Blogs

I'm in Daegu, Korea, for this year's AoIR conference. The first paper session I'm in starts with Amy Johnson, who notes that existence on Twitter is manifested by voice – and voice is understood as the linguistic construction of social personae. Popularly, social media platforms are also described as giving people a voice, though this view is heavily disputed.

On Twitter, anyone with an email address and the technological literacy can have a voice, so from that perspective it is a surprisingly permissive environment – people, groups, bots, group of bots can all have a voice, and this makes Twitter a post-human and post-individual space.

There is a long history of research into the imagined and imaginary nature of participation, participants, and communities, of course – from Anderson to Appadurai and beyond. Amy's focus is on Twitter bot accounts as technical objects, especially also because Twitter explicitly allows and embraces such bot accounts.

The annual end-of-year conference season is upon us again, and I’ll be heading off tomorrow to the annual Association of Internet Researchers conference – the most important conference in my field. In spite of the considerable troubles AoIR has faced this year – its first conference location, Bangkok, was no longer feasible following the military coup in Thailand, and there still seem to be some teething problems with the replacement location in Daegu, Korea – it will be great to catch up with leading colleagues in the field again.

This year, we’re presenting the first outcomes of our latest big data studies of the Australian and global Twitterspheres. One major paper will present what we’ve been able to glean so far of the overall patterns within the global Twitter userbase – we now have data on some 870 million Twitter profiles, which provides us with a unique perspective on how Twitter has grown and diversified as a platform. Further, we’ve also got a brand-new map of follower/followee  networks in the Australian Twittersphere, based on our dataset of some 2.8 million Australian users, and we’re using this to explore the footprint of recent television programming to shed new light on second-screen viewing practices, as part of our Telemetrics project (more on this at Darryl Woodford’s site). I’ll be live-blogging the conference again if I can get online, so expect to see much more over the next few days. As a preview, my slides for the two presentations are below.

It’s that time of the year, so we’re now calling for applications from prospective PhD students who are interested in joining an innovative and high-profile research group at Australia’s leading university for media and communication studies, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

I’ve posted the Social Media Research Group’s overall call for applications below, but I also want to call specifically for expressions of interest for the second PhD scholarship associated with my current ARC Future Fellowship project. Drawing on social media data, Hitwise Australia, and Fairfax Digital sources, this project seeks to investigate the patterns of intermedia information flows in the Australian online public sphere, and (in addition to the first PhD student Felix Münch, whose focus is especially on methodological development) this second PhD will use innovative quantitative and qualitative research methods to trace user engagement with major events and topics in Australian public debate over time and across social and mainstream media networks.

PhD students applying for this scholarship will need to possess a detailed understanding of recent events in Australian politics and public life as well as of the Australian media environment. They should also have proven skills in the mixed-methods (quantitative / qualitative) analysis of social media data and other data sources, ideally including a working knowledge of analytical tools including Tableau, Gephi, Excel, etc. Familiarity with the approaches and methods developed by the QUT Social Media Research Group and documented at Mapping Online Publics would be welcome. For further enquiries about this PhD opportunity and its role in the wider Future Fellowship project, please contact me at a.bruns@qut.edu.au.

But in addition to this specific PhD scholarship, my colleagues and I are also interested in other PhD applications for social media-related research in the current QUT scholarship round. Below is our call for applicants, with further information on how to apply:

The final speaker at CMPM2014 is Stephen Mills, whose interest is in the question of professionalisation in political campaigning. But what is being professionalised here? Individuals, institutions, systems? Does professionalisation occur when a cohort of professionals replace a previous non-professional cohort, or is this a more comprehensive institutional change through which new cultural norms are being adopted?

Since when does such professionalisation happen? Is it already over, is it continuing, or is it yet to happen? Does it happen quickly or slowly, disruptively or in an organised manner? And what is it caused by – exogenous factors such as technological change, or endogenous dynamics of adoption, adaptation, hybridisation?

The next session at CMPM2014 starts with Murray Goot, who takes us back to the ALP's pre-election study in 1961. The common view is that Labor first conducted a professional opinion poll in South Australia in 1968, and nationally in 1971, but this is incorrect: NSW Labor conducted a survey in the 1940s, and federal Labor did so in 1961, focussing on a selection of seats across the various states. It examined respondents' issues agendas and perceptions of parties, as well as their perceptions of local candidates. Interviews also explored the key issues which drove voters.

This first large-scale piece of political research was a benchmark against which subsequent polls can be measured. It focussed mainly on NSW and Victoria, with Queensland dropped due to costs in spite of the potential for changing seats there. The seats were largely marginal ones, or seats where there was significant interest in outcomes. 100 respondents in each electorate were chosen in city seats, 200 in country seats, and the response rate was above 50%.

My own paper was next at CMPM2014, presenting our work on the Twitter activities by and directed at candidates in the 2013 Australian federal election. Here are the slides, with audio to come:

Twitter in the 2013 Australian Election from Axel Bruns

Up next at CMPM2014 is Stephen Dann, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by Australian political parties. He followed the 31 of the 77 candidates in the Western Australian Senate re-election who were present on Twitter (27 of whom actually posted any content), and found, in short, that what they were posting was not authentic communication.

Stephen's approach was to examine what candidates were doing in Twitter before, during, and after the election campaign. This may include original content, reactions to other people's tweets, or sharing material from outside of Twitter. Overall, then, tweets fit five broad categories: conversation (through @replies), news updates (sharing newsworthy content), passing along other people's content, maintaining a social presence, and broadcast of experiences and opinion. And spam is another possibility, sadly, often hijacking hashtags or conversations or replaying the same message from multiple accounts.

Next up at CMPM2014 is Wayne Burns from ACIL Allen Consulting, who presents the corporate perspective on campaigning. Corporate public advocacy campaigning is back in Australia, he says – previously, the marketplace of voices in public policy making had been quite small, but especially through the incorporation of social media into political discourse this has changed considerably.

Australians have very low trust in corporations, while NGOs are seen very positively; this has led to corporations becoming increasingly active in public campaigning as well. Corporate public affairs efforts are essentially on methamphetamine these days, Wayne says, and shows The Guardian's "Three Little Pigs" ads as an example of how social media are now affecting public discussion about political issues.

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Michael Crosby from United Voice, who is discussing political campaigning outside election campaigns. Australian unions' ability to organise is widely recognised, even in spite of the overall decline in union membership in developed nations. Union volunteers are still crucial in many campaigns both during and outside elections.

Michael highlights the great sacrifices made by union volunteers, who commit a great amount of their time to organising even in addition to their work obligations, and amongst these especially flags the work of union members with comparatively poor working conditions, such as early childhood educators.

Past union campaigns which addressed this group have been relatively unsuccessful, because they followed traditional union lines without understanding the specific work environment in this area. Instead, there was a need to research the profession more closely: to understand the situation of workplaces in the sector, their profitability and level of staff turnover, and the feasibility of union action.

The third Labor speaker at CMPM2014 is Kaila Murmain, NSW Labor's Assistant General Secretary. She begins by outlining the current political environment in NSW, which has been difficult for Labor following the 2011 landslide towards the Liberals; at the next election Labor would need to regain some 27 seats to win. There has been a need to rebuild with the help of strong local candidates.

One focus of this rebuilding is to attract strong small local donors for the Labor campaign. This is difficult given the considerable lack of trust Australians have in politics and politicians, and the lack of attention now being paid to political messaging in the mainstream media. Volunteers are therefore now the party's biggest asset, and the branch structure has become a crucial tool again.