RKCSI Spring Lecture Series

Speaker: Hans Ibold, School of Journalism, Indiana University
Topic: New Media in Authoritarian Central Asia: Fuel for What?
Date: Friday, February 24, 2012
Time: 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Place: LI001 Wells Library (SLIS in Wells Library; East 10th St. entrance)

Talk preceded by an informal gathering with cookies, tea, and coffee, available at 1:45pm.


ABSTRACT
Emerging research on the role of media in social and political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East reminds us that newer networked media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the mobile Web are not inherently transformative. What matters is how people select and use these tools and in what cultural contexts. However, this does not mean that a search for generalizable patterns of transformation is futile. In this talk, I discuss a work-in-progress that explores how activists in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan use newer networked media tactically. I begin by drawing on my past work in Kyrgyzstan and on more recent research to discuss how newer media have opened up opportunities for alternative forms of expression, participation, and learning in Kyrgyzstan. I then discuss and seek feedback on a study I am designing that investigates an information technology activist culture and its influence in Kyrgyzstan. Considerable evidence suggests that this small group may be playing a role in spreading awareness and in connecting otherwise separate domestic and international people that can lead to new ideas, new identities, and new opportunities for group actions, as well as new tensions and entrenchment. Finally, I suggest that this small group of IT activists may be filling an information and community-building void left by the increasingly irrelevant news media in Kyrgyzstan.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Hans Ibold is an assistant professor at the IU School of Journalism. His research examines media and cultural globalization and the role journalism plays when media technologies and cultures converge. He was the technology reporter for the Los Angeles Business Journal, arts editor for the Idaho Mountain Express in Ketchum, Idaho and an online editor and features writer for Getty.edu. From 2003 to 2005, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan, where he continues to travel and carry out media research. Ongoing projects investigate Twitter and social change and new media literacies. For more information, see his website at: http://hanspeteribold.net/

This series is designed to introduce faculty, students and staff across the university to current research in social informatics conducted at IU and around the world. The Center is jointly sponsored by the IU Schools of Informatics and Library & Information Science, and the Kelley School of Business. For more information about the Center, please visit http://rkcsi.indiana.edu