News and Affect in #Egypt

Up next at AoIR 2012 is Zizi Papacharissi, whose focus is on structures of affect and their connection to political engagement. What is the texture of feeling here – for example in the expression of sentiment on Twitter? In her talk here, Zizi will focus on the #egypt hashtag.

Twitter is a form of news storytelling here, presenting collectively prodused newsfeeds which interact with the wider news economy; it can be an alternative or a primary channel for information. As a news reporting mechanism, Twitter can also offer premediation for news events which have not yet happened, or act as an ambient news environment. The use of the platform for broadcasting and listening in during breaking news events, such as popular uprisings, is especially notable as well.

There's an underlying question about the homophily of participants here – who participates, what is being expressed, what are the news values which become apparent? The specific patterns may be different in each case, of course. What is the form, the look, the feel of news shared on Twitter in the #egypt hashtag, for example? Zizi's project examined some 1.5 million multilingual tweets.

Old news values continue to persist here – however, a number of other key patterns also became apparent: for example, the instantaneity of reporting (and retweeting); the presence of crowdsourced elites who were especially invested in curating the story of the Egyptian uprising on Twitter (the activities of these users were especially direct, immediate, and reciprocal); the solidarity between participants (which may be especially pronounced in this case); and the ambient nature of the newsfeed (even when there is no new news, there is a constant flow of tweets which continue to report and re-report the event, with rich affect).

Such affect is present in the emotive expressions connected to processes of premediation and anticipation of events prior to their occurrence; collaborative newsfeeds express incompatibilities between the different speeds of news reporting: they point to the many journalisms which take place here. Perhaps these are leaderless publics, engaging in a form of networked gatekeeping, then? They also show affect in news storytelling, as well as in mobilisation – what sort of story does this stream of tweets tell, and how is it different from the mainstream media story? What sort of mediality does it express?