My own paper starts the ICA-flavoured session at ECREA 2012 this afternoon; my presentation built on our research into the uses of Twitter to explore how we might reconceptualise the public sphere. The slides are below; audio will follow. now online, too.

Social Media, Big Data, and the Public Sphere from Axel Bruns

The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sheetal Agarwal, whose focus is also on Occupy-related Twitter networks. Is Occupy a networked organisation, and if so, what kind of networked organisation? How might its organisational features be assessed? There are plenty of theories about organisation, from organisational sociology to political economy, which have been applied to the study of communication networks, international relations, and digital media. Such theories variously see organisations as bounded or unbounded, intentional or emergent, membership-driven and/or issue-focussed.

Common to organisations are strategies for resource allocation, responsiveness to external environments and flows, and capabilities for long-term …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

Fairly violent clearouts of the campsite took place across the timeframe of the Occupy Oakland campaign, since October 2011. The local movement has gained a particular reputation within the overall Occupy movement.

Tim and …

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with a paper by my colleague Tim Highfield that Stephen Harrington and I contributed to as well – he's focussing on Australian politics on Twitter. (Slides and audio to follow.) Here are the slides and audio; my notes on the presentation are below.

Australian politics has been online for some time, in various forms – political blogs played a role in discussion around the 2007 federal election, for example, but the people blogging were mainly interested citizens following …

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.

Twitter communication is public by default; there is a low threshold to communication and Twitter is very open to participation. At the same time, the question is whether this leads to a …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Jenny Korn, whose focus is on the #FuckProp8 hashtag which emerged around the Californian referendum to ban gay marriage, known as Proposition 8. The success of this referendum was a surprise to many Californians themselves, and resulted in a substantial amount of pushback, in the form of the hashtag (and its alternative #rejectprop8).

This is an event-based process of community formation which leads to a gradually strengthening cohesion of community activities that generates impact and finally results in stasis. In this, overlapping virtual and physical communities are embodied in a wider imagined community …

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with Catherine Knight Steele, whose focus is on the online expression of grief following the death of Whitney Houston. Many of the messages being posted following her death seemed more like the support offered to family members than a public expression of fandom. The same was not true in the same way following the death of Michael Jackson, when many more critical responses were aired.

The grieving online following Houston's death can be understood as ritual – there was no documentation of news, but a reflection on who we are, how we express …

The final presenters in this AoIR 2012 session are Camila Monteiro, Raquel Recuero, and Adriana Amaral, who begin by noting the demographics of Twitter in Brazil: there are some 33 million Brazilian Twitter users, most of whom are adolescents. Their interest in this paper is especially in fandom and anti-fandom around the pop band Restart, and in the social capital which such activities create and maintain.

Many of the trending topics in Brazil are focussed on popular music, in fact, and fans seem to artificially attempt to create such trending topics. The researchers engaged in interviews with fans as well …