In the following sections, we will see the findings of our research surveys done in Japan, Thailand and China in the past several years. As the findings of the following tables show, although it is not clear to what extent people in ‘Far East’ are aware of these findings, we can conclude that Ba works as a locus or a set of criteria for understanding meanings of HRI and privacy in different cultures in ‘Far East.’

3. Privacy and Robots in Japanese, Thai and Chinese ultural contexts (Ba) In the following passages we will see the findings of our 4 researches conducted in 2010, 2011 and 2012 (along with our other past researches for the purpose of comparison) in Japan, Thailand and China. The purposes of these researches are to find

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out different cultural Ba in ‘Far East’ and the relations between people’s Ba-relatedviews and IIE-related-views (robots and privacy).

These researches are as follows. (1) 2011HG: Research done in Japan from August 19 to August 21, 2011. The respondents are 744 men and women with age 2544. The respondents (Internet users living in Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures) were selected by a research company in Japan. This survey was designed as quota sampling, and ratios of gender and age were quoted from the official statistical report of the Japanese government about the Internet users in 2010 in Japan. (2) 2010CG: Research done in China from August 9 to August 17, 2010. The respondents are 481 men and women living in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. This survey was designed as quota sampling, and ratios of gender and age were quoted from the official statistical report of the Chinese government about the Internet users in 2010 in China. (3) 2010CS: Research done in China in 2010. The 367 respondents are Chinese university students, Guangdong College of Industry and Commerce (Guangzhou, Guangdong Province) and Jishou University (Jishou, Hunan Province). (4): 2012TS: Research done in Thailand in January, 2012. The respondents are 141 students studying in Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. This survey was done with help from Soraji Hongladarom of Chulalongkorn University. This research in Thailand was done on the limited samples of Thai students. But this research is considered to be a useful step to the comparison of people’s attitudes in ‘Far East’ regarding HRI and privacy-related topics. (Other research shown in the following tables was done by Nakada and his colleagues in Japan.)

In my view, Japanese of today live in two different realms or two different aspects of world/society. If we use the term described in the sections above, we can say that Japanese people of today live in two different Ba. According to my interpretation, one of these Ba is characterized by strong influence by modernized, advanced, rationalized, individualized and Westernized ways of life. And another is characterized by orientation to more traditional, indigenous and non-rational (i.e. virtuous life is more important than income, advancement in life regarding occupation and social status or personal benefits gained through rational judgment) life. We might call the former ‘rationalized life-oriented-Ba’ and the latter ‘virtuous life-oriented-Ba.’ Or more simply, ‘rationalized Ba’ and ‘virtuous Ba.’ We have to add additional explanation to the latter, ‘virtuous Ba.’ In traditional ways of life in ‘Far East,’ at least in Japan, in many cases, virtue, dignity, ascetic attitudes, righteous soul and emotional/aesthetic sensitivity to this world are more important than modernized, advanced, rationalized, individualized and Westernized ways of life. Or we might say that people in Japan live in a life world characterized by tension between modernized, rationalized, and Westernized ways of life and virtuous, ascetic and aesthetic ways of life.

In Japanese, we have a proverb, ‘Wakon and Yousai.’ Wa means traditional Japanese ways. Kon means mind, spirit or righteous soul. You means Western. Sai means intelligence. So ‘Wakon and Yousai’ means ‘we need Western intelligence but we have to keep our original and righteous soul.’ This ‘righteous soul’ is based on “nation’s past righteous good deed,” “lessons deriving from ‘our past cultural, political, historical, and religious experiences related with Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Kokugaku, thoughts of Lao-tse and Zhuangzi, Bushido (moral and ethics of Samurai),

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M. NAKADA

traditional views on nature, orientation to solidarity and so on,’” and also “our past shared emotional sensitivity to this world associated with our literature, poems, essays such as ‘The Tale of the Genji.’ I think that ‘virtuous Ba’ is full of meanings and interpretations of these ethical, existential, ascetic and aesthetic ways of life. In addition, in my view, important social problems including HRI and privacy, which are evaluated with criteria related to ‘rationalized Ba’ on one hand, are almost always interpreted by the measurement grounded on ‘virtuous Ba’ on the other hand.

According to my previous research in Japan, these frameworks for understanding or hypothesis about this dualism, ‘rationalized Ba’ and ‘virtuous Ba’ have been proved to be fundamentally correct (see Nakada, 2009; 2010). And if my understanding is correct, this dichotomy is not confined to Japanese culture. People in ‘Far East’ share the heritage of cultures, thoughts as well as the past memories coming from encounter with advanced (at least with regard to ‘Western intelligence’), rationalized, individualized ways of life in ‘Far West.’ In this sense, we can think that people in ‘Far East’ share at least some aspects of traditional and virtuous Ba and also the experiences of conflict arising from different Ba(s).

The following table (Table 1), the one mainly associated with ‘virtuous ways of life,’ shows that this interpretation is fundamentally acceptable. The items or statements shown in Table 1 are originally thought out for the research about Japanese respondents.

But as this table shows, the agreement of the importance of ‘virtuous ways of life’ is not confined to Japanese respondents. The range of the respondents in Thailand is limited.

So we have to be careful not to draw too many implications from this data, but at least we can say that people in ‘Far East’ including Thailand might be considered to share a certain aspect of ‘virtuous ways of life.’ It is surprising to know that people’s views on ‘virtuous ways of life’ are very similar in ‘Far East.’

Table 1. Sympathy with ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-related meanings in ‘Far East’ 1995G (Japan)

2000G (Japan)

2008G (Japan)

2010S (Japan)

2011G (Japan)

2010CG (China)

2010TS (Thailand)

Distance from nature

73.6%

-

79.8

77.0

78.0

90.6

91.5

Honest poverty Destiny Denial of natural science

83.7 84.4

81.5 79.0

84.0 81.2

84.7 89.5

87.0 82.4

86.2 81.5

54.8 52.1

88.5

88.3

86.2

89.1

88.2

94.2

89.4

Criticism of selfishness

85.5

88.3

90.2

62.8

80.3

93.8

-

Powerlessness

71.9

64.8

73.4

62.9

77.8

-

-

73.3

65.6

71.0

50.8

72.7

83.8

-

-

68.1

77.2

82.3

74.3

83.4

95.0

Scourge from heaven

62.7

49.5

-

-

-

-

12.7

Warnings from heaven

-

-

67.4

38.1

60.2

81.7

19.7

Superficial cheerfulness Belief in kindness

ROBOTS AND PRIVACY IN JAPANESE, THAI AND CHINESE CULTURES

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1) Table 1 shows the percentages of the respondents who said ‘agree or somewhat agree’ to ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-related meanings. These statements are: “Within our modern lifestyles, people have become too distant from nature”(Distance from nature); “People will become corrupt if they become too rich”(Honest poverty); “People have a certain destiny, no matter what form it takes”(Destiny); “In our world, there are many things that cannot be explained by science”(Denial of natural science); “There are too many people in developed countries (or Japan)(or China)(or Thailand) today who are concerned only with themselves” (Criticism of selfishness ); “In today’s world, people are helpless if they are (individually) left to themselves” (Powerlessness); “In today’s world, what seems cheerful and enjoyable is really only superficial” (Superficial cheerfulness); “Doing your best for other people is good for you” (Belief in kindness); “The frequent occurrence of natural disasters is due to a scourge from heaven” (Scourge from heaven); “Occurrences of huge and disastrous natural disasters can be interpreted as warnings from heaven to people”(Warnings from heaven).

2) Figures in bold type indicate the items to which over 50% respondents showed affirmative answers

The following tables (Table 2, 3, 4 and 5) show people’s views on robots and privacy in ‘Far East.’ (The original questionnaires include some items which don’t deal with privacy and robots directly. But in my view, these are privacy-related- or robotrelated-items in a broader sense.) As these figures show, people in ‘Far East’ have various views on robots and privacy. It is not clear whether ‘encountering’ with my questions provides them with chances to think about these problems or whether these views lie in their minds in a latent way. But it is important to find that people in ‘Far East’ can, at least potentially, see these problems from ethical and critical perspectives.

Generally speaking, Chinese respondents tend to show their attitudes toward these problems in a clear way. Japanese respondents tend to show relatively vague attitudes compared to Chinese respondents. But on the other hand it is very interesting that Japanese respondents show very strong attitudes toward ‘The earth, mountains, rivers are expected to be a subject of affection or consideration, even though they have no life’ and ‘When our houses are destroyed by some sad and hard accidents like natural disasters, we feel that we lose our own part.’ This might be a typical case of Japanese emotional sensitivity to nature and Mono (things).

Table 2. Views on robots in ‘Far East’ (What are your thoughts about various views on robots shown in the following list?)

To leave handicapped or elderly persons in the care of robots worsens isolation of them from societies even though this idea seems to be appropriate at first glance It is very natural when children sympathy or some kind of affection towards virtual creatures like Tamagotchi.

2008 G (Japan)

2010S (Japan)

42.2%

58.6

33.8

62.4

2011 HG (Japan)

2010 CG (China)

2010 CS (China)

2012 TS (Thailand)

-

83.5

88.2

54.2

-

81.3

78.8

-

486

Robots should be given similar rights in the future as fetuses or patients in a coma without consciousness or awareness.

Robots are expected to be a subject of affection or consideration in the future just as the earth, mountains, rivers are treated so, even though they have no life.

To leave children in the care of robots would be better than to leave them alone without any care.

To provide robots with capability of expression of their emotions such as pains would be good in order to prevent (avoid) cruelty or maltreatment to them. .It is natural for some people to get mad when their avatars are insulted, because they feel that the avatars are part of themselves.

Friendly robots like pet robots for the purpose of human-robot communication are just fake because they have no real minds or feelings.

It is very natural when children show sympathy or some kind of affection towards robots without life just as they show sympathy towards characters of animated cartoons.

It would be very good to use robots as the purpose of education for children at schools in order to promote effects of education.

To use robots on the battlefields would be good because we can reduce the number of causalities of warfare.

To use robots on the battlefields and to have them kill human enemy soldiers would cause serious ethical problems.

To use robots to do domestic chores would be good because we can lesson the burdens of family members.

M. NAKADA

9.4

13.5

-

49.4

27.6

23.9

21.4

29.6

-

67.4

54.3

40.2

19.6

35.7

-

71.1

56.6

46.5

31.4

27.7

-

65.3

66.6

-

25.8

32.5

-

-

64.1

-

22.6

30.7

-

-

43.4

-

-

40.1

-

-

79.5

36.4

41.3

40.9

61.6

36.2

57.7

14.6

27.6

-

74.3

49.8

-

58.3

-

-

64.1

85.8

-

-

-

-

40.2

-

44.9

1) The percentages are added figures of ‘strongly agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’. 2) Figures in bold type indicate the items to which over 50% respondents showed affirmative answers.

ROBOTS AND PRIVACY IN JAPANESE, THAI AND CHINESE CULTURES

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Table 3. Views on robots in ‘Far East’ (Continuation of Table 2) (Data: 2011HG) 2011 HG (Japan) The earth, mountains, rivers are expected to be a subject of affection or consideration, even though they have no life.

To leave elderly persons in the care of robots might be considered to be helpful, but at the same time we feel that those elderly people are pitiful with help by machines.

To leave children in the care of automatized robots with monitoring devices would be better than to leave them alone without any care.

When our houses are destroyed by some sad and hard accidents like natural disasters, we feel that we lose our own part.

To leave children in the care of human teachers would be better than to leave them in the care of robots, even if the teachers have some problems regarding knowledge and personality.

