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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.

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.

#Eurovision: Twitter as a Technology of Fandom from Axel Bruns

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.

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.

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.

Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter from Axel Bruns

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 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?

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.

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.

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.