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Using Social Network Analysis to Explore the Dynamics of Online Publics

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Mathieu O'Neil, whose focus is on the use of social network analysis in exploring online publics. Social network analysis treats the diffusion of information online as a form of contagion. It draws distinctions between leaders and followers in the social network, and the network properties of these accounts affect how information is disseminated across the network; there are certain threshold levels for information diffusion and the emergence of information cascades.

What different categories of actors exist in social networks, then? What is the impact of social status or structural positions, and what cultural dynamics may apply? One way to approach such questions is through the concept of fields, which have their own structural features and dynamics; indeed, the recent concept of the strategic action field suggests that collective actors are attuned to and interact with each other based on their shared understandings of the field itself.

Can we consider social networks as fields, then? Offline, networks do not represent fields, but online, fields are equivalent to networks, Mathieu says; it then becomes possible to identify influential actors, challenges, and other aspects of these fields through network analysis.

In the first place, then, this project explored Web-based hyperlink networks to identify clusters in such linking structures, explore homophily, informality, and decentralisation. People using the same discourses did not always link to each other, however – shared discourses can be unconscious and do not always result in shared linking practices, therefore.

Such early work on organisational linking networks has developed into a greater focus on online publics that may be more inclusive of individuals, conversational, and fleeting; ties between participants are more numerous and easier to create, and affected by the available affordances of connection (such as likes or retweets).

On Twitter, for example, hashtags may represent general fields (like #auspol) or specific interpretative frames. New users are more likely to challenge established frames and innovate in their use of such frame hashtags, for example.

Can we model the online activist habitus from this? What is the constitution of online publics? The project examined a range of hashtag publics and explored the network of participants (through @replies or retweets), also taking into account the gradual decay of such connections over time. Broadly, this seems to point to the gradual diversification of interaction patterns within hashtag publics.