We can’t help loving cute pet robots even if we know they are machines.

We feel that robots, even though they have no life, should be protected against human’s arbitrary destruction, because they are made with earnest care.

We should do similar requiem services for broken robots and computers just as Japanese requiem service for broken needles.

Two types of mistakes are completely different from each other: robots soldiers might kill civilians on the battlefield by mistake; human soldiers might kill civilians on the battlefield by mistake .

The plan to use automatized robots on the battlefields and to have them kill human enemy soldiers make me feel some sort of unpleasantness.

72.3 % 55.9 33.2 76.1 34.1 43.3 53.2 40.7 41.2 68.4

1) The percentages are added figures of ‘strongly agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’. 2) Figures in bold type indicate the items to which over 50% respondents showed affirmative answers.

Table 4. Views on privacy in ‘Far East’ (What are your thoughts about various views on privacy shown in the following list?)

Watching people through crimeprevention-camera (security camera) in the streets is very important to keep public order.

Collecting someone’s personal information through search engine like Google without his/her being aware of it is a controversial issue because this information is used without permission.

To ask someone about his/her income might be regarded as rudeness (violation of privacy) even among school(personal)friends.

Respect for privacy is among the most important presuppositions for

2008G (Japan)

2010S (Japan)

55.4%

50.6

64.4

66.6

2010CG (China)

2010 CS (China)

2012 TS (Thailand)

-

76.1

55.8

50.7

-

86.0

81.2

55.7

2011 HG (Japan)

-

-

-

83.4

63.9

39.5

-

-

-

90.4

93.9

-

488

building developed and civilized society and we should place greater importance on this than ever.

Even if there is no danger for privacy-violation, to show a photo of one’s face in SNS or blogs is a matter associated with a feeling of reluctance.

I have no secrets to my parents and I can tell them everything from my boy (girl) friend to my friendship.

Too much respect for personal privacy might not harmonize well with virtues in collective life culture which emphasizes shame, modesty, consideration for others.

When we worry too much about privacy, we can’t honestly and frankly talk about matters with our good friends.

When the newspapers or TV report on crimes, we want to know detailed reports on suspects’ or culprits’ occupations, human relations, life history or personality in order to know the meaning of the incidents.

When the newspapers or TV report on serious crimes like homicide, we want to know detailed reports on victims’ occupations, human relations, life history or personality in order to know the meaning of the incidents.

Photos or real names of culprits of crimes under 20 years old which are sometimes presented through the reports of mass media might be important information in some cases, although these items of information are controversial.

To disclose part of my afflictions of illness or failure to my friends sometimes makes our relations closer and better than to talk about my good job and success.

M. NAKADA

-

-

75.2

-

-

87.1

34.0

-

-

-

40.0

-

39.6

34.4

43.1

52.6

-

40.8

48.2

60.4

54.0

72.0

-

-

-

-

-

66.2

76.7

45.9

52.1

-

-

31.2

39.4

45.2

27.6

-

-

46.4

-

46.8

64.8

44.2

79.6

52.3

61.9

1) The percentages are added figures of ‘strongly agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’. 2) Figures in bold type indicate the items to which over 50% respondents showed affirmative answers.

ROBOTS AND PRIVACY IN JAPANESE, THAI AND CHINESE CULTURES

489

Table 5. Views on privacy in ‘Far East’ (Continuation of Table 2) (Data: 2011HG) 2011HG(Japan)

Watching people through crime-prevention-camera (security camera) in the streets is very unpleasant even though this might be important to keep public order.

I don’t understand why Chinese people do such things without reluctance to open one’s own photos of face on the Internet.

To bury the articles left by the victims as well as the cars in the ground in the railroad accident in China means loss for respects for the victims.

It is rather unpleasant that my family members or my friends use my own coffee cup without paying attention on my personal emotion.

When serious crimes occurs, I feel to know some detailed information on families and occupations of criminals and culprits in order to understand the meanings of crimes.

When I know the faces of criminals or culprits through the reports of the newspapers, TV or the Internet, I feel that I can understand the backgrounds of the incidents more clearly.

By posting on the Internet, I can understand my real feelings.

37.7% 58.7 77.4 49.5 52.9

25.8 22.2

1) The percentages are added figures of ‘strongly agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’. 2) Figures in bold type indicate the items to which over 50% respondents showed affirmative answers.

One of the most important findings about Japanese views on robots and privacy which we got through analysis on our past researches is the one that those views have strong or fairly strong correlations with people’s views on ‘virtuous ways of life’ (we called these ‘Seken-related views in my previous papers) (see Nakada, 2009). The following tables (Table 6, 7 and 8) show that these findings are not confined to Japanese cases. These tables show the ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-factors and Robotfactors as well as Privacy-factors. ‘Virtuous and ascetic life’-factors are factors which we can get by doing factor analysis (principal factor analysis, Varimax rotation) on the items indicated in Table 1. Similarly we can get ‘Robot-factors’ and ‘Privacy-factors’ by doing the same statistical methods on the items of Table 2, 3, 4 and 5. Table 6, 7and 8 show a very important finding that ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-factors are strongly or fairly strongly correlated with Robot-factors as well as with Privacy-factors. For example, in the case of Thai respondents, ‘Virtue 2 (denial of modern life)’ factor (which is one of the factors of ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-factors in Thailand) has statistically significant correlations with 4 robot and privacy factors. This means, in my interpretation, that these factors or these different (at least on the superficial level, people seem to have a variety of different views on virtuous and ascetic life as well as on privacy and robots) views in Japan, China and Thailand lie within similar frameworks for understanding various meanings of phenomena with which we encounter in this world. If we use our own term which I explained above, these findings show, if my understanding is correct, that people in ‘Far East’ live in a similar Ba or Ba(s) where people’s evaluation on ‘what is virtuous life?’ has a crucial role.

490

M. NAKADA

Table 6. Relations between ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-factors and Robot-factors as well as Privacy-factors (Data: 2011CG=China)

Virtue1 (criticism of modern life) Virtue2 (orientation to virtue)

Robot1 (rights and care for robots)

Robot2 (usefulness)

Privacy1 (collectivis m rather than privacy)

Privacy2 (concern about violation of privacy)

.181***

.272***

.211***

.347***

.353***

.219***

.257***

.328***

1)*** =p<0.001, **=p<0.01, *=p<0.05, ns= non (statistically) significant

Table 7. Relations between ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-factors and Robot-factors as well as Privacy-factors (Data: 2011HG=Japan)

Virtue1(orientatio n to virtuous life) Virtue2 (denial of modern life)

Robot2 (criticism of destructio n by robot)

Robot3 (criticis m of robot use)

Robot4 (empath y for nature)

Privacy 1 (truth beyond privacy)

Privacy2 (criticis m of railroad accident in China)

Privacy 4 (human relations beyond privacy)

.336***

.316***

.308***

.222***

.391***

.198***

.196***

.188***

.301***

.081*

.309***

.250***

1)*** =p<0.001, **=p<0.01, *=p<0.05, ns= non (statistically) significant

Table 8. Relations between ‘virtuous and ascetic life’-factors and Robot-factors as well as Privacy-factors (Data: 2012TS=Thailand)

Virtue1(nonrationalism) Virtue2(denial of modern life)

Robot1 (rights for robots)

Robot2 (positive attitudes toward teaching -robots)

Robot3 (children abuse through use of robots)

Privacy1 (collectivis m rather than privacy)

Privacy2 (concern about violation of privacy)

-.197*

ns

.186*

ns

.186*

ns

.218*

.184*

.218*

.184*

1)*** =p<0.001, **=p<0.01, *=p<0.05, ns= non (statistically) significant

ROBOTS AND PRIVACY IN JAPANESE, THAI AND CHINESE CULTURES

491

4. Conclusive Remarks As we have examined in this paper, it is clear that people in ‘Far East,’ at least, in Japan, China and Thailand, share some sort of attitudes toward ‘virtuous and ascetic life.’ And we have examined too that these attitudes toward or views on life interrelate with people’s views on robots as well as with their views on privacy. In my opinion, this means that people in ‘Far East’ live in similar cultural and existential contexts which might be called Ba, although it is still unclear how people in ‘Far East’ are aware of the roles of this/these Ba(s). I believe that the findings, which we could get through our empirical surveys, qualitative researches (we did a lot of interviews with Chinese people and Thai people to prepare our questionnaires) and theoretical thinking, are very important, because these findings seem to be the first ones in the field of researches in IIE, in particular, in IIE focusing on ethical problems in ‘Far East.’ But at the same time, I have to admit that this is only the first step to be followed by the researches in the future. Our next step, which we need in order to see this/these Ba(s) and also to see our minds associated with views on ‘virtuous and ascetic life,’ will be, I think, to look into the inner structures of Ba(s) in ‘Far East.’ We also have to see the relations among ‘virtuous life-oriented-Ba,’ ‘rationalized life-oriented-Ba’ and probably different Ba(s) emerging through the roles of technologies. We already know that our body (body schema) can encounter with tools (for example, see: Iriki et al., 2009; Introna, 2007) and that our body can be under influence by phenomena related with oscillation or CPG(a central pattern generator)(see: Nakada,2011). In this sense, we human beings might share some sort of Ba(s) with robots. Concerning privacy too, as the phenomena of ‘mirror neurons’ suggest, the interaction between humans through our body schema might bring forth newer and broader sight regarding privacy.

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M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 493-501.

PARENTS VIEWS AND RULES ABOUT TECHNOLOGY: AS TOLD BY THEIR MIDDLE SCHOOL CHILDREN IN HUNGARY AND INDIA KATHLEEN WEAVER, ANITA KOMLODI, JIEYU WANG, KARUNA JOSHI UMBC, Baltimore, USA AND BEATRIX SELLEI Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

Abstract. To help us explore parental attitudes towards and usage of technology, we interviewed students ages 10-15 in Hungary and India in focus groups regarding their technology use. This paper focuses on the preliminary results of these students’ perceptions of parental limitations on their technology use. Parents in both countries limited children’s technology use; however, there were differences in the way these limitations were defined and expressed among our participants. The students from Hungary stated that in many situations their parents have a negative attitude toward technology, however, they prescribed fewer rules and gave more freedom to their children to use the technology items discussed. In India, the students indicated that their parents thought technology was useful, a helpful tool, and spent time using technology with their children and in front of their children. Yet the Indian parents limited their children’s use of technology more than the Hungarian parents.

1. Introduction Girls and women are facing a multitude of challenges in the technology field. Clayton (2009) believed that gender stereotypes can influence girls’ choices and keep them away from choosing Information and Communication Technology as their occupations.

She indicated that mass media and educational practices reinforced these stereotypes.

Moreover, family factors, for example, parental views of technology, also impact children’s attitudes and behaviors towards technology. Family influences can impact children's attitude towards technology. Our study looked at parental limitations on children's technology use in two countries to explore any variation in how the parents in our study approached their children's technology use.

Recently researchers have found novel ways of studying the use of daily technology among teenagers, especially girls. For example, March and Fleuriot [1] used the combination of weblogs and interviews to collect data to study everyday life of

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teenage girls in the United States and United Kingdom, “how, when and why they use technology, and the relationship between technology and their privacy practices” (p.

107). The study found that the participants preferred using voice instead of text messaging and staying mobile during phone conversations so that their phone conversations would not be overheard.

In a study regarding children’s safety on the Internet, Rodes [2] observed and interviewed twelve households, totaling fourteen adults and nineteen children to observe issues of domestic privacy and security with their children on the Internet. The results showed that computer security was enforced in several ways, including rules, such as time restrictions, and monitoring children’s use of technology by staying in the same room as the child or installing a website blocking software.

However, there has been very little research regarding parents’ attitudes towards their child’s technology use, specifically rules and restrictions, from their child’s point of view. The purpose of this paper is to report the results regarding parental rules and restrictions and parental views as presented by their children from a larger study of technology use and attitudes by these children.

2. Methodology To accomplish the goals of this research we conducted focus group sessions interviewing middle school students from Hungary and India (see Table 1.)

Table 1. Participant information.

Country Hungary Female Hungary Male India Female India Male

Participants 17 18 18 17

Age Range 10-15 years 10-15 years 10-13 years 10-13 years

These two countries were selected for various reasons. India was selected as an important IT industry player and source of IT workforce. Hungary was selected to provide geographic diversity. The data reported in this paper will be compared to data previously collected in the US in future work. In addition, the inclusion of Hungary allowed for data collection on three continents insuring a degree of diversity, The students from Hungary belong to two parent, mid- to upper-class families, with both parents having received either a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. The families have two to eight children. These parents regularly use technology, higher income parents use the newest technology (phone, PC, etc.)

The students from India are also from two parent, middle to upper-class families; most participants’ parents have attended college and are familiar with technology. More than half of the families had multi-generational households, where grandparents also lived with these families or have joint families living in the same house. The parents purchase technologies such as computers, mobile phones, cameras, etc.

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Six focus groups in both Hungary and India were video and audio recorded at the local schools where the children attended. The monogender focus groups consisted of five to seven children and lasted approximately one-hour.

All of the above video and audio recordings were transcribed, and in the case of Hungary, translated. The textual data was then coded and cross-coded using a grounded theory approach, by a team of seven researchers. Transcripts were coded using an iterative, mixed-method approach. First, the data was coded based on a schema developed from the focus group guides. Then, open coding was conducted to identify major themes. Finally, a round of axial coding refined theme categories, developed additional dimensions within themes, or found additional themes categories.

Multiple coders were used to code a subset of the data so that at least two but no more than three coders analyzed a subset of data. Between each round of coding, the coders met to discuss their analysis so that all coders were aware of developing themes.

Each coder analyzed approximately 20% of the data.

2. Results and Discussion The data has shown very strong differences in how technology is perceived and rule sets imposed regarding the usage of technology between the two countries, with very little difference suggested by gender usage and perceptions. These students from Hungary felt their parents have a very negative attitude towards technology. The Indian students presented a positive attitude from their parents, providing examples of how technology has changed their lives and can be very helpful.

2.1. WHAT THEIR PARENTS THINK OF TECHNOLOGY During the focus group sessions, the students were asked the question: “What do your parents think of you using technology?” The Indian students provided three times as many positive answers as the Hungarian students (see Figure 1) including examples such as communication as a good use of technology. Over one third of the Hungarian students provided negative statements where most of the concerns from the parents related to their child completing their homework first, time spent with the family, and jealousy of the children’s technology skills.

Figure 1. Positive/negative statements about technology.

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2.1.1 Positive Comments When asked what their parents thought of technology, the students from India provided three times as many positive comments as the Hungarian students. These positive comments from the Indian students focused more on the technology, where as the Hungarian comments tended to focus on the person using the technology.

One girl from India provided the following statements: “They think technology has changed things which are used in our daily lives.” (IFFG4)

One boy from Hungary said: “…sometimes they say I am clever if I am able to do something all by myself.” (HFFB1)

2.1.2 Negative Comments More than 33% of the Hungarian students stated that their parents have a negative attitude toward technology. Three of the students specifically stated that their parents are concerned that using any type of technology will interfere with their or schoolwork.

One girl stated that most of the students she knows have computers in their bedroom and they spend excessive time on their computers rather than with their parents.

“They are not so happy when we are in our room all the time. We hardly talk to them.”

(HFFG5)

Four of the Hungarian boys explained that their parents are jealous of their technology knowledge and skills and they feel their parents envy them, which they feel gives their parents a negative attitude.

“It bothers them that I can do all the things they cannot do.” (HFFG6)

The Indian students also reported that their parents are concerned about technology getting in the way of them completing school assignments. Six of the Indian students mentioned that their parents want to make sure they do not misuse or become addicted to technology.

2.2. SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGIES AND PARENTS VIEWS Well over 50% of the Indian students responded with a general answer about technology, where the Hungarian students’ were more specific to technologies.

Computers and cell phones were both mentioned by almost 1/3 of the Hungarian students as technology that their parents had a negative attitude towards their child’s use of (see Figure 2.)

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Figure 2. Parents’ positive or negative views of specific technology.

Parents’ negative statements about their children’s use of cell phones all came from five Hungarian students. Two students mentioned that their parents specifically don’t like them playing games on their cell phones. One of the Hungarian girls mentioned that having prepaid minutes does not change their attitude: “They are not happy when I use lot of (prepaid) minutes.” (HFFG1)

Of all the specific items mentioned, the PSP / Nintendo / Wii was the only kind of technology that received exclusively negative statements, though not all students commented. Only three students mentioned that their parents have a negative attitude towards the gaming consoles, but both the Indian and Hungarian students made these statements. Television was mentioned by three Hungarian students, all using emotional terms, such as “don’t like” or “not happy with” in their explanations.

Another technology mentioned was iPod/MP3 players, which received one negative and one positive comment, both including that when the students listen to music too loud their parents don’t like it. A musical instrument was mentioned by one of the Hungarian boys. He stated that his parents like it: “…because that leads somewhere, it’s meaningful.” (HFFB3)

One girl from India mentioned that her mother is likes the toaster because it helps her.

2.3. RULES AND RESTRICTIONS The students were asked what rules their parents set regarding their technology usage.

Computer was the most common answer, having the most restrictions. MP3 players and gaming consoles were the least restricted. As previously discussed, cell phones were one of the two most negatively viewed technologies by parents. However, it was one of the technology items that did not have many restrictions. Over half of the students mentioned that they did not have any rules or restrictions. In the following sections we will discuss the types of limitations parents posed on children across both countries.

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2.3.1 Types of Rules and Restrictions Time Limitations Almost 50% of the students from Hungary and 25% of the students from India indicated that they have time restrictions on computer usage, ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours each day (see Figure 3.) Half of all the students stated that they are allowed 1 hour a day to use the computer or the TV.

Figure 3. Student’s time limits for using technology items.

Five of the students from Hungary and one from India stated that these restrictions are based on days of the week, where the weekends have no time restrictions. “…on school days, I can not watch as much TV for sure, not like now in the summer. Or not like on Saturdays or Sundays.” (HFFB4)

Delayed Gratification One-third of the students from Hungary stated that they must complete homework, household chores, or even a reading assignment before they are allowed to use any technology. Two of the students stated that once they have completed their homework, there are no set restrictions for their technology use, although their parents may step in if they feel their child needs to stop: “When I am done with everything I can get on the computer, but if I play too much my parents will say so.” (HFFG2)

Four of the Hungarian students stated that their parents required them to complete their assigned chores before they are allowed to use any technology.

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Safety on the Internet The students from India specifically talked about using the Internet and their parents involvement in their activities. Six students described sitting with their parents or informing their parents of their actions on the Internet, and two indicated that they were required to provide their parents with their passwords: “My parents know the passwords of my accounts so they routinely check.” (IFFB3)

One student indicated that he has parental controls set up on the computer: “…I have that software which automatically blocks sites on Internet, but that is very irritating, for example I wanted to download this software …but it does not allow it to be downloaded.” (IFFB3)

Another boy in the group added: “It is like our mother in the computer in a software.” (IFFB3)

No Restrictions Almost 70% of the Hungarian students indicated that they do not have set rules or have different types of restrictions for using technology. Where as only 15% of the students from India indicated the same Three Indian students stated that they have no specific rules. Four Hungarian students indicated the same but provided more details.

“I do ask if can watch TV or not, but there are no rules.” (HFFG2)

Three students explained that they have different types of restrictions, depending on the day of the week or if school is in session. “…I can only used it on weekends…summer vacation, winter vacation, then I can use it on weekdays…anytime I want.” (IFFB3)

There are three Hungarian students that mentioned they either ignore the rules completely or wait until their parents are not home and do whatever they want. One boy offered this explanation: “…we never follow them, the rules are just too tough.” (HFFB3)

2.4. WHO INTRODUCED YOU TO TECHNOLOGY? During the focus group discussions, the students were asked to talk about their favorite technology item [3]. These items included computers (both laptops and desktops), cell phones, iPods, PSP/Nintendo/Wii, TV, bicycles, and even a bread slicer. The students were asked who introduced them to a technology item. The students in both Hungary and India indicated that just over ½ were introduced to their favorite technology item by their parents (as opposed to other sources such as friends, schools, and media.) 53% of students in Hungary indicated that their parents introduced them to their favorite technology item and the students from India indicated that 51% of them were introduced by their parents.

One of the boys tells the story about being younger in his mom’s office:

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“…I was palming the keyboard…I was in my mom’s lap first.” (HFFB6)

One boy from India was given his father’s cell phone: “My father brought it when I was three or four…I immediately took it and figured out all the functions…my father was actually really impressed…at his birthday he gave me (the cell phone).” (IFFB3)

3. Limitations The number of participants in each country and the time of interaction with the children in the focus groups was limited. Thus our conclusions are valid only for our participant groups and can be transferrable to similar groups in the same country, but cannot be generalized beyond those groups with similar characteristics. However, the patterns identified in our data show some interesting trends that warrant attention.

In analyzing parents’ views and limitations, it is important to note that the focus group interviews reflect the parents’ opinions and rules through the eyes of their children. Consequently, the parents may not have such a negative view of technology, but perhaps limitations imply to the children that their parents do not like technology.

Therefore, it would be interesting to compare children’s reports and parents’ accounts of these limitations. It would also be interesting to find out in future studies how parental encouragement vs. discouragement impact children’s attitude toward technology

4. Conclusions Within this set of students the Hungarian parents appear to see technology as a toy that their children play with and approached it as such when establishing technology restrictions for their children: “When I am done with everything, I can get on the computer, but if I play too much, my parents would say so.” (HFFG2) “And then of course when my parents aren't at home, I play on weekdays too” (HFFB3)

This set of Indian parents has given the impression to their children that technology is useful and helpful and can be used as a tool.

“They think we have such a good opportunity so we should use it wisely.” (IFFB6) “They think that it makes our work easier.” (IFFB6)

These Indian parents spend time sitting with their children when they are concerned about their Internet usage.

“My mother sits with me when I am updating Facebook.” (IFFB3)

They talk to their children about technology related current events.

Researcher “…who told you about this that they break the ozone layer?”

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“our science teacher and also the newspapers and our parents” (IFFB6)

And they demonstrate using technology for work related activities.

“My mom has a lot of work because she is a teacher…she has to calculate the marks on Excel.” (IFFG5) “My mom works in a company where…their mode of communication is Skype and email...” (IFFG5)

Parental encouragement or limitation has a potential impact influencing children’s attitudes towards technology. Our paper reported on general trends in limitations and encouragement among our participants in two countries. Interesting differences in patterns of encouragement and limitations were identified between the countries.

Parents who encouraged their children to use technology also often felt it was important for their children to understand the value of technology. Despite those differences, similarities in the types of limitations were observed in both participant groups. Thus, it seems that while limitations and rules are necessary for children’s technology use, just as in many other areas of children’s lives, patterns of encouragement can greatly vary depending on the views of the parents and the culture. A recommendation from this study is that while limits and rules should be in place, children can still be encouraged to see the value of technology and potentially develop an interest in technology fields of study.

5. Future Work Our analysis is ongoing and we are planning to place our findings in the framework of research on family relations in these two countries. In addition, it would be interesting to interview the parents, to see if the children’s impression of their feelings about technology matches their own views. The fact that the Hungarian parents expose their children to technology indicates that they want their children to have access to it. It would be interesting to ask Hungarian parents whether allowing their children to use technology more as a tool, say to work on their homework, rather than a reward after their homework is done, they would provide a more positive attitude towards technology and thus decrease the sneaking and rule-breaking by their children.

References Clayton, K. L., L. A. v. Hellens, et al. (2009). Gender stereotypes prevail in ICT: a research review. SIGMIS CPR'09, San Antonio, Texas. ACM New York, NY, USA. March, W., and Fleuriot, C. (2006). Girls, Technology and Privacy: “Is my mother listening?”

Proceedings of CHI 2006, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Rode, J. (2009). Digital Parenting: Designing Children’s Safety. BCS-HCI '09: Proceedings of the 23rd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Celebrating People and Technology, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Wang, Jieyu, Komlodi, Anita (2012). Children’s formal and informal definition of technology.

Proceedings of the 2012 iConference (pp.587-588). February 7-10, Toronto, ON, Canada, ACM New York, NY.

M. Strano, H. Hrachovec, F. Sudweeks and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia, 502-513.

EXPOSURE TO ONLINE SEXUAL MATERIALS AND CROSSCOUNTRY DIFFERENCES IN EUROPE ANNA ŠEV ÍKOVÁ, JAN ŠEREK AND HANA MACHÁ KOVÁ Institute for Research on Children, Youth and Family Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Abstract. This study examined individual-level factors and country-level factors which predict exposure to online sexual materials (EOSM) among European children. The sample consisted of children aged 11-15 years (N=12,472) who were surveyed within the project EU Kids Online II. A cross-cultural comparison has shown that the country-level factors accounted for 11 % of the variation in EOSM within the European sample. However, neither broadband penetration, nor religious faith were significant as studied country-level factors, while all individual-level predictors such as advanced age, being male, increased amount of time spent online, emotional problems, sensation seeking, and excessive internet use predicted EOSM. On the other hand, gender had a different effect on EOSM at the cross-country level. The countries with higher rates of exposure indicated lower gender differences in EOSM. The implications of the findings are discussed.

1. Introduction The expansion of the internet into the bedrooms of children has raised concerns regarding the nature of some of its contents. In particular, these concerns deal with exposure to online sexual materials (EOSM) at a young age as this can negatively affect children´s attitudes towards sex or sexual well-being (Brown and L´Engle, 2009; Peter and Valkenburg, 2006, 2007).

Even though this concern is present in most of the modern countries, a recent cross-national research on 25 European countries has shown differences in prevalence of EOSM among young internet users. For instance, the highest rates of EOSM were found in Norway where 34% of children at age 9-16 years saw sexual images on websites, while the lowest prevalence was documented in Germany with 4% of children reporting EOSM (Livingstone, Haddon, Görzig, and Ólafsson, 2011).

Previous studies provide evidence that children with more psychological difficulties and risk factors are more likely to experience EOSM (Peter and Valkenburg, 2006; Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor, 2007; Ybarra and Mitchell, 2005). Children suffering from depression (Ybarra and Mitchell, 2005), who scored higher on impulsiveness (Wolak et al. 2007) and sensation seeking (Peter and Valkenburg, 2006) seem to be more vulnerable to seeing sexual images online. Also, an increased time

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spent online has been found to predict EOSM (Mesch, 2009; Mitchell Finkelhor, and Wolak, 2003). Within the perspective of psychological difficulties and risk factors, higher frequency of internet use can be a manifestation of excessive internet use, i.e. pathological internet use (Young, 1998).

Considering the relation of cross-national differences in EOSM and psychological difficulties/risk factors as the predictors of EOSM, there are few explanations why children with psychological difficulties and risk factors might differ in their prevalence across countries. For instance, a lower standard of living which varies across countries has been found to affect children´s well-being (Gallo and Matthews, 2003). However, focusing on the European context from where comparative data are available, an analysis of EOSM across 25 European countries provides evidence that children’s EOSM seems to be highest in Nordic countries and some Eastern European countries, and lowest in Southern Europe and predominantly Catholic countries (Livingstone et al.

2011). This indicates that some cultural specifics other than standard of living may be behind the differences in the rate of EOSM across Europe.

COUNTRY-LEVEL CHARACTERISTICS IN RELATION TO VARIABILITY OF EOSM Considering previous research, the North, the East and the South of Europe differ in the level of internet use and internet access (Eurostat, 2009; Livingstone et al. 2011). For instance, South Europe is known for lower internet penetration in comparison to Nordic countries and some Eastern countries, among which particularly Estonia and the Czech Republic have experienced rapid growth of internet penetration (Internet World Stats, 2011). In relation to EOSM, the expansion of broadband penetration may be related to the extent of EOSM as high speed internet connections allow access to a relatively large amount of data in a short time, including sexual images. Therefore, we hypothesize that broadband penetration rates might help explain the cross-country differences in EOSM. Furthermore, the findings have shown that lower EOSM was found in the Southern catholic European countries. In general, it is known that religiosity varies across European countries (EVS, 2008) and, at the same time, it has a regulatory effect on sexual behavior. For instance, higher religiosity delays sexual development (Hardy and Raffaelli, 2003). In terms of EOSM, children with lower religiosity have been found to be more likely to see sexual images online (Mesch, 2009). Therefore, we hypothesize that religious faith may contribute to the differences in EOSM in Europe.

Finally, Nordic countries are known for progressive gender role attitudes (e.g.

Sjöberg, 2004). Considering strong evidence for gender differences in EOSM in the fact that more boys have seen sexual images on the internet than girls (Mesch, 2009; Peter and Valkenburg, 2006; Wolak et al. 2007), we hypothesize that in countries with liberal sexual norms women might be more sexually empowered and thus more active in seeking sexual stimulations (see Clement, Schmidt, and Kruse, 1984). With this in mind, we expect that countries with lower gender differences in EOSM might have higher rates of EOSM than countries with greater gender differences.

To sum up, the study aimed to examine to what extent cultural specifics might explain variations in EOSM across Europe and to identify country-level factors that could be responsible for these national differences. Considering the important role of

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psychological difficulties and risk factors in EOSM, emotional problems, sensation seeking and excessive internet use were also included in the analyses. Demographic characteristics such as age and gender were controlled as well.

2. Methods PARTICIPANTS The present study used data from the international research project EU Kids Online II, which aimed to enhance the knowledge of European children’s and parents’ experiences and practices regarding risky and safer use of the internet and new online technologies. This study was conducted during April/October 2010 across 25 European countries, where 25 142 children (50% girls) aged 9-16 years were interviewed together with their parents. The representative samples of the countries were stratified by region and level of urbanization. Addresses of households were selected randomly by using Random Walk procedures in most countries. In a small number of countries an alternative random-selection approach to recruitment was adopted. At each address, one child was randomly selected from all eligible children in the household (i.e. all those aged 9-16 who use the internet). More detailed information about the recruitment is available at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EUKidsII%20(200911)/Survey/Technical%20report.PDF. In our study we focused only on young adolescents aged 11-15 years (N=12,472) who answered all the analyzed questions.

Additionally, the sample was reduced from the original 25 to 20 European countries due to the missing values of utilized country-level factors.

PROCEDURE Data gathering was performed via a survey, which was preceded by instructions and two rounds of testing that the children understand. The professional agency Ipsos MORI provided support for designing the questionnaire and cooperated with local fieldwork agencies to ensure that a unified, standard approach was used in each country. Data was collected at children´s homes where one child (together with one parent) was interviewed. The whole research was conducted in line with ESOMAR ethical guidelines and approved by the LSE Research Ethic Committee. Confidentiality and anonymity were guaranteed and all the information and questions were stated and explained to parents and children in an age-appropriate way and in the local language.

MEASURES Exposure to online sexual materials. This variable was measured using two filter questions: (1) “In the past year, you have seen lots of different images. Some of these might be sexual. Have you seen anything of this kind in the past 12 months?” indicating general exposure (see Table 1) and (2) “Have you seen these kind of things on any websites in the past 12 months?”. These items examined the occurrence of exposure

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(Yes or No). Children who answered “yes” on both the questions were identified as those having experience with EOSM. Frequency of internet use. Next, how often adolescents used internet was assessed.

Respondents were asked: “How often do you use the internet?” with possible answers being: “less than once a month” (= 1), “once or twice a month” (= 2), “once or twice a week” (= 3), ”every day or almost every day” (= 4). This scale was treated as continuous, higher scores indicating more frequent internet use.

Emotional problems. The participants were also asked a set of questions that dealt with emotional problems which were derived from the Strength and Difficulty Questionnaire (Goodman, Ford, Simmons, Gatward, and Meltzer, 2003). The variable included 6 items using a 3-point Likert scale from “not true” (1), “a bit true” (2), to “very true” (3).

The questions addressed problems such as a) having a lot of headaches, stomach-aches or sickness, b) being very angry and often losing temper, c) often feeling unhappy, sad or tearful, d) being nervous in new situations and easily losing confidence, e) being easily distracted and finding it difficult to concentrate, and f) having many fears, being easily scared. The scale scores were computed by averaging the items; a higher score indicated greater emotional problems. The scale was internally consistent ( =.65).

Sensation seeking. To assess the extent of sensation seeking, the items suggested by Stephenson, Hoyle, Palmgreen, and Slater (2003) were adopted. Participants were asked: “I do dangerous things for fun”, “I do exciting things, even if they are dangerous”. These were answered on a scale ranging from “not true” (1), “a bit true” (2) or “very true” (3). Scale scores were computed by averaging the items and a higher score indicated more sensation seeking. The scale was internally consistent ( =.76).

Excessive internet use. This variable was measured by using a five-item scale with a four-point response scale (from “never” (1) to “very often” (4)). The participants were asked how often, in the past 12 months, they had gone without eating or sleeping because of the internet, how often they felt bothered when they could not be online, how often they caught themselves surfing when they had not really been interested, whether they dedicated less time to their family, friends or schoolwork because of the time spent on the internet, and whether they tried to spend less time on the internet without success. These five items were derived from the ten item version of the scale (see Šmahel, Vondrácková, Blinka, and Godoy-Etcheverry, 2009) using the concept of behavioral addiction developed by Griffiths (2000). The scale covers five proposed criteria: salience, mood modifications, tolerance, conflicts, time restriction. Scale scores were computed by averaging the items; a higher score indicated more problematic internet use. The scale was internally consistent ( =.75).

Country-level indicators.

Broadband penetration. This factor indicates the percentage of European households using broadband connection in 2009. The data was obtained from EUROSTAT (see http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=t siir150&plugin=1).

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Religious faith. This factor indicates the percentage of religious people within the European countries that was assessed by the European Value Study in 2008 (see http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/) See Table 1 for a more detailed description of the variables.

