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China's Internet
and Chinese Cultures:
The Fourth Annual Chinese Internet
Research Conference 2006
Date:
21-22 July
2006
Venue:
Nanyang Executive Centre (NEC)@
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Organisers:
The Singapore Internet Research Centre (SIRC) and
the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Conference Report
The Singapore Internet Research Centre (SIRC) together with the
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, organized the Fourth Annual Chinese Internet Research
Conference (CIRC) from 21-22 Jul 2006 at the NTU campus in Singapore.
The conference brought together 60 top scholars, analysts, industry
leaders, journalists and legal practitioners from around the world
to examine the impact of the Internet on Chinese culture, and vice
versa.
Presently, China boasts the world's second largest online population,
behind only the United States. CIRC 2006 is the fourth conference
in a series of academic discussions that study the impact of Internet
and other new media technologies on China's culture and society
as well as how the Chinese perceive the changes taking place in
their social lives, work lives and relationships. The first conference
in the series was held in University of Southern California, and
the subsequent two were at UC-Berkeley and Michigan State University
respectively. The conference this year is the first held in Asia
and focused on the ways in which the Internet and other technologies
interact with Chinese culture and social life.
Besides the keynote speaker, Isaac Mao, a software architect and
one of the pioneers of blogging in China who shared his views on
the role of technology on China's social and cultural realms, the
conference was also attended by some of the key researchers and
industry practitioners. These would include, Rebecca McKinnon, former
CNN Beijing Bureau Chief, and founder of "Global Voices online"
at Harvard Law School; Guo Liang, Professor and Vice Director, Center
for Studies in Social Development, Beijing's Chinese Academy of
Social Science; Roland Soong, author of the East South West North
blog, and chief technical officer for KMR, the world's second-largest
media research firm; Deb Fallows, senior Research Fellow at the
Pew Internet & American Life Project and Xiao Qiang, Director
of The China Internet Project at the Graduate School of Journalism,
University of California at Berkeley.
Some of the issues discussed at the conference included Internet
use and social transformation in China; the social and political
implication of blogging in China; digital gaming in China; Internet
use in the rural areas of China; intellectual property and technological
development in China; national identity and political action and
Internet governance and regulation in China.
The 5th Annual Chinese Internet Research Conference 2007 will be
held at Texas A&M University.
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General
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