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The next paper at ECREA 2012 is presented by Jean-Marc Francony, who shifts our attention to the French presidential election and begins by noting the difficult process of shuttling between data analysis and theory-development in the context of political uses of social media. His approach is to consider the election as a media event, and the research builds on some 2 million tweets from the socialist primaries and the French presidential election. Specific live media events during this time were also investigated.

Day two at ECREA 2012 starts with a panel on political communication using social media which I've had a hand in organising, and the panel begins with our paper on Twitter in the recent Queensland state elections. The slides are below – audio to follow... is also available now.

Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election from Axel Bruns

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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