Table 1. Variable description within European sample Europe (N=9,664) M (SD) Range Gender (girls) Age Frequency of Internet use Emotional problems Sensation seeking Excessive internet use Broadband Religion

12.99(1.41) 3.66 (.59) 1.42 (.36) 1.69 (1.02) 1.44 (.51) 53.50(14.53) 22.90(19.99)

% 50.0

11/15 1/4 1/3 1/3 1/4 24.00/77.00 6.90/82.20

DATA ANALYSIS We used the multilevel modeling approach with random effects to examine the relevance of individual and contextual influences when predicting EOSM. Data from 20 European countries was used. Multilevel analysis is an extension of simple regression analysis and assumes that the studied people are divided into groups with both individual- and group-level predictors explaining the variance in individual-level outcomes. In our dataset, children were divided into twenty countries; thus a two-level model with individual (level-1) and country (level-2) variables was employed. Since the outcome variable was dichotomous in our case, a model assuming Bernoulli distribution and using the logistic link function on the individual level was estimated (Hox, 2002; Raudenbush, Bryk, Cheong, Congdon, and du Toit, 2004). Three multilevel models were estimated in total. The level-1 part was identical for all three models, and it comprised the six above-mentioned individual-level predictors: Log(pij/(1-pij)) = 0j + 1j(Gender)ij + 5j(Sensation Seeking)ij + 6j(Addiction)ij

2j(Age)ij

+

3j(Frequency)ij

+

4j(EMO)ij

+

where p was the probability that the child i from the country j had seen on-line sexual images, 0j was the intercept for the country j, and other s were regression coefficients for the given predictors. However, the models differed in their specification of the level-2 parts. The first model (Model 1) assumed that children from different countries have different initial log-odds of EOSM. Therefore, a random intercept (u0j) was included to account for the inter-country variation. Individual-level regression coefficients were assumed to be the same across countries, and no country-level predictors were included:

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0j 1j

= =

00 10

,

+ u0j, 2j =

20,

…,

6j

=

507

60.

Next, two country-level predictors (broadband penetration and religion) were added (Model 2). Therefore the intercept part of the level-2 model changed to: 0j

=

00

+

01(Broadband)j

+

02(Religiosity)j

+ u0j

where 01 and 02 were regression coefficients for country-level predictors. Finally, we tested whether the effect of gender on EOSM varied across the countries (Model 3).

Thus, we added a random slope for gender (u1j) to the model: 1j

=

10

+ u1j.

The models were estimated using the restricted penalized quasi-likelihood estimation procedure in HLM for Windows 6.08. For the sake of easier interpretation, gender (female = 0; male = 1) and age (age 11 = 0; age 12 = 1; etc.) variables were added to all analyses as uncentered, while all other predictors were grand-mean centered before the analysis. This was done after the list-wise exclusion of missing data from all analyses (except description of prevalence of EOSM in Table 2).

3. Results First we performed a basic comparison of the prevalence among children in Europe (see Table 2). The results show that Czech internet users have the highest EOSM (33,8%), while the lowest EOSM was reported by children from Germany (4,9%).

In the next step, we conducted a multilevel regression analysis predicting the odds of being exposed to sexual materials on the internet (vs. not being exposed) in 20 European countries. The results are presented in Table 3.

In Model l, the intercept tells us that an “average” girl from an “average” European country had .08 odds of EOSM. All individual-level predictors significantly predicted the children’s EOSM. Being a boy increased the odds 1.38 times. With advancing age, the odds increased 1.45 times for every additional year of age. The odds also increased with greater frequency of internet use, emotional problems, sensation seeking, and excessive internet use (see odds ratios in Table 3).

The random part of the model indicated that children from different countries significantly differed in their EOSM, and this could not be attributed to individual-level predictors. Since the outcome variable was dichotomous, it was not possible to simply compute the percentage of its variance which was attributable to the country level.

However, there are at least two ways to deal with this problem. First, a median odds ratio (MOR) can be computed. If we repeatedly randomly choose two children from different countries who have the same covariates and compute the odds ratios between the person of higher and the person of lower propensity, the MOR is the median of these odds ratios. MOR can be equal to or higher than 1, with a MOR of 1 meaning no

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inter-country variation (Larsen and Merlo, 2005). The MOR of our model was 1.84, which meant that children from different countries considerably differed in their EOSM. The second way is based on assuming that the dichotomous outcome variable arises from an underlying continuous variable. Since we know its variance ( e2 = 2/3 for the standard logistic distribution), we can easily compute the ratio between the country-level and total variance (Goldstein, Browne, and Rasbash, 2002). For our data, u02 / ( u02 + e2) = .11, meaning that country-level differences accounted for 11 % of the variation in EOSM. Table 2. Sample description and basic variable frequency Country

N

Percent of females

Austria

605

49.4

Exposure on the Internet 18.0

Belgium

596

50.8

20.4

Bulgaria

685

49.1

22.5

Cyprus

555

50.7

12.5

Czech Republic

610

50.2

33.8

Germany

626

46.0

4.9

Denmark

666

54.5

30.0

Estonia

612

49.4

33.4

Greece

501

43.7

17.7

Spain

678

47.1

10.0

Finland

686

51.9

29.3

France

543

52.3

25.0

Hungary

648

50.7

13.4

Ireland

675

50.0

12.0

Lithuania

603

49.7

28.1

Netherlands

665

53.7

28.0

Poland

668

47.6

15.0

Portugal

574

50.3

16.8

Romania

653

50.1

22.9

Slovenia

623

50.6

22.9

12,472

49.9

20.6

Total

Note. All results in this table are displayed with “country weight” except for N, which is the actual number of respondents in each country.

Table 3. Multilevel regression with Exposure to sexual materials on the internet as the dependent dichotomous variable (unit-specific models)

B (SE)

Model 1 OR

95% CI

B (SE)

Model 3 OR

1.38 1.45 1.47 1.47

(1.23-1.55) (1.40-1.52) (1.30-1.66) (1.26-1.73)

-2.56(.16)** .32(.08)** .38(.02)** .38(.06)** .39(.08)**

1.38 1.46 1.46 1.47

.37(.03)** .73(.05)**

1.45 2.07

(1.38-1.53) (1.86-2.30)

.37(.03)** .73(.05)**

1.45 2.08

-.01(.01) -.01(.01)

.99 .99

(.96-1.02) (.97-1.01)

95% CI

B (SE)

1.38 1.45 1.47 1.47

(1.23-1.55) (1.40-1.52) (1.30-1.66) (1.26-1.73)

-2.56(.16)** .32(.06)** .37(.02)** .38(.06)** .39(.08)**

1.45 2.07

(1.38-1.53) (1.86-2.30)

Model 2 OR

Fixed effect Level-1 variables Intercept -2.56(.16)** Gender (male) .32(.06)** Age .37(.02)** Frequency .39(.06)** Emotional .39(.08)** problems Sensation seeking .37(.03)** Excessive internet .73(.05)** use Level-2 variables Broadband Religiosity Random effect u02 u12

.41** -

-

.42** -

Note. B = unstandardized regression coefficient. SE = standard error. OR = odds ratio. CI = confidence interval for OR. variance. u12 = random slope variance (gender). N = 9,664. ** p < .001. * p < .01.

.42** .07* u02

= inter-country

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None of the country-level predictors were able to explain the inter-country differences in the participants’ EOSM. As can be seen in Model 2, the predictors of broadband penetration and religiosity were both non-significant and only had a 1 negligible effect on the odds of being exposed .

However, we found that the countries differed significantly in the effect of gender. In some countries, gender mattered more than in others when predicting EOSM – this follows from the fact that the regression coefficients for gender significantly varied across countries (variance .07 and standard deviation .27; see Model 3).

Assuming that the coefficients are normally distributed, we can expect that in 67 % of countries the regression coefficient lied between .32 ± .27, i.e. from .05 to .59.

Obviously, the gender effect ranged from none to considerable. Moreover, tau correlation between random slopes and random intercepts was found to be -.22. This suggests that in countries with higher average EOSM, gender mattered moderately less than in the countries with lower average EOSM.

4. Discussion This study has shown that all individual-level predictors, including demographic characteristics of children, frequency of internet use, psychosocial difficulties, and risk factors were significant, while culture-level predictors such as broadband and religiosity could not explain the country difference in EOSM. However, it has been found that in countries with greater average EOSM gender mattered moderately less than in countries with lower average EOSM. The findings on individual-level predictors are in line with prior research in that older children tend to consume sexual contents online more often than younger internet users (Mitchell et al. 2003; Wolak et al. 2007; Ybarra and Mitchell, 2005). This might be given in relation to psychosexual development: one's interest in sexuality increases with age. Furthermore, the results are also consistent with previous studies documenting that boys are more likely to see sexual images on the internet than girls (Mesch, 2009; Wolak et al. 2007). The observed gender differences might be related to the differences in socialization of boys; interest in sexuality is generally supported among boys and the social status of boys in male peer groups is influenced by their knowledge of sexuality, which may increase their need to consume sexual materials on the internet (Macek, 2003).

Also, frequency of internet use as a significant predictor of EOSM has been documented in similar studies on exposure to sexual materials on the internet (Mesch, 2009; Mitchell et al. 2003). Increased time spent online may be a manifestation of pathological/excessive internet use on one hand. On the other hand, EOSM may be an 1

Since the country-level predictors appeared to be insignificant, we tested several other predictors for explorative purposes. They were added to the model "two-by-two" to keep a reasonable ratio between the number of predictors in the model and the number of cases on the second level (N=20). These predictors were: internet usage (Eurostat), percentage of young people who have had sexual intercourse (Unicef), ICT Development Index (ITU), percentage of young people living in single-parent family structures (Unicef). None of them was found to have a significant effect.

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outcome of non-problematic internet use, since malicious software may cause sexual images to unexpectedly popup on the (whole) screen (Wolak, Mitchell and Finkelhor, 2006).

The study confirms on the cross-national sample that vulnerable children, facing emotional problems, increased sensation seeking and excessive internet use, are more likely to experience EOSM (see Peter and Valkenburg, 2006; Wolak et al.; Ybarra and Mitchell, 2005) which again raises the question of how to protect vulnerable children from the risk of EOSM and at the same time to allow/empower them to profit from the opportunities that the internet brings.

Although the country-level factors accounted for 11 % of the variation in EOSM within this cross-country sample, none of the studied cross-national-level indicators significantly explained the differences in EOSM. This indicates the complexity of EOSM and that further research is needed. Even the findings that in countries with greater average EOSM gender mattered moderately less than in countries with lower average EOSM should be interpreted with caution. In the introduction we suggested that this could advert to the gender-related cultural specifics of studied countries. In those cultures where gender differences in EOSM are less distinct, girls might be more empowered in their sexually-related activities on the internet, which in turn could increase the occurrence of EOSM in general. However, this cultural interpretation of the gender effect on EOSM could also be clarified by another relevant explanation. Previous research work has shown that gender differences appear in the context of wanted - intentional EOSM while these differences disappear when examining unwanted EOSM among young internet users (Mitchell et al. 2003; Wolak et al. 2007). Then the finding of the present study might indicate that greater average EOSM in some countries could be rather the outcome of unwanted – unintentional EOSM than the result of progressed gender role attitudes.

Therefore, the study suggests the need to reflect a type and place of EOSM when exploring cultural indicators which could explain differences in the rates of EOSM. Specifically, it might be important to consider how internet usage patterns may affect a type of EOSM; whether EOSM occurs intentionally (visiting X-rated websites) or unintentionally (pop-up advertisements) or whether it occurs in a private setting (computers in bedrooms) or in public (computers in living rooms or schools). All such information related to EOSM may help in identifying country-level indicators responsible for the observed national differences.

