A 'Value Ecology' approach to the performing arts

In recent years, ecological thinking has been applied to a range of social, cultural and aesthetic systems, including performing arts as a living system of policy makers, producers, organisations, artists and audiences. Ecological thinking is systems-based thinking which allows us to see the performing arts as a complex and protean ecosystem; to explain how elements in this system act and interact; and to evaluate its effects on Australia’s social fabric over time. According to Gallasch, ecological thinking is “what we desperately need for the arts.” It enables us to “defeat the fragmentary and utilitarian view of the arts that dominates, to make connections, to establish overviews of the arts that can be shared and debated” (Gallasch NP). John Baylis took up these issues in "Mapping Queensland Theatre" (2009), an Arts Queensland-funded survey designed to map practices in Brisbane and in Queensland more broadly, and to provide a platform to support future policy-making. In this paper, we propose a new approach to mapping Brisbane’s and Queensland’s theatre that extends Baylis’ ‘value chain’ into a ‘value ecology’ that provides a more textured picture of players, patterns, relationships and activity levels in local performing arts

The lusophony in the blogosphere: from the “imagined community” to the “imaginative community”

Publicado em: "Colonialisms, post-colonialisms and lusophonies: proceedings of the 4th International Congress in Cultural Studies". ISBN 978-989-98219-2-7Departing from the observation that the blogosphere is nowadays a powerful communication space between Lusophone citizens - users of Portuguese language constitute the fifth largest language community on the Internet (Macedo , Martins & Macedo , 2010) - this paper presents some findings of a study that sought to examine the contents of fifteen blogs, Brazilian Mozambican and Portuguese, in relation to representations of the Lusophony. The results show that many aspects of the Portuguese colonial empire long history, from its achievements to its vicissitudes, are reminded, communicated and discussed in order to justify points of view, whether favorable or unfavorable, about the meaning of a Lusophone community. Regarding it as a kind of imperial extension, both its advocates (usually nostalgic Portuguese on their supposedly glorious historical past), as its detractors (mostly Africans and Brazilians who preserve the memory of a past of domination), tend to produce simplified representations that result in tensions and misunderstandings. Consequently, there is confusion between the nowadays geocultural community of Lusophony and its own past. This confusion is connected with the crossing of the independent present of those who speak, think and feel in Portuguese with the colonial past, which led them to the meeting of their cultures. In fact, on the blogosphere, lusophony is emphasized, on one hand, as a Portuguese colonial empire heritage and, one the other hand, as an unequivocal proof of its radical disappearance. It is concluded that such a diversity of representations can turn this “imagined community” into a “imaginative community.”

Feelings as traces of colonialism. The online debate about compensation for the Indo-European community in the Netherlands analyzed through the sociology of emotions.

This thesis investigates the contemporary online debate about compensation for the Indo-European community in the Netherlands, using the sociology of emotions as a theoretical lens. It consists of a qualitative text analysis of posts and comments in the Indo-European blogosphere, respectively from Blimbing, Indisch4Ever and Java Post. Readers’ letters published in Moesson – a monthly magazine devoted to the Indo-European community – are used as an additional source. Anger is a prominent emotion in the Indo-European blogosphere. Differentiating the range of emotions revolving around compensation allows for the act of being angry to be seen as an act of emancipation in a postcolonial context, in which behaviour previously reserved to the former colonizer, is appropriated. However fulfilling the performance of anger may be on the individual level, it complicates the possibilities for dialogue on a societal level by enforcing opposing identities of protestors versus government. This leads commenters in the Indo-European blogosphere to continue to regard the Dutch government with distance and distrust. It also causes the debate about compensation to rarely transcend its financial level, rather than be regarded as part of a wider process of recognition

Online politics and grassroots activism in Lebanon: negotiating sectarian gloom and revolutionary hope

This article describes the confluence of online activism and street protests in Lebanon. While Arab protesters have systematically been portrayed as young, urban and wired since the 2011 uprisings, Lebanese activists are also often regarded as trapped between war and sectarianism. This article challenges both frameworks and looks closer at the ways pre-existing waves of discontent crystallised into the mobilisation of thousands of Lebanese onto the streets of Beirut in 2010 and 2011. To achieve this, the article critiques the over-emphasis on network politics that accompanies internet-related hypotheses. The fashioning of a new kind of politics outside the dominant political factions (‘8–14 March’ blocs) was crucial for activists in Lebanon. New independent initiatives that locate feminist and queer politics within an overall analysis of imperialism and capitalism, as well as experimentation with digital technologies, helped forge a unique and non-sectarian camaraderie. By conveying the circumstances that have shaped political involvement, this article avoids the projection of non-ideological/networked politics that dominate concepts of online activism. The internet played a dual role in Lebanese grassroots politics, as illustrated through the experiences of the feminist collective Nasawiya

