网络政治博客与现代公共治理

网络政治博客对现代公共治理的介入,激发了现代公共治理中公民政治参与意识。博客对政治事件的追踪,一定程度上成为现代公共治理中治理者与公众互动的重要手段,某种意义上提高了现代公共治理中治理者的治理素质。通过建立公共治理过程中博客政治参与话语机制,培育公共治理过程中博客政治参与快速反应机制,甄别公共治理过程中博客政治参与信息的真伪性,都将有助于网络时代现代公共治理的普遍形成。     

Autocratic adaptation: The strategic use of transparency and the persistence of election fraud

Why would an autocrat want, or at least make it appear to want, to reduce election fraud? In recent years, non-democratic rulers have surprisingly begun to embrace fraud-reducing technologies, like web cameras or transparent ballot boxes. The reason for this is found in the relative ease by which one type of fraud can be replaced with another. With the help of new fraud identification techniques, I argue that the installation of web cameras in polling stations changes how fraud is conducted. Web cameras do not reduce fraud, but rather make certain blatant forms of fraud, like ballot box stuffing, more costly. Autocrats then substitute for other types of fraud, such as fabricating the vote count out of view of the cameras.     

Web2.0下的商标间接侵权问题研究

Web2.0的出现使得网络商标侵权的侵权主体分散化、侵权角色多重化、侵权行为多样化、侵权关系复杂化,这一趋势使得传统商标领域的规则很难有效地为权利人服务.为了更好地促进Web2.0的发展和保护商标权利人的合法权益,有必要建立商标间接侵权制度,找寻主体相对集中、角色单一、对于网络行为有较高级别的管理能力和处于网络关系上层的主体--网络服务提供商来承担相应的替代责任,扩大商标权的保护,更好地维护商标权人的合法利益.     

The role of memes in the construction of Facebook personae

Abstract

This research is based on the assumption that social media sites – such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – have changed the way in which memes (culturally transmitted ideas) are transmitted or spread. It is argued that social media have provided the most fertile environment for the replication of memes to date. The social networking site Facebook is the main social media example used throughout the research. The way in which Facebook is represented in film, as well as the ways in which the offline lives of the characters are affected by their social media profiles, specifically as depicted in the film Catfish (Joost and Schulman 2010) are analysed. Lastly, it is argued that one can construct an entirely new persona, or merely experiment with different aspects of who you are, on social media sites. This online persona can be influenced by the memes one chooses to spread online. Naturally, all memes carry connotations, values and judgements. These memes collate with one's profile and, thus, the connotations attached to the memes one shares are then associated with one's online persona/profile. It is found that although a social networking user tries to portray him/herself in an idealised manner, these memetic connotations give a true impression of his/her offline persona. As a result, there is not much difference between the user's online and offline personae.     

Do Online Election Campaigns Win Votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” Election

Studies of Web use during elections have focused mainly on the content of Web sites and on the major factors driving parties' and candidates' adoption of the technology. Evaluations of the electoral impact of Web campaigns have been more limited. This article examines the nature and extent of Web use by voters and parties in the 2007 Australian federal election, focusing particularly on the consequences of Web 2.0 campaigning for candidate vote share. The findings show differing levels of commitment to older and newer e-campaigning technology across parties and their supporters and significant electoral advantages are associated with minor parties candidates using Web 2.0 campaign tools. The results confirm existing studies' findings about the impact of Web campaigns on contemporary elections, but that these effects are moderated by the type of Web tools used and party using them.     

Hacia una ubicación conceptual de Internet como medio de comunicación

The academic field of communications continues to face several challenges related to its disciplinary development. From an epistemological perspective, the definition of its object of study presents a still unfinished conceptual elaboration which would have made possible a more solid reflection vis-á-vis the new technologies that enable communicative acts in the framework of the media. This article seeks to provide elements that may strengthen this category in view of the Internet as an innovation that offers unprecedented possibilities for interactive communication not only due to the space-time compression it entails, but also to the rhizome structures through which information flows. It argues that the Internet is a communications media with unknown possibilities for expression and dissemination, based mainly on the social uses of hypertextual foundation which facilitates the operation of one of the most frequently used communication environments: the World Wide Web.     

Five Stars and a Cricket. Beppe Grillo Shakes Italian Politics

The article focuses on a new political player: the Five Star Movement led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. The party lies at the junction between different organisational models and conceptions of democracy: it combines an online and an offline presence; it has ‘horizontal’ structural elements, but a top-down decision-making process; it is positioned ‘beyond’ ideologies, while its electorate comes from various political families. The work considers the history, message, leader, organisation and electoral base of the movement, as well as the political opportunity structure that facilitated its growth in 2012 and the challenges it faces in the delicate phase of institutionalisation.     

The Involvement Process Through the Internet in the 2010 Italian Regional Elections

This paper explores Internet tools used for consensus building during the 2010 Italian regional elections, especially focusing on the use of the Internet to involve the electorate in a background of political disaffection. Previous experience from the United States and European countries suggests that the Internet is an interesting tool for the creation and development of consensus and shows an increasing use of Internet-based communication for elections. In this context, the research has two objectives. The first is to measure the degree of use of Internet tools by the main candidates to develop participation in several local areas, more limited than those traditionally investigated in the literature. To this end, we used the technique of analysis of site functionality, properly integrated to make it suitable for measuring the use of tools for participation, to compute for each candidate a reliable index of participation. Second, the work aims to understand how different contexts of electoral competition may encourage or lessen the inclination to use Internet communication tools in a participative sense. The analysis reveals a positive correlation between the affiliation of the candidate for the ruling party and the tendency for this candidate to use tools of participation more than the competitor.     

开发基于Web的分布式应用程序策略研究

分布式对象技术已经成为建立服务器应用框架和软件构件的核心技术,本文结合当前三种主流的分布式对象技术CORBA、COM、Java,对开发分布式Web应用系统的策略进行了探讨。     

Conclusion – Building Regions from Below: Has the Time Come for Regionalism 2.0?

In a changing world ridden with crises and characterised by a general redistribution of power, regional organisations need to reinvent themselves. Equally, the study of regionalism has to reject its traditional Eurocentrism to embrace new conceptual categories in order to describe more effectively the variety of regional processes across the world. Against this background, this article looks at the European project and its current crisis before discussing other regional ‘experiments’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which rest on different principles but also manifest considerable shortcomings. The analysis points to the need to look at regionalism with a critical eye, emphasizing the undeniably important achievements but also the hidden threats that a certain model of regional integration (for instance, the classical top-down elite-driven process adopted by the EU founding fathers) can pose to the sustainability of regional cohesion and the adaptability of this model to other areas of the world.