Acknowledgements Data collection of the ‘EU Kids Online’ network was funded by the EC (DG Information Society) Safer Internet Plus Programme (project code SIP-KEP-321803); this work was also supported the Czech Science Foundation (GAP407/11/0585) and the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University.

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CENSORING, CENSURING OR EMPOWERING? Young people and digital agency LELIA GREEN Edith Cowan University 270 Joondalup Drive, Joondalup, WA 6027, Australia

Abstract. The protection of young people from troubling and disturbing online content is rightly a high policy priority in Western nations. However, ‘the child’ is increasingly being defined as anyone below the age of majority: 18 in most nations. The significant age and maturity differences between primary school children and teenagers are recognised in most cinema classification schemes but less nuanced in terms of regulated online content. While there is considerable evidence that younger children benefit from vigilant support regarding what they access online, the legal and policy focus upon the regulated protection of teenagers risks constraining opportunities as well as risks, and may impact upon their online behaviour in ways that lead to unintended consequences. This paper is framed in terms of recent debates around the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC’s) National Classification Scheme Review (which considered content), and the Australian Government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s Convergence Review (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011) (which considered the regulatory implications of converged media). It elaborates some of the issues arising from acknowledging that older children are agents who see themselves as having choices about what they do online.

Recent research in Australia has underlined the importance of vigilant protection of young people from age-inappropriate content online. In one study investigating a random, stratified sample of 400 Australian children, aged 9-16 inclusive, plus the parent most involved with their internet use, it was demonstrated that younger children were much less likely to access potentially-troubling content but much more likely to register concern if they did so (Green et al, 2011, pp. 58-9). As Livingstone et al comment of their 25,142-child EU Kids Online study “it is noteworthy that in the Europe-wide study, those who encounter most risk online (often, teenagers, boys) are not necessarily those most bothered or upset by the experience (often, younger children, girls)” (Livingstone et al, 2011a, p. 58).

This paper explores one aspect of this issue in terms of young people’s access to sexual images online. This risk is focused upon because children’s access to sexual images is the subject of policy and regulation in many countries. The main aim of

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policy is often to make sexual images and adult content invisible to people under 18.

The discussion argues that this issue demonstrates other aspects of invisibility in two ways. Firstly, it makes invisible the agency of some young people who believe themselves mature enough to access sexual images online, and who do so; and secondly it makes invisible the very considerable difference in maturity and outlook between children across the age span from birth to the end of their seventeenth year. Teenagers, some of whom are legally permitted to engage in sexual activity, and some of whom are sexually active even though they have not yet reached the legal age of consent, are thus treated the same as children who have no interest in such matters. Older children who may seek out sexual images for a range of reasons, some of which are educational, thus face censored media or adult censure. Their agency in this matter is likely to be invisible.

At the same time, there are a number of online experiences which do bother children, yet which appear to have been largely invisible to regulatory and other authorities. These policy-making bodies tend to concentrate on risks with a sexual content. Children’s negative online experiences often centre upon their digital interactions with other young people, yet the public debate tends to be around children’s online experiences with adults and adult content. This paper addresses these topics through a critical analysis of research in Australia with Australian children aged 9-16, AU Kids Online. The AU kids Online study was carried out in parallel with a 25nation European study, EU Kids Online II, funded by the European Commission’s Safer Internet Program (2009-11). Australian policy responses to risks run by children are framed in terms of two major reviews in that country: the National Classification Scheme Review, sponsored by the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Convergence Review, sponsored by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. There is supplementary discussion around how to recognise children’s agency while also helping keep them safe online.

Australian Children’s Experiences of Viewing Sexual Images Online In Australia, in terms of the risky experience of seeing sexual images online, 11% of 910 year olds had done this and almost all of these (10% of 9-10 year olds) had been bothered by the experience, i.e. 91% of the sample that had seen the images. Only one 9-10 year old indicated they has seen sexual images online and had not been bothered by the experience. In the 15-16 age range, 56% of respondents reported accessing sexual images online and 12% said they had been bothered by this, i.e. more than threequarters (78%) of 15-16 year olds who had accessed sexual images online were unfazed by what they had seen. Arguably, a policy focus should concentrate on minimising harm rather than ruling out risk and this suggests that more work needs to be done to understand the critical nature of age-appropriate content and the processes through which children learn to cope with challenging material online. As Livingstone et al comment, in the full findings report of their European research: Older children should be the focus of safety measures, therefore, because their risk of harm is higher in terms of incidence; younger children should be the focus of safety measures because the potential severity – their subjective perception of harm – tends to

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be greater, and because they are less well equipped to manage risks themselves.

(Livingstone et al, 2011b, p. 132)

With regards to older children, their position is made more complex as a result of their status in western society on the boundary between (responsible) adult and (innocent) child. This complexity is evident in the gaps between prohibition and practice around sexual activity. For example, in 2001, as part of a longitudinal project entitled The Australian Study of Health and Relationships, 19,307 Australians aged 1659 agreed to take part in a telephone interview about their sexual attitudes and practices.

There was a significant difference in the overall proportion of men who reported having heterosexual vaginal intercourse before the age of 16, compared with women, with the figures being 21.5% (men) compared with 13.4% (women). (Rissel et al, 2003, p. 135) The data presented suggests that these figures under-represent the current situation while over-representing contemporary gender differences. When the 16-19 year old survey sample is considered, the proportion of men saying they had vaginal intercourse before they were 16 rises to 26.9% while the proportion of women saying this is 24.8%.

Apart from a small reversal in men aged 30-39 (23.21%), and 20-29 (22.56%), in each age-group and both genders, over the five age-group cohorts interviewed, a larger proportion of respondents reports starting sexual activity earlier while the difference between the proportions of men and women reporting under-age sexual activity decreases (Rissel et al, 2003, p. 135). This implies that an increasing proportion of young people is experimenting with sexual activity below the Australian age of consent, 16.

There are reasons to be cautious about this data on the age of first sexual activity.

Many respondents refused to be interviewed and it is reasonable to expect that those who were interviewed were particularly sexually aware, or sexually confident. Further, there is evidence of significant regional variation within Australia. For example, Queensland Health commissioned an in-depth study of the data for their state. This showed that 37.5% of male respondents aged 16-19, and 31.2% of female respondents, reported that their first experience of vaginal intercourse occurred before the age of 16.

(Queensland Health 2003, p. 18) Even given these reasons to be cautious, it is probable that over a quarter of Australian 16 year olds are sexually active before they reach the age of consent, and that a declining (with age), but nonetheless significant, proportion of Australians in every generation were similarly sexually active before the age of 16.

The Australian Study of Health and Relationships and similar projects have not so much served to normalise adolescent sexual behaviour as to fuel concern over the media and marketing industries’ sexualisation of children, resulting in a 2008 Senate Enquiry into this area (Australian Senate 2008). The Child Safety Commissioner for the Australian state of Victoria presented a submission (State Government of Victoria, 2008) which, among other matters, argued that changes proposed by the Australian Association of National Advertisers to the Advertising to Children Code demonstrated the necessity for a mandatory code of advertising conduct. The AANA submission stated “that advertising or marketing communications to children must not include sexual imagery in contravention of prevailing community standards”, but was deemed inappropriate by the Commissioner as a result of defining children as 14 or under. “It can be strongly argued that sexualised imagery of 15 years olds would be in breach of community standards, but paradoxically this would not breach AANA regulations.”

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(State Government of Victoria, 2008, p. 12). The agency of 15-17 year olds in this debate is not fully acknowledged or clearly visible.

It might be expected that disagreements over recognising the agency of older children would have prompted public debate about the status of teenagers, with regards to younger children on the one hand and adults on the other, but no public debate is visible. It is as if any nuanced response to the issue of sexually-aware teenagers is inappropriate.

Over the past two years the Australian government has instituted a number of reviews into policy around media and regulation. Two of these have particular relevance here: the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC) National Classification Scheme Review (which considered content) and the Australian Government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s (DBCDE) Convergence Review (which considered the regulatory implications of converged media). Neither examines the issue of sexually-aware teenagers although the National Classification Review Scheme Report recommends continuing the differentiation (with some changes in regulation) between pre-teens, early teens and older adolescents in terms of the classification of movies and television programs.

Both the reviews considered here tend to follow an iterative progress with a discussion paper, eliciting responses, and a final report. Sometimes, as with the Convergence Review there is an interim report, to which responses may be made, followed by a final report. Much of the paper that follows draws upon the author’s submissions to these reviews, both of which included consideration of children’s online activities and references to the 2011 AU Kids Online study.

As a matter of interest, there is some cultural specificity in these debates. Unlike equivalent debates in some other jurisdictions, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore, there is little discussion around the corruption of children’s values or the encouragement of deviant behaviours. For example, the final report of the National Classification Scheme Review, 404 pages long, refers to a 1968 landmark decision of “The High Court of Australia [which] upheld the use of a ‘community standards’ test—referring to offence to the ‘modesty of the average man’—rather than adopting the common law test of obscenity, based on the ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’” (Australian Law Reform Commission 2012, p. 48). Apart from acknowledging that the British Board of Film Classification does use this term, in that it has “the authority to refuse a classification to films or other media deemed ‘obscene’, defined as material whose ‘effect is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it’,” (Australian Law Reform Commission 2012, p. 385), there is no further use of the words ‘corrupt’ or ‘corruption’. The word ‘deviant’ is used once in the report, in a direct quote from Singapore legislation which bans “content that glorifies deviant sexual behavior” (Australian Law Reform Commission 2012, p. 391). Instead, as indicated, acceptability or not is deemed by reference to ‘community standards’, although the community envisaged is entirely composed of adults.

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The National Classification Scheme Review The National Classification Scheme Review was instituted on 24 March 2011 by the Attorney-General of Australia. The need for the Review was seen as being influenced by (1.4): the rapid pace of technological change in media available to, and consumed by, the Australian community the needs of the community in this evolving technological environment the need to improve classification information available to the community and enhance public understanding of the content that is regulated the desirability of a strong content and distribution industry in Australia, and minimising the regulatory burden the impact of media on children and the increased exposure of children to a wider variety of media including television, music and advertising as well as films and computer games the size of the industries that generate potentially classifiable content and potential for growth … (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2011 ‘Introduction’) The National Classification Scheme Review was explicitly framed against a discussion around media regulation in a convergent age, as countenanced in the Convergence Review, which was at that time underway as part of the responsibilities of the DBCDE. The Convergence Review was conceived as the over-arching investigation and reported at the end of March 2012, having taken the recommendations of the National Classification Scheme Review into account. At the date of submission of this paper, the Convergence Review Final Report had not been made public. The discussion in this paper concerning the Convergence Review particularly relates to its ‘Interim Report’ (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy 201 ‘Interim Report’) and “the impact of media on children and the increased exposure of children to a wider variety of media including television, music and advertising as well as films and computer games” (cited above). First, however, the National Classification Scheme Review.

It should be noted that there are a number of exemptions proposed from the future National Classification Scheme, including Proposal 6.3 “The definition of exempt content should capture the traditional exemptions, such as for news and current affairs programs” (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2011, p. 8). The public interest served by exempting news and current affairs programming from a classification scheme is balanced against the desirability of protecting children from exposure to any content they might find distressing, and the exemption upheld. Similarly, the recognition that “Australians should be able to read, hear, see and participate in media of their choice” (ALRC, 2011, p. 4) and that the regulatory framework should acknowledge “the size of the industries that generate potentially classifiable content and potential for growth” and “the desirability of a strong content and distribution industry in Australia, and minimising the regulatory burden” (both cited above) indicate that adults have a right to access ‘adult content’. Given that such content is available in magazines, DVDs and videogames; and in films and on television; as well as online and in adults’ photos and

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memorabilia, parents and caregivers have to be vigilant if the aim is to prevent access to such material.

