KEYNOTE SPEAKER
All's WELL That Ends:
The Origins and Future of Online Community
Steve Jones, University of Illinois at Chicago
This presentation is focused on the connections between online community and commerce/economics, particularly the rhetoric of community as it has been taken up by those in e-commerce endeavors. It makes the case that the most influential symbol for online community, the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) should be examined in light of sociocultural trends apart from Internet-related ones, most importantly those that began to shape the social mores of the Baby Boom generation in the late 1960s. Of particular importance is the borrowing of language and ideas from Sixties literature and song in subsequent structuring of community discourse. Examining the rhetoric of online community in this context will add a missing link to ongoing debates about the construction of online community. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the consequences of telepresence and immersive technologies for online community.
Steve Jones has been Internetworking since 1979 when he was using and co-authoring educational materials on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Communication from the Institute for Communications Research there in 1987, and is author of five books, including Doing Internet Research, CyberSociety and Virtual Culture. A social historian of communication technology, his books have earned him critical acclaim and interviews for stories in Time, the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsweek and several other newspapers and magazines. He has also been interviewed on radio and TV, and has been a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and "Sounds Like Science." Jones, co-founder of the association(of).internet.researchers, has made numerous presentations to scholarly and business groups about the Internet and social change and about the Internet's social and commercial uses, and was selected to participate in the U.S. Department of Commerce's efforts to review proposals for funding parts of the "information highway." He is co-editor of New Media & Society, an international journal of research on new media, technology, and culture and edits New Media Cultures, a series of books on culture and technology for Sage Publications. He has provided Internet consulting services to High Tech Resources, Inc., Thrifty Car Rental, The Wallis Group, Walsh Associates, The Greater Tulsa Association of Realtors, and Dave Beson Seminars, among others. Jones's interests in technology and policy are also evident in his research into popular music, youth culture and communication. His first book, Rock Formation: Technology, Music and Mass Communication was nominated for the BMI/Rolling Stone Gleason Award and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research Award. He has published numerous journal articles, among them "Critical Legal Studies and Popular Music Studies" in Stanford Humanities Review, "Unlicensed Broadcasting: Content and Conformity" in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, "A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity and the Aural" in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, "Source and Geographic Bias in U.S. Network News" in The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and "Re-Viewing Rock Writing: Recurring Themes in Popular Music Criticism" in American Journalism. Jones is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois - Chicago. Additional information can be found at http://info.comm.uic.edu/jones Contact information: Steve Jones, Ph.D.
|
Steve Jones