my first conference
Posted by popkitchen | Filed under academic
by new media center@flickr
Following a really busy Tuesday, I hopped on the bus and by Wednesday morning, I landed in Skopje, Macedonia to attend a Glocal conference at New York University in Skopje. This year’s topic is “Inside Social Media”.
I had to sleep a bit, so I missed introductory speeches, as well as few presentations, apparently the rift between theoreticians and practitioners showed immediately.
Paul Bradshaw did not appear in person, but via video link (which I also missed), however the project he presented seems really interesting. Help me Investigate is a web platform on which citizens of British city Birmingham are posing questions, initiating investigations regarding the issues of public importance. For example, people are interested how the city funds are being utilized, why certain services cost as much as they cost or how to obtain certain documents.
The next presentation, by Daniel Kempf from Germany, continued in a same vein, as he talked about Myheimat project. It is a combination of online and print media – central point is a website, to which citizens contribute news stories from their local community. The most interesting features are published in a magazine, which is distributed freely, throughout local communities, enabled by local advertisers. The project is completely self-sustainable, pointing out the way to go in the future. Hyperlocal is what they call it. In my view, if hyperlocal replaces (or at least overshadows to a great extent) traditional media, such as newspapers with national coverage, it is the ultimate fragmentation of common culture, as people would lose interest for global affairs or anything happening outside their immediate community. Call me paranoid, but I find this very worrying.
What followed where presentations on the evolution of photo albums from analogue to digital, with the emphasis on the selection process – how do we interpret the selection we post on Facebook profile, in relation to thousands of photos that are stored on our hard drives. Also, there was a presentation on the influence of Skype on interpersonal communication.
The discussion that followed showed the different expectations of audience, some came to learn something new in order to apply it in their business, while others are more interested in the influence of online media on education, especially of young people, to whom new media is not new, but the only media they know. In that regard commentary on the revolutionary discourse of new media, which are not new, nor revolutionary hit the target.
The conference can be followed, through different channels:
Twitter, hashtag #glocal09
Live stream
Flickr coverage
Tags: glocal, skopje, social media
