March 23, 2007
Networked Publics, 24/7, and looking to the future
It is spring, and changes are afoot.
We are inching towards closure on a collaborative research project that I was part of at the Annenberg Center in 2006-07. A few months ago I finished writing the introduction to the Networked Publics book that Kazys is editing, and I've just posted it here. I'm looking forward to this work getting out in print, but in the meantime, you can see drafts of the chapters on the networked publics site. Our goal for this book is to have a readable overview of current trends in Internet society and culture, centered around the shift towards the lateral networking of "publics." I hope my introduction does justice to the collection of essays represented there as this was a truely interdisciplinary and collaborative project.
The legacy of the networked publics group does not end there. Ever since the conference that we put on, a group of us at the Annenberg Center have been putting together plans for an event that focused on one dimension of the networked publics research agenda. After the Networked Publics Conference a year ago, we targeted video as the medium that would be next in the pipeline for radical reconfigutation. This hardly sounds prescient at this point in time, but we really did not anticipate the degree to which Internet video has captured the limelight in the past six months. This work to plan a follow on event is becoming more concrete, and we have recently announced it on our DIY media blog and on a new live journal community. "24/7: A DIY Video Summit" is an ambitious event aimed at making a statement and an intervention in the space of Internet video by drawing together creative, industry, and academic groups.
All of this comes at a bittersweet time because USC recently announced that it will be "decentralizing" the Annenberg Center, where all this work has been taking place, and which has been an ideal home for my research for almost five years now. There will no longer be a place for researchers and research projects at the center, and I will be moving, together with my projects and team, to another institutional home. I'm grateful for all the support that the center has give me so far - the warm and effective staff, the leadership, and fellow researchers. It really was an exceptional place to work, and the legacy of the research and relationships fostered there will have a lasting influence.
Posted by Mizuko Ito at March 23, 2007 11:28 PM
Comments
Hi Mimi,
I was just catching up on your work today, as I wanted to cite your work on "networked publics." The intro chapter is excellent and I look forward to reading the whole book.
This past year, I've been overseeing interviews with high school journalists. One of the things we were looking at was the extent to which high school journalists have a sense of their role in relation to a public (e.g., perhaps the act of producing high school media helps them think beyond themselves, or tends to draw young people with a predisposition to be more collective in orientation). One interesting thing so far is that it seems like high school journalists are not, by and large, bloggers. I thought maybe they'd be "prosumers" or active in the building of a youthful networked public as informants on world events within their peer groups or something like that. Instead, I'm now wondering whether those who self-select as media producers in high school tend to share assumptions about news and public life with their more senior professionals in the news industries: e.g., they see themselves as gatekeepers, but circumscribed within existing means of communication (the school paper, yearbook, radio, mainly).
This is just kind of an interesting thing I'm ruminating about today and your work on networked publics is helping me to think about it. I think the observation about high school journalists points to the fact that the re-creation of journalism, as its undergoing change in relation to the emergence of the blogosphere, may have to come from those outside professional socialization into news. But how those outsiders connect with the insiders will remain to be seen, as even at the youthful level, it's far from clear.
Anyway, just thought I'd drop in to say hi. I am so sorry to learn of the developments at Annenberg! You all are the CAPITAL of digital youth insights! It's a real loss to all of us out in the hinterlands who look west for leadership in this field. Of course, I know that wherever you go from here will be interesting and enlightening.
Best wishes,
Lynn
Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor and Director,
Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media
School of Communication
2490 S. Gaylord St.
Denver, CO 80208
Lynn.Clark@du.edu
website: www.du.edu/~lclark29
blog: http://lynn-s-clark.livejournal.com
That's VERY interesting about the profile of high school journalists. That's neat that you are doing this study. I'd love to hear more about it. I'm really interested in the ways social reproduction works or doesn't work across and among generations. When does generational identity trump other forms of identity? In the case you are looking at, it seems like generational identity is not winning over this other form of identity.