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.

I am now at the Inaugural Conference of the VIRT3C Research Group at the University of Hull. The overall themes are collaborative production and the exploration of strengths and weakness of peer technology and open projects.

VIRT3C will bring leading cybertheorists, internet, peer production and social networking experts together for knowledge-sharing, and collaboration in interdisciplinary academic projects, facilitating original ideas for research and funding applications. It will provide a physical base and a hub of activity, provoking and supporting new ideas of research to several successful virtual networks, such as the P2P Foundation, Oekonux and other virtual communities.

During the first day, I did a talk called sub*culture: exploring the dynamics of a networked public. It was part of the session on “Network Publics, Citizenship and Piracy” where the two other presenters were Johan Söderberg, who gave an interesting talk about the Swedish pirate movement, and Athina Karatzogianni whose presentation was on the China-Google cyberconflict. The full programme can be found here.

Some highlights from my notepad during day 1:

– “bankable dissent” (Yang, 2009) seems to be an interesting concept

–  Judith Butler’s paper “Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance” (1997) has some nice passages about how “one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one’s utterance” (p. 365)

– “the Megan Meier affair” is a telling and tragic, however extreme, example of cyberbullying

– the paper “Sharing Nicely” by Yochai Benkler seems to be worth checking out

– three recent trends in web 2.0 as identified by Geert Lovink: (1) the colonization of real-time [using technology to get as close as possible to real-time events]; (2) comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions; (3) the emergence of national webs [a global internet has become utopian, again]

Today, we are presenting a new research project called DVIS – Domestic Violence and the Internet in Sweden. The goal of this project is to map how victims of domestic violence in Sweden are using the internet and social media both to find information and to connect with networks of people that they may not otherwise have access to when living in situations of domestic violence.

This project is planned over three years, and will end with a symposium to which policy makers, victim’s rights advocates, and researchers will be invited in order to start a discussion about domestic violence victims’ habits online and how we can learn from these habits so as to provide information and support to the people who need it.

One thing that we have noticed, just in the short amount of time since we have begun this project, is how much networking and conversation is going on outside of forums that are dedicated to domestic abuse support. Perhaps this is an issue of safety, as cookies to places like Post Secret, Twitter and Second Life landmarks are not as dangerous as cookies to women’s (and men’s) help organizations. Actually, PostSecret has a very interesting and active community and when postcards are posted that talk about abuse, there are often many instances of other’s ‘reporting’ or showing solidarity through telling similar accounts.

Beyond systems of support, what happens when this technology – that we argue could play an important role in providing a social network when real-world networks have been removed – is used against the victim? If the aide agency does not have a warning, will the user think of clearing – or know how to clear – the browser history? Will pictures posted on Facebook of a child’s birthday party, which the uploader thought only a select few would be able to see, but due to holes in security when commenting on something, provide a way for an abuser to find the victim’s location?

More information about the DVIS project can be found on the project’s website here.

The presentation that we will give today can be found here (in Swedish).

I am now on my way home from the international conference on Violence and Network Society: School Shootings and Social Violence in Contemporary Public Life hosted by the Department of Communciation at Helsinki University. All in all, this two-day cross disciplinary event about the mediation and communication of school shootings, terrorism and other forms of social violence was excellent. The first conference day was ended with a strong performance “About the Making of a Dangerous Individual” by British/Finnish artist Steve Pratt. I also got the chance to chat with Steve, and he gave me DVD of one of his performances relating to communicating controversial content through video, and we agreed that I should give him some comments on that from my research perspective. The second day of the conference was ended on a similarly thought provoking note with the screening of  Estonian director Ilmar Raags movie “The Class“. Raag also took part in one of the conference panels.

For my own part, I managed to get in contact with a number of interesting people, most notably a group of visual researchers from Jacobs University Bremen headed by Professor Marion G. Müller, but I also had interesting conversations with the three prominent keynote speakers (Douglas Kellner, Barbie Zelizer, and Stewart Clegg) as well as with a number of other people that I plan to stay in contact with, for example Glenn Muschert and Kari-Andén Papadopoulos. My own presentation went really well, and there seemed to be a large interest in the methods I have used. In the sessions I attended, I particularly enjoyed the presentation on “Violence, Victims and Emotionality in Finnish Crime-Appeal Programming” by Mirka Smolej. Her interesting research is quite reminiscent of things I work on in my project on crime victims in the Swedish press.