Social media and personal blogging: Textures, routes and patterns

Weblogging (or blogging) is one the social media, characteristic of the web 2.0 generation. In this article, I will present a research on the Danish blogosphere, the focus of which has been on individual and personal blogging. Inspired by media geography, I pursue the idea that personal blogging can be understood as an embodied, collaborative and distributed practice which constitutes a digital realm to be inhabited by its users. Within media geography, the concept of “textures”, taken form Henri Lefevbre and the sociology of everyday life, designates how the self, the everyday and the mundane are spun together and mark out different cultural-material routes in and between space and place, real and virtual and in so doing create different reticular patterns of the commonplace (Falkheimer & Jansson, 2006; Jansson, 2002, 2008). By means of the concepts of textures, routes and patterns, I identify four different genres in personal blogging to be illustrated by four examples from the Danish blog community.Sociale medier og personlige blogs: teksturer, ruter og mønstre Weblogging (eller blogging) er et af de sociale medier, der er karakteristiske for den såkaldte web 2.0 generation. I denne artikel skal jeg præsentere et studie i den danske blogosfære, hvis fokus er den personlige blog. Inspireret af mediegeografien skal jeg forfølge den tese, at den personlige blog kan forstås som en kropsliggjort, samarbejdende og distribueret praksis, der tilvejebringer et digitalt rum, som kan bebos af de deltagende, dvs. såvel bloggere som brugere. Inden for mediegeografien beskriver begrebet ”tekstur”, taget fra Henri Lefevbre og hverdagssociologien, hvordan selvet, hverdagen og det ordinære (i betydningen fælles og almene) væves sammen, men på forskellige måder, der hver især afmærker forskellige ruter i og imellem rum og steder, det virkelige og det virtuelle og derved også skaber forskellige mønstre i og af dette fællesrum (Falkheimer & Jansson, 2006; Jansson, 2002 og 2008). Ved hjælp af begreberne teksturer, ruter og mønstre identificeres i artiklen fire forskellige genrer i personlig blogging, der illustreres gennem 4 eksempler fra det danske blogmiljø

Blogging the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals

This study focuses on the use of new technologies by the sports-media complex, looking specifically at the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals. Combining the world's single largest sports media event with one of the most current, complex forms of Web-based communication, this article explores extent to which football fans embedded in Germany used the Internet to blog their World Cup experiences. Various categories of blog sites were identified, including independent bloggers, bloggers using football-themed Web sites, and blogs hosted on corporate-sponsored platforms. The study shows that the anticipated "democratizing potential" of blogging was not evident during Germany 2006. Instead, blogging acted as a platform for corporations, which, employing professional journalists, told the fans' World Cup stories. © 2009 Human Kinetics, inc

Diversity of thought in the blogosphere: implications for influencing and monitoring image

A blog, a shortened form of weblog, is a website where an author shares thoughts in posts or entries. Most blogs permit readers to add comments to posts and thereby be a conversational mechanism. One way that companies have started to use blogs is to monitor their corporate image (in this dissertation, the term image is used in reference to corporate, brand and/or product image). This study focuses on how common socio-psychological processes mediate consumers’ revelation of corporate image in the blogosphere. Centering resonance analysis, a means of measuring similarity between two bodies of text, is used in conjunction with multidimensional scaling to locate text as cognitive objects in a space. Clusters are then detected and measured to quantify diversity in the thoughts expressed. Detected patterns are studied from a social process theory perspective, where complex phenomena are hypothesized to be the result of the interaction of simpler processes. A majority of blog commenters compromise the expression of their thoughts to gain social acceptance. This study identifies the most extreme of such people so companies who monitor blogs can assign less weight to image indications gained from them as they may be merely expressing thoughts that are intended to maintain social acceptance. It was also found that single-theme blogs attract a readership with similarly narrow interests. The boldest and most diverse thinkers among comment writers have the most impact because of their ability to provoke the thinking of others. However, commenters who repeat the same ideas have little effect, suggesting that introducing shills is unlikely to shift the sentiment of a blog’s readership. People participate in blog communities for reasons (e.g., need for community) that may undermine thought diversity. However, there may be value in serving those needs even though no valuable insights are provided into image or directions for product development. Members of homogeneous-thinking communities were observed to more actively participate, with greater longevity. This may increase loyalty to the company hosting the blog

Understanding Collective Reflection in Crowdsourcing for Innovation: A Semantic Network Approach

Empowered by the wisdom of crowds, innovation nowadays is increasingly relying on diverse individuals’ knowledge collaboration. Research on crowdsourcing and open innovation has demonstrated that through deliberate understanding and reflective thinking, members of the online crowd collectively manage their knowledge to generate innovative ideas. However, the semantic patterns of how online crowd’s collective reflection ultimately leads up to innovation remains unclear. Employing semantic network approach, this study analyzed a total of 1,116 posts contributed by online crowds responding to two organization-sponsored crowdsourcing open innovation challenges. Findings show that the semantic patterns of online crowds’ knowledge collaboration evolve from one phase to another in accordance with crowd members’ collective reflection on their diverse knowledge. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Researching identity narratives in cyberspace: some methodological challenges

Cyberspace as a study object entails remarkable challenges to researchers, especially because it is an immaterial and highly changeable environment. This paper addresses some of the methodological challenges faced during a research about Lusophone identity narratives in blogs and sites in Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal, and the outlined strategies to overcome the difficulties found. The first challenge was how to design a Lusophone cyberspace cartography, due to the fact that, on one hand, everyday there are new blogs and new sites online, on the other hand, many of these blogs and sites suddenly disappear. Then, some challenges were faced to conduct the content analyses of the selected blogs and sites. In addition, the study objects were too different to enable the use of a single observation protocol, with pre-established categories. Furthermore, there were some questions to deal with the statistical analyses of the blogs. Initially, the researchers concluded that the statistical analyses, which in some cases depend on the collection of data within the blogs, might inflate the results obtained, for instance the number of visitors, the visitors’ origin and the visit average time. Therefore, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was a valid methodological concern because the blogs and sites observation probably would change the object behaviour. Finally, a well-known research question was addressed: how to interview the bloggers and the webmasters while minimising the impact of the interview in the blogs’ content production. Having identified and described the challenges faced during the research, the aim of this paper is to discuss some methodological ideas about how to study identity narratives on cyberspace.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT