It looks like 2016 is destined to start with a bang rather than a whimper: I’m delighted to announce that a major collection I’ve edited with my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen in Oslo and Stockholm has now been published. The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics is a 37-chapter, 560-page collection of current research on the uses of social media in political activism and electoral campaigning.
From Anonymous to the Scottish Independence Referendum, from oppositional politics in Azerbaijan to elections in Kenya, the Companion covers a broad range of social media uses …
Over the past three years, my colleagues and I at Queensland University of Technology have partnered with Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) and the Eidos Institute to undertake an Australian Research Council Linkage project to analyse and evaluate how social media are used by emergency management authorities, media organisations and citizens during recent natural disasters events.
During this time we have worked closely with officers from several Australian emergency management organisations to better understand from their practical experience how social media are used in emergency communications, and to find out those areas that are working well as well as …
One more post before I head home from the AoIR 2015 conference in Phoenix: during the conference, I also received my author’s copy of Hashtag Publics, an excellent new collection edited by Nathan Rambukkana. In this collection, Jean Burgess and I published an updated version of our paper from the ECPR conference in Reykjavík, which conceptualises (some) hashtag communities as ad hoc publics – and Theresa Sauter and I also have a chapter in the book that explores the #auspol hashtag for Australian politics.
The final speaker in this final AoIR 2015 session is Lee Humphreys. Her interest is in the intersections between mobility and memory, and this needs to be understood in terms of degrees of mobility; some devices are more mobile than others.
There is also a very long history of mobile media, all the way back at least to the immensely popular pocket diaries of previous centuries. These devices enabled their users to create media messages – to note things ad hoc as users were going about their day. By contrast, (paper) photo albums could be seen as mobile media memory …
We move on in this session at AoIR 2015 to Nicole Ellison, who highlights the different frames through which we might understand mobile uses; one is the affordances frame which might highlight the differences between content persistence and ephemerality, for instance. She points to Snapchat in this context, as a particularly interesting object of research.
Snapchat uses were studied here by exploring the interaction experiences of a cohort of undergraduates across different media and using Snapchat as the baseline. They were surveyed for instance on the pleasantness of their interactions (where face-to-face ranked high, email and texting low); on supportiveness …
The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on the ubiquitous nature of Internet access in contemporary society. Prior to this, households may have had different mediators as determined by the location of connection plugs; later, patchy wireless availability made Internet use nomadic as we moved between islands of connectivity. Today, use is truly ubiquitous.
This creates substantial variations in place – the surroundings of where we use the Internet are no longer predetermined by connectivity limitations. But scholarship has so far largely failed to take such situational contexts into account. Context-related variables show up in …
The final (!) session of AoIR 2015 is on the mobile Internet, and starts with Katy Pearce. Her interest is in the experiences of mobile-only Internet users: a phenomenon which is especially prevalent in developing countries. Here, resource constraints make it more likely that users will buy multi-purpose devices such as feature phones or smartphones with direct network access rather than desktop, laptop, or tablet devices that require a wifi connection. >
The devices people use impact on their usage patterns, of course. But other factors, such as age, educational and sociodemographic status, also impact on such patterns. In Armenia …
The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Chris Paul and Mia Consalvo, who shift our interest towards games. What is a game, in the first place? Game styles now vary wildly, and address many different communities of gamers; this is a matter of constitutive rhetoric as the language being used brings distinctions into existence through repetition.
One element that defines games is their payment structure: in mobile gaming, are they free to play or do we pay to win, for instance? Which companies create fair and good or exploitative and greedy games?
The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Nicole Hentrich, who shifts our focus to the problem of geoblocking in accessing televisual content online. Such Internet content is still controlled on a geographic basis; the Internet is thus not experienced the same by everyone, on both an individual, regional, and national basis.
Even when new services enter a local market – as Netflix did in Australia earlier this year – these issues do not go away. Netflix became officially available in Australia in March 2015, though some 200,000 subscribers had already been using it through VPNs – more than …
The second session on this final day of AoIR 2015 starts with Camille Yale, whose focus is on Netflix. Netflix represents a rearticulation of the commercial media system, rather than a revolution: it has an intense commodity orientation, global ambitions, and oligopolistic practices; it claims for itself that it is democratising entertainment, however.
Such language is driven largely by its Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt. Under him, Netflix has defined its own version of media commercialism, but operates much like a regular media conglomerate: it engages with other streaming companies, commodities audience labour, and replaces overt advertising with covert 'commodity …
, an excellent new collection edited by Nathan Rambukkana. In this collection, Jean Burgess and I published an updated version of our paper from the ECPR conference in Reykjavík, which conceptualises (some) hashtag communities as ad hoc publics – and Theresa Sauter and I also have a chapter in the book that explores the #auspol hashtag for Australian politics. 