Children can be disturbed by a range of materials not generally captured by classification systems (such as images of people being unkind to animals), but there are a number of indications from the AU Kids Online research that the experiences that most trouble children are negative exchanges with peers, and engagement with usergenerated content not typically submitted for classification and review. While Australian respondents to the AU Kids Online survey were more likely to say they were bothered by online experiences than comparative children in any country in the 25nation EU Kids Online research (30% of Australian children said this, compared with an average 12% of European children, Author et al, 2011, p. 61), almost all of the things that bothered them involved other children and young people. Thus if the Australian data were treated as country 26 of the European study, and considering the six areas of risks investigated, AU children would be: second most likely to be bothered by misuse of personal data (particularly when “somebody used my password to access my information or to pretend to be me”); third most likely to say they have been bullied online; fourth most likely to say they have been bothered by seeing sexual images online (this would likely be captured by a Classification Scheme); sixth most likely to have been bothered by unsettling user-generated content (which may also be susceptible to classification); averagely likely to have been bothered by receiving sexual images or messages via online ‘sexting’, and less than averagely likely to have been bothered after meeting a stranger whom they first met online.

In focusing upon the public and policy attention being paid to under-18s access to sexual images, there is no desire to make invisible the children that have been bothered by such material. Instead, the aim is to make visible the matters which bother more children, more of the time, which have received little attention.

It is clearly of concern that Australian children’s responses indicate they are more likely to be bothered by what they have encountered online in the past twelve months than is the case with the average child responding to the same questions posed by the EU Kids Online team in Europe. It is possible that this finding was affected by the smaller sample size (400 Australian children compared with 1000 for each of the 25 European nations), which impacts upon the confidence we can have in the data; and the comparatively late date of the fieldwork, which occurred about six months after most of the European data had been collected. One possible difference arising from this delay is that Australian children were far more likely than the children in Europe (46% compared with 12% on average; Green et al, 2011, p. 66) to say that at some point in the past year they had accessed the internet using a smart handheld device, such as an iPad. It might be that the more portable the internet access technology, and the more possible it is to use in the company of peers and away from the oversight of parents, the more likely children are to take risks. The specific dynamics of children’s online access using smart handheld devices are an early priority for future research.

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Even so, the notion that a child has been bothered (defined as something which “made you feel uncomfortable, upset, or feel that you shouldn’t have seen it” Green et al, 2011, p. 8), need not seamlessly equate with ‘harm’. On the contrary, the term bothered was used, rather than ‘upset’ or ‘disgusted’, in order to capture a range of responses from “I got over it straight away” (short duration) and “not at all upset” (low intensity) at one end of the scale, to “for a couple of months or more” (long duration) and “very upset” (high intensity). For all that there is an understandable emphasis here, and in other reports, upon the proportion of children who said they were bothered by something they encountered online, the numbers are generally too low and the statistical cell sizes too small, to draw valid inferences at the country level. Further, even in Australia which had the highest proportion of children who said they’d been bothered, 70% had not experienced anything online in the past year that they found discomforting. Given the small numbers of children registering exposure to risk, crossnational comparisons are required to establish whether and to what extent children feeling bothered is equated with identifiable harm, and with other risk factors in their lives such as being thrill-seekers, taking alcohol and other drugs and being in trouble with the law. (This data was solicited via a series of psychometric and social experience questions as part of the EU Kids Online questionnaire.)

In the absence of proof that feeling bothered leads to harm, it is fair to suggest that activities that have the capacity to bother a child represent a potential risk to the child.

Risk-taking needs to be considered, however, as an activity that offers potential benefits. Apart from the fact that responsible risk-taking has been associated with the development of resilience (Grotberg, 1995, ‘Introduction’), it has also been associated with creativity and being innovative: Responsible risk-taking has been associated with the desirable characteristics of innovative behaviour. The UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has published a research report arguing that “five generic skills […] underpin innovative behaviour and form a set of attributes clearly linked to the innovation process” (Chell, 2009, p. 4). These attributes are: creativity, confidence, energy, risk-propensity and leadership. ‘Risk-propensity’ is defined as being “a combination of risk tolerance and the ability to take calculated risks” (Chell, 2009, p.

4). (Green, 2010, p. 229)

According to the EU Kids Online research, and AU Kids Online, “opportunities and risks go hand in hand” (Livingstone & Helsper, 2010). One indication of this is the ‘ladder of opportunities’ (Livingstone & Helsper, 2007) which represents the data collected concerning children’s skills, competencies, activities and interactions online.

The AU Kids Online data indicates that two-thirds of Australian children (66%) are operating “beyond a basic level of activity and are involved in active and creative internet uses, viz: ‘Playing, downloading and sharing’ and ‘Advanced and creative [use]’ (Author et al, 2011, p. 59). This ranking aligns Australia with countries like Norway where children also start using the internet at a comparatively early age (younger than 8, for the 9-16 year olds surveyed) and engage in a number of activities online. Although EU Kids Online has indicated that less internet use is associated with reduced risk, the balance to be sought is maximising benefit while minimising harm.

Dealing with risk and developing resilience are valuable life experiences. One way to help achieve these positive outcomes is by good family communication and a

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progressive exposure to risk, and this is the strategy adopted by most Australian parents as outlined by the Media and communication in Australian families report (Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2007). In this case, parents reported varying their regulation strategies and supervision practices as their child matures (ACMA, 2007, pp. 117-120).

It is clear that the National Classification Scheme Review constitutes a timely contribution to the policy debate and that it remains important to assess commerciallyproduced online materials to help parents and others to keep children safe. In younger age groups, strategies for keeping children safe seem usefully achieved through ‘restrictive mediation’ (Lobe et al, 2009, pp. 174-5, also referencing Valkenburg, 2004, pp. 54-5), setting down strong rules around what can be accessed and when, as well as talking to children about why, and sharing online experiences with them. With older children, however, safety and resilience seem more associated with active mediation strategies including co-viewing and negotiation. Australian parents would rank second out of the 26 nations associated with EU Kids Online in terms of “actively mediating their children’s safety online” (Green et al, 2011, p. 42) and this is positively supported by a robust National Classification Scheme environment.

The Convergence Review The Convergence Review was announced on 14 December 2010 by Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy, Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. It is a “landmark review of the regulation of media and communications in Australia” (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘What is?’) and is expected to recommend replacing more than two decades of separate legislation around newspapers, broadcasting, the internet and media ownership and regulation. Draft terms of reference were released with the announcement of the review, and were open for public comment until 28 January 2011 (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011 ‘Draft ToR’). On 2 March, 2011, the final terms of reference were confirmed and published.

The three person Convergence Review Committee was finalised on 21 April 2011.

It included expertise from the worlds of: computing (Glen Boreham, the chair, had been Managing Director of IBM in Australia and New Zealand); film and television (Malcom Long had been a past Executive Director of the National Film Television and Radio School and a member of the principal regulators, the Australian Communications and Media Authority and its predecessor the Australian Broadcasting Authority as well as holding senior managerial positions in the ABC, SBS and ABC Radio); and print and new media journalism (Louise McElvogue started out as a print journalist working in Europe and the US before moving into new media where she was responsible for developing and realising a range of award-winning interactive services including 4oD – Channel 4 on demand).

A week after the committee membership was finalised, on 28 April, it issued a ‘framing paper’ (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Framing paper’) and sought feedback on this, following up with consultations

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with key stakeholders as part of the preparation of an Emerging issues report. The ‘Emerging issues’ paper was released on 6 July 2011 and also included a ‘guiding principles’ section which set out the fundamentals that the committee argued should drive their work. As a result of discussion and feedback the eight principles put forward in the Framing paper were expanded to become the ten revised principles in the Emerging issues paper. These principles are: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Citizens and organisations should be able to communicate freely, and where regulation is required, it should be the minimum needed to achieve a clear public purpose.

Australians should have access to and opportunities for participation in a diverse mix of services, voices, views and information.

The communications and media market should be innovative and competitive, while balancing outcomes in the interest of the Australian public.

Australians should have access to Australian content that reflects and contributes to the development of national and cultural identity.

Local and Australian content should be sourced from a dynamic domestic content production industry.

Australians should have access to news and information of relevance to their local communities, including locally-generated content.

Communications and media services available to Australians should reflect community standards and the views and expectations of the Australian public.

Australians should have access to the broadest possible range of content across platforms, services and devices.

Service providers should provide the maximum transparency for consumers regarding their services and how they are delivered.

The government should seek to maximise the overall public benefit derived from the use of spectrum assigned for the delivery of media content and communications services. (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Emerging issues’, pp. 8-10)

Five ‘detailed discussion papers’ were also produced by the committee and released for public comment on 19 September 2011 (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011 ‘Discussion papers’). They arose out of the areas canvassed in the Emerging issues paper and covered Media diversity, competition and market structure; Layering, licensing and regulation; Spectrum allocation and management; Australian and local content, and Community standards.

Responses to the Emerging issues paper and the five detailed discussion papers were invited prior to 28 October 2011, following which an ‘Interim report’ was released on 15 December 2011, with submissions invited up until 10 February 2012. That month was also the time frame for delivery of the final reports for the National Classification Scheme Review (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2011) and the Independent Media Inquiry (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011). The latter was instituted in the wake of the UK News Ltd scandals, to examine “the pressures facing newspapers, online publications and their newsrooms, as well as the operation of the Australian Press Council” (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Independent Media Inquiry’). The

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final report of the Convergence Review, due to be presented to the Government at the end of March 2012, is to address the outcomes of the National Classification Scheme Review and the Independent Media Inquiry as well as include feedback on the Interim report.

In terms of children’s and young people’s digital agency, the major area of interest in the Convergence Review centred upon principle 7: “Communications and media services available to Australians should reflect community standards and the views and expectations of the Australian public.” The Interim Report offered a range of recommendations around “the need to ensure that any new regulatory framework does not […] inadvertently capture the communications activities of individuals” (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Interim report’, p. 4). However, it did not specifically address children’s agency, even though children and young people constitute one of the more active cohorts of content creators providing Australian and local content for diverse audiences (Green et al, 2011, pp. 8, 59). Subsequent statements to the effect that “all content providers will still be subject to some requirements, such as those protecting children from harmful content” (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Interim report’, p. 5), and the “need to protect children from exposure to age inappropriate content” (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Interim report’, p. 16), were taken by some commentators to suggest that, in the future, all Australian-based websites would require regulation (Keane, 2011).

Protecting children is more complicated than might at first seem since, in some lights, the dangers from which children need protecting include themselves and each other. It has been regularly noted by researchers in the field that what troubles adults about children’s online activities is not necessarily that which troubles children, and vice versa (Green 2010). Adults are most concerned about strange danger, pornography and access to websites that discuss self-harm, anorexia, suicide and drug use (Livingstone & Haddon, 2009, p. 27). Children are more likely to say they are concerned about cyber bullying, identity theft and spam (Livingstone & Haddon, 2009, p. 59). In overall terms, Wolak et al (2008, p. 111) suggest that policy makers should pay particular attention “to higher risk youths, including those with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns, and patterns of off- and online risk taking.” They see risky behaviour leading to online harm as generally reflecting risky behaviour offline, and vulnerability to harm in a range of situations.

