Next up at AoIR 2012 it's Tim Highfield and me again, presenting a paper co-authored with our colleague Stephen Harrington. Here are the slides; audio to follow. and audio.
My colleagues and I have a paper in the next session at AoIR 2012, too, but we start with Rachel Magee, whose interest is in fandom on Twitter around the recent movie The Hunger Games. She and her colleagues developed the Twitter Zombie system, which draws on the Twitter search API to track user and hashtag activity around he movie. The movie is based on a popular novel for teen audiences, and the film itself was also very successful, with substantial fan activities around it.
In anticipation of the movie, there was significant Twitter activity - Rachel and …
The second speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Lucy Morieson, whose focus is also on Australian online news – in particular, on the Websites of The Age, Crikey, and The Conversation. This also plays out against the changing business and professional environments for Australian journalism, of course.
Journalism in Australia is currently in crisis, as audiences and advertisers are dissipating, and this also has an effect on Australian political and democratic processes. At the same time, this is also an opportunity, enabling the emergence of new players in the journalistic sphere. Between the dichotomous rhetorics of …
The first AoIR 2012 session this Saturday starts with my paper with my colleagues Tim Highfield and Stephen Harrington, which presents our work on the Australian Twitter New Index (ATNIX). Below are the slides – for more, also see my column at The Conversation. Audio to follow soon! I've added the audio now, too.
The final speaker at this AoIR 2012 session is Zeena Feldman, whose focus is on the Couchsurfing Website. She begins by suggesting that the Net has always been a space of competing discourses, a hybrid space, and the same is true for social media as well. Social media have been seen as technologies of resistance as well as of repression, and the case of Couchsurfing illustrates this.
The site is a social network for travellers which operates as a platform for exchanging stays in private homes; it frames non-commercial hospitality exchange as a means of fostering cultural understanding and exchange …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Constance Kampf, whose interest is in online activism. There are a number of different forms and levels of activism, of course – from a general expression of support for specific causes to radical and potentially dangerous interventions. Much online activism has been driven by issues of transparency, but that term is ill-defined: does it just mean the openness and availability of information about known phenomena, or also an absence of unknowns?
Another key issue in this is the role of knowledge as a cultural resource: transparency can become a socio-technical construct …
The next speaker at this AoIR 2012 session is Dan Mercea, whose work stems from an interest in the Occupy movement in the Netherlands. Activity peaked in October 2011 with a series of marches and the establishment of Occupy camps, but gradually dwindled thereafter; social media played a prominent role in the initial organisation of these activities, reaching politically unaffiliated (potential) participants.
Social media may play two roles in this context: bridging and bonding participants. Twitter is primarily useful for creating bridges between a variety of participants, for example, while Facebook seems more conducive to both bridging and bonding; this …
After that extraordinary AoIR 2012 plenary session, the first of the parallel sessions I'll be attending starts with a presentation by Gordon Fletcher on Internet humour memes in UK universities. The genesis for this was a line in The Guardian which asked where memes were the new site of class struggle; Gordon then began to gather up university-related memes pages on Facebook, and identified their popularity.
Most of these pages were single pages related to one university, created by students, and named in a way which clearly spoke to insiders (using popular abbreviations and slang, for example). The majority …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 plenary is Terri Senft, who argues for a department of Shameless Studies. Is anyone actually shameless? We all constantly negotiate our shame, for all sorts of reasons; we are in solidarity with one another where we share a specific form of shame.
Similarly, we gather online around shared topics; an early example of such gathering was the early Web's Camgirl movement, and so often the people engaging in these topics were also considered to be too much, too shameless, even though what happened here is to ease one's shame, to empower oneself.
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 …
