The 5th Int’l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
19-21 July 2011, Barcelona, Spain
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
The fifth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media brings together researchers from the disciplines of NLP, Social Psychology, Data Mining, Sociology and Visualization to increase our understanding of social media in all its incarnations. Research that blends social science and technology is especially encouraged.
Vladimir Barash is attending the 2011 ICWSM and reports from the sessions.
These are rough notes from Day One of ICWSM.
Manuel Castells – Keynote. Social Media and Wiki-Revolutions
–social media and social change
–what makes human human = meaningful communication
—changes in the nature of communication process => changes everywhere in society
—-more specifically, changes in the nature of communication process => changes in power relationships
—(mass-self communication) = social media
—-organized by large corporations but driven by desires of communicators (people)
—-this principle is embedded in the technical structure of the internet
—–enterpreneurial character, hacker culture
–culture of autonomy
–individuation != individualism
—referential point for society in what groups of individuals decide is important for them (as opposed to cultural / societal institutions)
–Castells study of internet usage in Catalonia
—empirical test of Internet as a platform of autonomy
—results: top 20% of population ranking high on autonomy according to several personality-based characteristics use the internet the most
—suggest there is a synergistic interaction between autonomy and use of the Internet(?)
–power and counter-power = dynamics of society