glocal09 - the rest of the conference
Posted by popkitchen | Filed under academic
I started writing for a new blog post on the lectures of the second and the third day of Glocal, yet I stopped as the presentations were interested, while during free time, I would rather eat at Skopje’s fantastic restaurants or hang out with my great host. So, here is the summary of the rest.
Day02
Second day at Glocal conference brought topics of culture, in the time of social media in focus. Professor Nada Svob Djokic from Zagreb kicked off the day with her presentation on the transformation of cultural industries from consumerism
crowd at glocal
Usage of new media in the process of re-discovery of ancient heritage in Macedonia (in the current political context of the dispute over the name of Macedonia with Greece), was the topic of the presentation of Vasilka Dimitrovska, who is an active blogger, focusing on archeology. That is the field, she is pursuing her Master on Belgrade University.
Kalina Maleska from New York University in Skopje spoke next about e-books, that is effects of publishing books online. It is interesting that Macedonian translation of Shakespeare are offered free, under CC license. So far, 80 titles were published in Macedonian language. Though, this was a dynamic presentation, supported by facts, I doubt that rarely anyone, save Cory Doctorow, directly benefited from electronic free issues of their books.
Niels Hendricks and Liesbeth Huybrechts are teaching on the Media and Design Academy in Genk in Belgium and their approach to social media, can be interpreted as critical. Which does not mean that they are renouncing all the participative features of web 2.0, instead they are focusing on what they term as concept design, that is human approach to social media. For the first time, I heard of Internet of things in their lecture. It is related to web pages, that are extending to items in real life.
Biljana Tanevska spoke about the status of Otaku within Japanese culture. These are the obsessive fans of manga and anime. More information can be found on her site, which was used also for presenting.
Faik Uyanik from Turkish section of BBC World Service spoke about ways BBC is using social media, combining on one side flexibility (editors and journalists are allowed to write blogs) and control through the implementation of precise guidelines, contained in BBC Share Strategy. Bottom line is – BBC employees should not write anything within social media that they would not utter on air. Also, they are banned from expressing political allegiance (which is allowed to the editors of other media in Britain – for example print media decide whom to endorse prior to the elections).
Day 03
The last day of the conference was opened with the presentation of Joachim Heinz from German T-systems, who spoke about the usage of social media within business environment. Whoever read Wikinomics or similar stuff is acquainted with Enterprise 2.0 concept, the new foundation of company, which is neglecting hierarchy in favor of collaboration, by using of web 2.0 tools – wikis, blogs, internal social networks. This is what Teamweb, used by T-systems, is about. Within it, all communication and exchange of ideas and information is lead. Having opportunity to pose a question in public, I was interested how much of it is really “social” and how much another obligation, imposed by the management and Joachim responded in a quite realistic way, stating that not everybody is using social network in the equal manner, however that its benefit is obvious, by showing instantly who the experts are (those blogging about various projects and offering arguments as response to comments) and who are not.
Panel on which I participated followed the talk on social networks and business, its topic was social media and its impact to society and legal regulation. Starting from Internet global governance, cases of censorship of YouTube channel in Turkey we managed to get to nationalism, which is related to my topic. Yet, it deserves a separate post, right?
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All in all, Glocal conference initiated some very interesting topics, using academic approach it covered a wide spectrum of issues, from strictly theoretical all the way to everyday practical. Regarding the topic, the whole event was covered on the net, which deserves praise. All presentations were broadcast on live stream, people could pose questions on Twitter, whereby the selection of the guests was real good. As I mentioned, this is the first conference I participated on and in my opinion it sets a high benchmark for all the others.
live-stream-glocal
Tags: glocal09, skopje, social media
