Christy Dena has done a nice write up of fan-related presentations at the recent Association of Internet Researchers conference in Australia that I just attended. After organizing the first AoIR conference in 2000 and spending many years being an exemplary AoIR citizen, I confess that I spent much of my time there meeting new people and exploring Australia rather than listening to presentations at the Hilton, but I did see Christy’s very interesting paper about fandom distributed across media and quite enjoyed meeting her. You can see Kevin Lim interview her about her topic here.

Two other people’s work I found particularly interesting are Daniel Skog (blog here) and Sal Humphries. They are both looking at what I consider an increasingly important new concern I’ve mentioned here before — the consequences of conducting social life in proprietary spaces, Skog in the context of Sweden’s LunarStorm, and Humphries in the case of online games.

There’s a lot of interesting media-related work going on in Australia, and it was great to be exposed to it. My own paper was about the representation of the internet as a relational medium as seen in Ann Landers and Dear Abby between 1993-2004. It’s part of a larger project taking an historical look at how the role(s) of the net in personal life were understood as the net went from new to normal. It’s got nothing to do with fandom, so I won’t go on about it here, but it’s fun stuff and I had a blast presenting it.

If you are looking for a quick virtual vacation, join me on a walk from Coogee Beach to Bondi Beach along Sydney’s Coastal Walkway. Wow.