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The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Sonia González Molina, whose interest is in the use of social media by the Catalan Road Service, the main source of official road information in Catalunya. She interviewed the responsible communication officers and analysed the organisation's Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as corporate documents.

Digital technology was introduced to the organisation in the 1990s, in order to enhance public communicate and develop new information services. This represents a process of convergence, and specifically enabled a greater amount of dialogue communication which – ideally – connects the organisation and its audiences, enables it …

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Didem Ozkul, whose interest is in understanding people's sense of place in an era of mobile communication. Mobile technologies liberate their users from place, but also afford a form of attachment and dependence on physical location; we become dependent on global positioning to locate ourselves in physical space.

Space is displayed as locations on smartphone screens, or used as a point of reference for directions; mobile technologies affect our processes of memory and meaning-making. This change can be investigated through concept mapping, which also highlights the difficulties people have in expressing their understandings …

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Frauke Behrendt, whose interest is in the use of mobile media for sharing bike riding information as generated by electrically assisted bikes. Such bikes are now also being introduced into the UK, and Frauke's research in Brighton is interested in using mobile media to monitor the use of such bikes and enable riders to provide feedback. Brighton is a useful test case as the hilly and windy environment means that electrical assistance for pushbikes is especially welcome.

This is a thoroughly interdisciplinary project, involving media studies, transport research, computer science, and other disciplines …

Finally in this ECREA 2012 session, we move on to Anne Mette Thorhauge, whose interest is in using mobile technologies to collect data about people's everyday lives. This involves log data, but also combines it with other information, such as semi-structured interviews, diaries, audiovisual recordings, and many more, and may be used to map patterns of work, leisure, transport, and so on.

Our lives – and particularly, our mobile devices – leave traces which we may be aware of, but which leave important clues for understanding society. In studying these, we combine automatically generated data with sel-reported information; some of …

The next session at ECREA 2012 starts with my colleague Tim Highfield, presenting a paper on the Tour de France on Twitter which was co-authored with Stephen Harrington and myself. My notes on the session are below ; slides and audio will follow later. Tim's slides and audio.

The Tour is a global media event with a substantial social media audiences, and is watched for the sporting action, as an act of sports fandom, as well as as a media event in its own right …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Peter Lunt, who notes that Habermas was initially especially attracted to the diverse and disorganised nature of the early formations of the public sphere, before the massification of the mass media. How are these institutionalised forms of mass media going to respond to the transformation of the contemporary media environment, then, which returns the mediasphere to a more complex, diverse, disorganised state, then? How can the BBC, for example, be repositioned if the excitement of where the public is has escaped from traditional institutional spaces, even online.

Traditional public service broadcasting …

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Maria Bakardjieva, who begins by noting the legacy of the public sphere concept – it has been enormously influential, especially also on central and eastern European scholars after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In the current environment, an important question is the evaluation of the deliberative quality of online discussion spaces. Mainly, hopes for rational critical debate in such spaces have been disappointed: nothing close to the Habermasian ideal has been observed here, and it needs to be understood why this is the case.

But the approach in such studies has almost …

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 at this ECREA 2012 session is Marco Bräuer, whose interest is in rural protests in Germany against the extension of major powerlines. These protest could be seen simply as a NIMBY phenomenon, but they involve a wide range of participants and protest repertoires; they appropriate innovative protest repertoires of global protest movements.

Local protest groups can be seen as part of the wider environmental movement, but this view can be challenged – they involve protesters who would not see themselves as aligned with such movements. As these groups emerge, they build on framing processes (conscious strategic efforts …

We move on to Stefania Milan as the next presenter at ECREA 2012. Her interests are in the social organisation of protest movements, especially through social media; what is the role of such media in the overall process, both at micro and meso levels? Collective action is a social construct which results for the interactions of social actors; their meaning construction is contextually embedded.

Social media and mobile devices are not only tools in this, but are also actors in their own right. This leads to the potential for a form of cloud protesting, representing a potential evolution of …