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In the week from 21 May to 28 May I attended for the third time the annual conference of the ICA, the International Communication Association. This year the location was in San Francisco ? what an amazingly friendly, relaxed city that is! – and as usual it was huge. Approximately 2000 communication scholars were presenting their work in 480 sessions consisting of four paper presentations each (with some so called high density sessions with 10-50 poster presentations).
The motto for this year was Creating Communication: Content, Control & Critique. While this sounds as critical and cutting edge new media studies, there also was ? as usual ? a lot of boring classical communication stuff.

Plain empirical research regarding PR-campaigns, health communication, effect studies of advertising, organizationial consultancy and several kinds of 'inter' communication (intergroup, intercultural, interpersonal, international…) In sessions organized by divisions as Communication & Technology, Information Systems, Mass Media and Journalism Studies one could find both dull papers and gems, but most of the interesting stuff came from more sparkling divisions as Philosophy of Communication, Visual Culture, Game Studies, Popular Communication, Feminist Scholarship, and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Studies. Indeed, the ICA is a mixed bag!

Sonia Livingstone, this years' chair, who probably came up with the general theme, did a good job with the plenary speakers and panels. The opening plenary was about Reflections on the Critical Role of Communication Scholarship, and had a panel of four women, though I did not hear anything new and exciting. The same in fact holds for the other plenary about What's so significant about social networking? This panel had big names as Howard 'virtual communities' Rheingold (who finally entered academia), Henry 'participatory culture' Jenkins, and Tiziana Terranova, who was already on my list of 'interesting scholars to check out'. Terranova, a lofty marxist scholar, had the most interesting contribution, dissecting the discourse on Web 2.0, focusing on the recurring term 'harnessing' in O'Reilly's classic text on Web 2.0. I really have to check this lady out! (book: Network cultures, and review of her book)
Rheingold and Jenkins were, well, just plainly Rheingold and Jenkins… Rheingold did a history trip on communities and social networking from the early days of the Internet until now, very much like the lectures we give in our courses in Utrecht (though we are less optimistic and more critical about data mining. Funny moment was when he asked the audience who knows the expression ' never ending september' ? I was the only one who raised my finger! In a communication scholars audience of I think 500!¹In the debate about contemporary social networks Rheingold referred to Trebor Scholz's claim that we all perform unpaid labor by providing our private and social data to the new net entrepreneurs and I was rather shocked about his comment: 'Well, who cares?' Come on, this panel was supposed to be about about net criticism, and when no one cares scholars should care all the more!

Picking out several sessions in the loaden programme I could recognize a pattern in new media communications trends: blogs are still rather hot (but it seemed stronger last year), but rising star theme is definitely the study of social networks as My Space, Facebook and Hyves. But this might as well be biased by my own interests…
My own presentation was ? of course ? in the division Philisophy of Communication. The panel was about The Mediatic Turn: Concepts & Consequences, and here I claimed that the mediatic turn was already over, that we should study the complex transmediations held together by transcoding metaphors (such as the metaphor of 'community' or 'Web 2.0′).²
Unfortunately we did not have a big audience, but on the other hand this facilitates really good debates. One women had very clever remarks about hyperlinks as communication device, I was very intrigued by her comments. She modestly said she was working in the field of Library Studies, but when I approached her after the session, she appeared to be Leah Lievrouw, co-editor with Sonia Livingstone of the The Handbook of New Media. She will be in Amsterdam at the end of June on the conference New Network Theory, check out this lady!

Speaking of network theory, Geert Lovink, organizer of NNT, was also present at the ICA. In a plenary panel about blogs all speakers except Geert saw blogs only as news blogs, claiming new civic journalism and agenda setting, but Geert's keynote really hit the issue: blogs as a sepcial effect of software and as daily life thing for ordinary people. Though I still don't understand why Geert insists on calling blogs so pejoratively a nihilist impulse. Or perhaps I just disagree.

In the margins of the ICA sessions I mused about interesting research projects, about the way people appropriate and personalize their desktops (at the ICA you have to bring your own laptop for your presentations – I have seen a lot of baby pictures or local scenery as background picture), and about the way people do not appropriate PowerPoint templates. Apparently Microsoft's PowerPoint has a flaw somewhere: all tables are displayed in Times New Roman, regardless of the design and fonts of the other slides ? yes, I am sensitive to sloppy design, MS formats and thoughtless use…

To end in genuine blog style with trivial but personally valueable notes: I had a terrific time in SF, dining and drinking with Amsterdam ASCOR-collegues Jeroen Jansz and Mirjam Vosmeer. With Mirjam I biked the Golden Gatebridge, piece of cake for solid Dutch girls And we met Christine, my dear old Digital City mate, who is living in San Jose now, still going strong with her cutting edge technological inventions in her Sillicon Valley company. My other Christina, my supervisor, was a bit disappointed in me, because I did not show up at the PhilCom party… Ehrm, I hate networking at receptions, I am not a networking type. But damn, Terranova was there… Well, you can't have everything.

1. 'Never ending September' (or eternal September, see also nl.eeuwig.september) refers to the moment in 1993 when AOL offered Usenet access to its thousands of clueless users who asked perpetual newbie questions. While for years newbies only flooded the Internet in September, when the new students arrived on the university computer networks, from then on it was never ending September on the growing Internet. (↩ back to text ↩)
2. I will post my paper as soon as it is finished. Yeah, I know, it's a shame… (↩ back to text ↩)