This is my talk, given today at the NMIC2010 conference.

Bonus material (questions and discussion) can be found here.

This week, I am attending NMIC2010 in the lovely city of Istanbul. The 2nd International Conference of New Media and Interactivity brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and countries to discuss topics such as the theoretical and conceptual framework of new media, new media and visual culture, networks and web technologies, and everyday life and new media.

This morning, I had the opportunity to listen to Christine Ogan – one of the keynote speakers – who gave an interesting talk about the role played by mass communication theory in the process wherein new theory has been developed in the field of new media research in the last ten years.

In the afternoon, I attended a number of interesting paper presentations: M. Hank Hausler spoke of urban digital media displays and the development of a protocol for generating collaborative creative content generation on such screens. At the intersection of architecture, information and culture, there is a lot of work to be done to meet the needs emerging from new modes of communication, and new ways of appropriating and navigating urban space. The things that are being done by Hank’s research group (UrbanAid, University of Sydney) seem really promising and exciting as regards possibilities for turning urban environments into connected multi-media spaces.

Melda Öncü Yıldız had written a thought-provoking paper on how the use of 3D computer graphics in movies affect the narrative and mode of storytelling, using examples from Star Trek, Star Wars, Tron, Lord of the Rings etc. to discuss this.

My colleague Ragnar Lundström did very well with his presentation on Representations of Benefit Fraud: Comparing Newspaper and Blog Discourse in Sweden and the UK. The talk was well delivered and generated the most engaged discussion of all of the papers in his session. All of the papers from NMIC2010 are available in a phonebook sized proceedings volume that will hopefully be available online in the near future.

The Bjästa case, more thoroughly described by bénédicte has been a quite major news event in Sweden lately. There is a 58 minute documentary from Swedish television available here. In brief, the case revolves around the rape of a 14 year old girl by an older boy in a school toilet in the small town of Bjästa in Sweden. She reported this to the police, the boy confessed, but still no one believed her. Adults and kids alike all seemed to think that, because he was too handsome and kind, it could never be true that the boy in question had committed a sexual offense. Social media has been a highlighted topic in news reporting and other public discourse on the events as much of the hate campaign towards the victim seems to have taken place through such platforms. There was, for example, a Facebook support group for the perpetrator.

I was invited to Örnsköldsvik, close to Bjästa, this Saturday to an event where youth workers, teachers, NGO representatives, politicians, as well as people in general gathered to discuss how to “deal with” youth culture, morality, and social media in the wake of these events. My main point was that the Bjästa case, even though illustrating the great potential of social media to mobilize people and to get your message out (no matter what it may be), could of course had happened just as well without these tools. I devoted my talk to try to give an objective account of the potential as well as pitfalls of using digital media for social and cultural aims. Around 150 people turned up, and my contribution was well-received. It feels good to take part in these kinds of things when you actually feel that you can make some sort of difference. The radio coverage as well as the tv coverage of the event is available online.