4 day long AoIR’s finally over (well, ok, it ended last friday… but then again, i’m living with “sunday vision”). it was a great conference. really enjoyed it. here are some of the highlights:

1st day: doctoral colloquium (qut kg)

we had randy kluver and barbara atkins as our chairs. people who are passionate about what they do are very sexy. yes, sometimes people like that may turn out to be a bit of psycho, but hey, what’s sexy without psychotic?

i had four main issues i really wanted people to help me with:

1. play - lack of direction in literature
2. contacts - for fieldwork in japan, korea, and china
3. mobile contents/applications - for case studies
4. actor network theory - where to from here? how can i cleverly overcome the temporal drawback of this and expand this for my research?

i got some interesting and helpful feedback from both the chairs and other students. it seems that the second phase of my methodology could be improved to make it more efficient and viable. this was my initial plan:

1. literature review
2. questionnaire and focus group (or interview)
3. case studies

after the presentation + feedback, plus a private chat with randy, it became clear to me that i may need to scrap the idea of quetionnaire (the main reason suggested was the difficulties that i will no doubt face, especially in china. randy’s got a lot of experience in research in china, and he warned me in a nice way about the hardship of conducting “structured” research in china) and replace it with interviews only. randy commented that he thought my project was extremely exciting and fascinating, but my methodology may present a lot of hinderances. i’ve thought about it for a while, and decided to go with the interview method. barbara and randy were so helpful, i feel really indebted.

i personally find deleuze’s ideas facsinating - though i only have an extremely limited amount of understanding - so polly mcgee’s presentation interested me. we’ve emailed each other since, so hopefully we can keep in touch. enjoyed listening to other people’s ideas too. apart from the fact that we had no sweets for morning/afternoon tea and very limited consideration for vegetarians in terms of food prepartion, and consequent physical and emotional pain, it was an enjoyable day, at least cognitively.

2nd - 4th day (hilton)

unlike most of us who pay to talk, keynote speakers are paid to talk. obviously there are reasons for that, and i enjoyed the keynotes (john hartley and guo liang). there was one session that i particularly enjoyed - incidentally full of qut people, not just qut people but qut people i like :) - jean burgess, sal humphreys, christina spurgen, and melissa gregg (uq). jean’s idea of new media literacy in relation to usability and hackability was very interesting (smart woman!); jean mentioned that people’s desire to improve their photographic skills is one of the main motives behind their continued flickr participation. this made sense to me as well, as i believe that “social productivity” is main reason behind the continued participation in cyworld in korea. i would like to contemplate further on the similarities and differences between flickr and cyworld from the productivity perspective. sal talked about regulations in multiuser online games, which was fascinating as well. i quickly - despite jean’s official “no more comment/quetions” - mentioned two animations before i left the room for another presentation: serial experiments lain and .hack. serial experiments lain was what brought me into the world of digital communications research. i watched the series (thanks to gt) in my 2nd year of undergrad, and i was blown away. unfortunately someone mentioned some website or something right after my comment, so i had so many people coming up to me during the break asking about the “websites”… haha. oh well.

other sessions i found exciting:

• nancy baym: The Internet in advice columns: Constructing relational consequences
  - i love her energy; it was really fun to listen to her talk
• marta celletti: The Internet as a Time of Regression: a hypothesis
  - big, interesting ideas. lots to think about.
• marika luders: Converging forms of communication?
  - i liked her simple yet effective interaction-participation-social integration approach. met her at the doctoral colloquium. she’s fun. tres cool.

i met a lot of great people at the conference, which was the best thing about the conference for me. it was a very enjoyable experience. it was a long one as well, so accepting the end of it felt pretty weird, as i said in my group email the other day:

the aoir conference has been such a major, though temporary, shift in my daily routine, it felt so surreal to walk out of the Hilton last Friday (had drinks to chill out, but it became even more surreal especially with nick cave’s little message on the toilet wall, rainbow, and the boys in their underpants parading victoriously around new farm after the game).
obviously i didn’t stay for the wrap-up; went to anise in new farm with oksana. had a wonderful time. surreal. definitely. and fantastic.

anyway, another conference weekend - going to ATOM conference. crazy busy. but i don’t mind it at all. especially since 4pm yesterday ;)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under events, talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.