The social mood reader: Mapping citizen engagement using the semantic web and supercomputing

Actual experiments in e-government and participatory online decision-makinghave, however, often proved disappointing. Traditional forms of governmentpolicy making and political organization, based upon centralised andhierarchical structures, one-to-many communications, and ‘push’ models ofstate–citizen interaction, have struggled to adapt to the decentralised, manyto-many forms of interaction of the Internet (Flew & Young 2005).Flew and Young’s quote above gets straight to the point. Participatory online decisionmakinginvolves more than consultation or sophisticated ways of delivering information tocitizens, although these of course are important. Online decision-making presupposes asocial-organisational structure that makes real decision-making possible. In this paper theauthor provides an overview of the use of sophisticated semantic web tools to calculatecitizen mood and the kinds of organisational structure emerging in local governmentjurisdictions that allow for actual decision-making

The impact of digital persona on the future of learning: A case study on digital repositories and the sharing of information about children at risk in Western Australia

Modern databases and digital depositories have the capacity to store vast amounts of information on individuals. In the case of normal everyday affairs, of course, there may be many databases and many organizations involved in collecting information on individuals. There are two types of digital persona possible in these environments active persona and passive persona (Clarke, 2001). In this paper the authors will report on initial results from an exploratory study on attitudes towards information sharing in Western Australian education and explore the role of active and passive digital persona in information sharing. Many organizations collect information on students, ranging from health, justice, and social security through to education. Sharing information on students is, the authors will rgue, essential to our understanding of the momentum of and the future for the digital and educational technology revolution. Students, in future, may want to have their own active digital persona. How these personae are constructed has implications for privacy legislation and how we construe the provision of education

Protecting the digital citizen: The impact of digital personae on ideas of universal access to knowledge and community

Universal service obligations (USOs) are designed to ensure that citizens of a modern state get access to basic services, from telecommunications to postal services. USOs are interventions in the marketplace to ensure that inequalities caused by geography or income or other impediments to access are compensated for. What constitutes access to \u27basic\u27 telecommunications, however, is being challenged by new technologies and new understandings about how people use telecommunications and media. In the past the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) was the \u27basic\u27 service. However, in this paper the authors argue that internet telecommunications makes \u27persona\u27 an important part of definition of USOs and in the delivery of essential telecommunications to modern digital communities and digital citizens

The Ratings Intellectual

There are key figures in the design and the maintenance of audience ratings that are often unknown to the public, but whose careers have been in assessing, evaluating and innovating ratings systems. They also tend to be the major figures in the auditing of ratings, of mapping changes in the audience with respect to the ratings, and indeed inventing new ratings systems. Gale Metzger in the United States, Tony Twyman in the UK, and Ian Muir in Australia are each key figures in this regard, but there are many more. In this paper the authors provide an historical overview of what we call the ratings intellectual. These intellectuals deal with ratings measurement as a form of knowledge and when crises in the operation of the ratings emerge they have had the highest profile in their solution. At the same time an important role has been played by more public figures who we can call “general ratings intellectuals”. Historically, some independent ratings intellectuals, like Leo Bogart, have had a public profile as public commentators on ratings as a form of social research alongside ratings entrepreneurs such as AC Nielsen and Hooper in the USA and Bill McNair in Australia who published extensively on audience measurement and ratings often as a means of educating their clients and selling their services. Leo Bogart provided a generation of market researchers with a sense of the utility and scope of ratings as a specific and limited form of market research; while entrepreneurs such as Arthur Neilsen and Bill McNair introduced and promoted the concept of the ratings to potential clients and the broader public in the ratings.After the formalisation of auditing functions from the mid-1960s ratings intellectuals increasingly became involved in both the ongoing investigation of the carriage of the ratings and in seeking improvements to its operations. To do this they often, like Bogart, operated outside the ratings companies themselves. Today, though, the ratings intellectual keeps a much lower profile as intellectuals exercising specific expertise within a particular technical domain even though their importance remains. Our principal figure here is Gale Metzger. The authors consider the operation of both personae as constitutive of the operation of modern ratings as a system of thought. It is our contention that the ratings intellectual represented a particular office although this office certainly changes over time. In this paper we are interested in two kinds of ratings intellectuals as distinct personae

The Atmosfear of Terror: Affective Modulation and the War on Terror

Since September 11, Muslims in Australia have experienced a heightened level of religiously and racially motivated vilification (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission). These fears were poignantly expressed in a letter to the Editor of The West Australian newspaper from a Muslim woman shortly after the London terror attacks

Transparency and the ubiquity of information filtration?

In past decades, the notion of information filtering was primarily associated with censorship and repressive, non-democratic countries and regimes. However, in the twenty-first century, filtration has become a widespread and increasingly normalised part of daily life. From email filters—designating some messages important, some less important, and others not worth reading at all (spam)—to social networks—with Facebook and Twitter harnessing social ties to curate, sort and share media—through to the biggest filtering agents, the search engines—whose self-professed aims include sorting, and thus implicitly filtering, all our information—filters are inescapable in a digital culture. However, as filtering becomes ubiquitous and normalised, are citizens en masse becoming too accepting or, worse, largely ignorant, of the power these filters hold

Rating the Audience

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse today's media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebook's privacy rulings and Google's alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals

Entering Farmville: Finding Value in Social Games

Social games—games that operate within social network sites (SNS) and draw on a user’s social graph—are a rapidly growing phenomena. According to AppData’s facebook applications report, Zynga’s social game, Farmville, as at the 15th March 2012, had 29,100,000 monthly active users (MAU) and 5,800,000 daily active users (DAU). The site also lists Farmville as no. 7 on the App leaderboard, and Zynga, the game designer, as no. 1 on the developer leaderboard with 245,429,908 MAU’s. These are not small numbers and clearly indicate a level of engagement and correspondingly, of revenue generation that warrant closer examination. However, the value of social gaming is far from just economic, with the experiences of game-play, and the broader social interactions possible surrounding social games, potentially creating value for the game company and players themselves in a number of different ways. This paper will explore the experience of the Zynga game Farmville, with particular focus on the question of value. Primary evidence will be drawn from the ethnographic experiences of one of the authors who spent several months immersed in Farmville as an explicitly positioned ethnographic researcher (as part of a larger ARC Linkage grant on social gaming on the internet). In order to situate these findings, this paper will also provide a brief history of the games leading to Farmville and explore the broader context of value creation in social games

Rating the Audience

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse today's media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebook's privacy rulings and Google's alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals

We are next! : Listening to Jewish voices in a multicultural country

If the notion of being at home in one’s country is safe and reassuring, the homeland and the heartland of what we judge important, then the thought that a countryneeds its own homeland security is destined to create a sense of unease. Australia’s homeland security unit was set up in May 2003 (Riley), just weeks after theallies’ Coalition of the Willing had celebrated George W Bush’s declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, of ‘Victory in Iraq’ (BBC). It might have been expected, inthis victorious glow, that the country would feel confidently able to return to a state of security. Apparently however – if paradoxically – it is only necessary to set upa department of Homeland Security when a country feels insecure. In a country of insecurity – and the dimensions of that insecurity were to be researched andteased out over the months and years to come – there are likely to be some people who feel more or less secure. What might the reasons be for people to feel fearfulin their own country