The notion of ‘protecting children from harmful content’ might be presented as an intervention to protect children from experiences which could provoke prolonged negative impacts. However, children may themselves be the authors of what might be deemed ‘inappropriate’ materials, such as slash fan fiction (Tosenberger, 2008).

Further, they are likely to take pride in their agency and creativity (Green & Guinery, 2004).

Contrariwise, some media that children are encouraged to watch may distress them, even where it offers a clear educational benefit. This can be the case with coverage of natural disasters, including media about Australian wildfires and floods, and with news and current affairs more generally. Were it possible to protect all children from all risk posed by all media content by blocking access to the potentially troublesome material, this would not necessarily be desirable. Duerager and

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Livingstone (2012), in a report issued for Safer Internet Day 2012, and based on the EU Kids Online research (n=25,142 children) argue that parents’ and caregivers’ engagement with their children around media materials is the child’s best protection against online risk. Proactive recognition of children’s agency suggests that the focus should be on encouraging children to engage with positive content, and guiding them to develop creative skills and a self-protective approach to their own online interactions.

This provides benefits both in regulated situations and in those situations when the child might be unsupervised and accessing online material, for example via an unsupervised smart handheld device.

Any preference to encourage digital agency needs to be combined with a commitment to educate around the area of media literacy and individual responsibility, alongside the promotion of coping strategies and resilience. Parents particularly are involved in this: 87% of Australian children access the internet from their homes. 45% can go online in their bedrooms and 31% have access to technological resources which can browse online while they are ‘out and about’ (Green et al, 2011, p. 14). One priority area for awareness-raising is around the online activities of younger children, aged 910. Only two-thirds of Australian parents monitor their children’s activities in this age group (Green et al, 2011, p. 45), possibly because they feel they are not yet exposed to risk. While these children are less likely to encounter risks online, they are more likely to be bothered if they do so. This is also the age range where children are most likely to recognise that parents have more online skills than they do, and younger children are consequently willing to be guided by their parents in terms of rules around online activities. Although Australian parents are comparatively involved in promoting online safety through active mediation of their children’s online activities (Green et al, 2011, p. 42), they are willing to do more: 55% indicate this (Green et al, 2011, p. 51).

Leaving aside discussions over parents and children, there are a range of recommendations emerging from the EU Kids Online study that relate to governments and industry in a converged media environment, and addressing a wide range of development contexts, in line with post-Soviet Europe and including Turkey as a participant in the EU Kids Online network. In addition to comments focused upon Awareness-raising; Children; Parents; Educators and Child welfare, Livingstone et al (2011c, pp. 44-45) have specific recommendations for Industry, Government and Civic society: all of which have a bearing upon the discussion as a means of ensuring better recognition of children’s and young people’s agency while keeping minors safe online.

These recommendations are: GOVERNMENT: For children who lack convenient broadband access, governments should ensure that digital exclusion does not compound social exclusion.

It is important that while all should benefit from public information resources, special efforts are made to ensure these reach the disadvantaged or information-poor.

Especially in countries where children do not ‘progress’ far up the ladder of opportunities, initiatives to support effective access, broad-ranging use and digital literacy are vital.

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If industry self-regulation is to meet the needs of children and families, it requires a firm steer from government to ensure that it is inclusive, effective and accountable.

If schools, youth and child welfare services are to raise awareness, provide information and guidance and effectively support children and parents, they require strong encouragement, resources and recognition, especially in some countries.

In many countries, there is already evidence that stakeholder efforts are bearing fruit; the imperative now is to maintain and extend such efforts to address future challenges. (Livingstone et al, 2011c, p. 44) INDUSTRY: To reduce user confusion and impractical skill burdens, privacy settings, parental controls, safety tools and reporting mechanisms should be ageappropriate if for children and far more usable (whether for children or parents) than at present and/or enabled by default.

To increase user trust, the management of safety, identity and privacy underpinning services used by children should be transparent, accountable and independently evaluated; while ‘safety (or privacy) by design’ may obviate the need for user-friendly tools, it makes the need for transparency and redress even more pressing.

As children gain internet access (and, it seems, increased access to sexual/inappropriate content) via more diverse and personal platforms, ensuring consistent and easy-to-use safety mechanisms on all devices is vital.

Especially in ‘new use, new risk’ countries, children are exposed to pornography or other inappropriate content and contact by accident (e.g. popups, inadequate online search processes or weak safety measures) – protection for children needs strengthening. (Livingstone et al, 2011c, p. 44) CIVIL SOCIETY: Much more great (diverse, stimulating, high quality) online content of all kinds is needed, especially for young children and in small language communities; while children’s books, films and television programmes are publicly celebrated and supported, far less attention is given to online provision for children who are, too often, left to find content for themselves.

Promoting children’s online opportunities, including their right to communicate and their need to take some risks is important to counter simplistic calls for restricting children’s internet use. The ambition must be, instead, to maximise benefits (as defined by children as well as adults) while reducing harm (which is not necessarily the same as reducing risk).

A critical lens should be sustained when examining public anxieties, media reporting, industry accountability or new technological developments to ensure that these do not undermine children’s interests. Further, critical analysis of regulatory and technological developments should not assume that all users are adults, that parents can and will always meet the ‘special needs’ of children, or

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that children’s interests are somehow antithetical to the public interest.

(Livingstone et al, 2011c, p. 45) These recommendations indicate that helping keep children safe while recognising their developing sense of digital agency is a whole-of-community endeavor. When major reviews choose to embrace media-driven comments such as “all content providers will still be subject to some requirements, such as those protecting children from harmful content” (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, 2011, ‘Interim report’, p. 5), there must be concern that the evidence-base developed from face-to-face research with over 25,500 children (including the Australian sample with the 25 nations included in EU Kids Online) has not been accorded sufficient importance. It can only be hoped that another opportunity to recognise and encourage children’s agency, while promoting safe internet use, has not been lost.

Conclusions This paper has addressed a number of recent reviews in Australia that attempt, among other agendas, to improve the protection of children from disturbing and troubling content online. It has addressed this issue by discussing Australian-based research with 400 children aged 9-16 and with the parent most involved in their internet use.

Although the indications are that 70% of Australian children have gone online in the past year without having any experiences that bother them, the focus of debate and potential policy intervention continues to look at protecting children from online harm through the mechanisms of preventing them from accessing risky materials. This might be seen as censoring their internet activities, or censuring them when they break the rules. Such strategies fail to give full recognition to the fact that not all children are the same, and what might pose significant risk of harm to one child will build resilience in another.

The risks that children are most actively protected against tend to be the risks that most concern policy-makers, regulators and law-makers rather than the risks that children perceive themselves. The risks perceived by policy-makers often have a sexual content, whereas Australian children are more likely to identify digital interactions with other young people as being more problematic. Such problem activities affecting children can include, for example, personal data misuse, bullying and user-generated content. Significant energy is expended in protecting children from risks associated with sexual images yet little attention is paid to risks associated with the child’s peers.

There is a possibility that wider, and potentially more harmful, risks are overlooked given the emphasis upon sexual images. Further, while an older child might feel confident in their resilience around accessing such images they might appreciate in dealing with risky online interactions with their peers.

Children’s agency is important, yet it is often invisible and lacking from public debate. Instead, the focus is on preventing children from encountering certain materials, either through censoring them or censuring the child. This creates a situation where personal agency and skills associated with young people’s resilience and empowerment

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are invisible. There is much more attention paid to public discussions around regulation than there is to developing media literacy and educating children and their care-givers around appropriate online interactions, both with potentially troubling content, and with each other.

As nations grapple with the challenges posed by convergent media environments, they must also recognise the complexity inherent in discussing ways of supporting children’s digital agency and online activities while minimising the experience of harm.

It is worth remembering that risk is not the same as harm, and the evidence demonstrates that more opportunities online also expose young people to more risk. It is also important that remember that the negotiation and experience of risk can itself prove beneficial through building resilience and helping to provide protection from future harm. In this context there is insufficient attention paid to the various levels of maturity included in the concept of ‘the child’, from birth through to 18. While this is often recognised in film classifications, for example, it is less a feature of debates around internet content. More attention should be paid to awareness-raising and the education of parents and care-givers as to age-appropriate interventions with their children. The aim should be to acknowledge children’s agency and individual difference while helping them develop as autonomous and empowered digital self-regulators as they mature from child, through adolescent to adult. In particular, this paper acknowledges that older children are agents who see themselves as having choices about what they do online, while younger children are more in need of protection and generally more accepting of protective measures. In the debates outlined here, the younger child’s visibility has tended to obscure and make invisible the older child’s agency.

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AUTHOR INDEX

AUTHOR INDEX Abdelnour-Nocera, Jose, 410 Adelsberger, Heimo, 105 Agderal-Hjermind, Annette, 383 Agosti, Matteo, 51 Al-Saggaf, Yeslam, 1 Alayed, Fahad, 100 Alstam, Kristina, 304 Ariffin, Shamsul Arrieya, 135 Austin, Ann, 410 Birkland, Johanna L.H., 193 Blignaut, Anita Seugnet, 228 Bradshaw, Vanessa, 270 Brady, Danielle, 372 Buehler, Erin, 100 Burk, Dan L., 469 Cheng, Yuk Wing, 146 Cockton, Gilbert, 121 Costello, Leesa, 270, 359 Cox, Geoff, 16 Dahan, Michael, 25 De Troyer, Olga, 84 Dolezal, Jake, 67 Dyson, Laurel Evelyn, 135 El-Qirem, Fuad Ali, 121 Epstein, Serena, 100 Feltrero-Oreja, Roberto, 174 García Cruz, Juan Carlos, 174 Gong, Wen, 420 Green, Lelia, 187, 270, 359, 372, 514 Gunderson, Lee, 319 Hernwall, Patrik, 38 Herring, Susan, 430 Holloway, Donell, 372 Hrachovec, Herbert, 187 Iitaka, Toshikazu, 244 Jensen, Kasper, 454 Johns, Mark D., 333 Joshi, Karuna, 493 Kaarst-Brown, Michelle L., 67, 193 Kampf, Constance, 16 Knight, Julia, 446

Komlodi, Anita, 100, 493 Kreps, David, 212 Lazos-Ramírez, Luz, 174 Lee, Catherine, 146 Lindström, Berner, 393 Macfadyen, Leah P., 187 Machá ková, Hana, 502 Massa, Paolo, 344 Masoumi, Davoud, 393 Michaelides, Mario, 410 Modi, Sunila, 410 Mushtaha, Abdalghani, 84 Nakada, Makoto, 478 Nordeman, Levien, 259 Oyugi, Cecilia, 410 Paolini, Paolo, 51 Parisien, Matthew, 319 Postma, Louise, 228 Ramirez de la Piscina, Txema, 284 Reeder, Kenneth, 319 Richter, Thomas, 105 Rodil, Kasper, 454 Rueda-Romero, Xenia, 174 Sabiescu, Amalia Georgiana, 51 Sellei, Beatrix, 493 Šerek, Jan, 502 Šev íková, Anna, 502 Siibak, Andra, 38 Sorensen, Kristin, 187 Sudweeks, Fay, 146 Sutinen, Errki Alan, 228 Swan, Karen, 228 Todorova, Dessislava, 163 van der Velden, Maja, 187, 199 Visser, Eva, 259 Wang, Jieyu, 493 Weaver, Kathleen E., 493 Winschiers-Theophilus, Heike. 454 Witney, Cynthia, Edith, 270 Zelenkauskaite, Asta, 344 Zhang, Guo, 430