Twitter

Time for a quick update again: I’m hardly even back from the SBPJor conference in Rio de Janeiro in November, but my keynote “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism” from the conference has already been published in the Brazilian Journalism Research journal, alongside the other keynotes. I posted the slides and audio from the presentation last month – and a similar presentation in German, from my visit to Vienna in March, is also online here.

When I arrived back in my office from the Rio trip, I was also very pleased to see that the Digital Difference book, collecting papers from the 2007 Ideas, Cyberspace, Education 3 conference on the shores of Loch Lomond, had finally arrived. It’s been a long road, but congratulations to the editors, Ray Land and Siân Bayne, for sticking with the project. My article, “Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age”, applies produsage concepts to explore new approaches to education.

Rio de Janeiro.
My own keynote presentation started the second day of SBPJor. Powerpoint and audio are below; the full paper (which attacks the topic from a slightly different angle, but makes much the same points) is also online.

My sincere thanks to Carlos Franciscato and the SBPJor organisation for the invitation to speak at the conference; it’s been great to meet some of the many Brazilian journalism researchers whose work I’ve been aware of for some time now. I’m sorry that because of the language barrier I’ve not been able to participate more fully in the conference itself, but I hope my contribution has been useful – some good discussion in question time, certainly!

Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – so much material which will be of immense value to future researchers is being lost every day if we don’t get our act together very soon; we can’t wait for the lumbering beast that is the U.S. Library of Congress to do the job for us, however fulsomely they’ve promised to archive the full public Twitter firehose. The truth is, here in Australia we already have the technologies for capturing and archiving large datasets of public communication on Twitter and elsewhere – but someone with the necessary public standing and archivist expertise (the National Library, the National Archives, …) must now take the initiative; the sooner, the better.

My paper (with audio) is below:

Seattle.
The final paper at AoIR 2011 is presented in absentia of the original authors, who were led by Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, and focusses on the use of Twitter during the continuing Arab Spring uprisings. It examines the linguistic features of the forms of Arabic used in these tweets, as well as the topics and sentiments expressed. The authors examined some 2000 tweets sampled at random from some 233,000 tweets gatered between November 2009 and February 2011. Tweets were coded for topic across a range of thematic categories, for language (standard vs. non-standard Arabic), and sentiment (objective, subjective; positive, negative, neutral, mixed).

Seattle.
The penultimate speaker at AoIR 2011 is the awesome Zizi Papacharissi, whose interest is in self-performance on Twitter. Performance, she says, is public dreaming: everyday life is a theatre, and online, too, we are performing a networked self. We do this towards a blend of imagined as well as actual audiences, evoking a type of public dreaming.

Performance theory tells us that individuals live by performance – every little gesture is a little performative, and performances are inherently self-reflexive. We have a repertoire of performative actions, and play out an ‘as if’ element in our behaviours.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Joss Hands, whose interest is in collective action in social media. How do we think, decide and act collectively in the age of social media as such, and how does this take place on Twitter in particular? Are social media expanding our capacity for a new kind of device consciousness?

A simple way of putting this is ‘does Twitter think?’ – the framing of the problem is rooted in the concept of the multitude as a social body, linked through communication technology; how does this social body come to collective decisions, not through top-down decision-making chains, but as a swarm that acts in concert like neurons in the brain? The suggestion is that it is the entire network which acts here, producing a dynamic of singularity and commonality.

Seattle.
Wow – we’ve already reached the final session on the final day of AoIR 2011; time has passed very quickly. I’m in a session on Twitter, and Gabriela Zago makes a start. Her focus is on the possibilities of Pro-Am news media work on Twitter, focussing especially on the newspapers The Guardian and El País.

New tools and Web services appear online all the time; these tools are appropriated in different ways by different social actors. One possibility is appropriation for news-related uses, pursuing Pro-Am collaboration opportunities. Such Pro-Am models combine professional journalists and amateur news users and produsers. Twitter is currently being appropriated in this way – this is a form of extending news media for multiplatform news delivery as well as for other purposes.

Seattle.
The next panel at AoIR 2011 starts with the excellent Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Twitter coverage of the Chilean mining accident and the subsequent rescue of the miners. Luca begins, though, by pointing to the underlying theory of media events – from the royal wedding (as a kind of 2.0 version, now with added social media, of the Charles & Diana a few decades ago wedding) to crisis and disaster events.

Twitter coverage of the mine rescue in Chile was coordinated through the #rescatemineros hashtag. The miners were trapped underground for some three months, following the 5 August 2010 mine collapse; the event transformed from a crisis event to a more organised media event as it gradually unfolded. How did Twitter cover this; how did messages propagate through the network; and how did Twitter interleave with the wider mediasphere?

Seattle.
The final presenter in our panel at AoIR 2011 is Anders Larsson, who shifts our focus to Sweden. Twitter was used by the national Swedish train operator during the extreme winter of 2010/11 to address the disruptions to train services. There is a strong impetus for major businesses and organisations to be on Twitter, of course; SJ (which used to be the state-owned monopoly train company in Sweden) has been online as @SJ_AB for some time now – but only on weekdays between 9:00 and 16:00 (even though their phone service is online for longer hours).

The last winter generated especially extreme amounts of snowfall; this disrupted train travel to a considerable amount, especially during the Christmas travel season. SJ didn’t use Twitter during the entire Christmas holiday, however (given that much of the crisis happened outside regular business hours?).

Seattle.
My own paper (with Jean), on the Twitter response to the second Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 through the #eqnz hashtag, was next at AoIR 2011. Here are the slides – audio soon, hopefully now also added.