Blogs

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Jonathan Hickman, whose interest is in #hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are a simple way for Twitter users to organise their conversations, by putting the ‘#’ symbol in front of words to make tweets on specific topics more easily searchable (e.g. #iranelection). The hashtag is a form of metadata in that it describes the content of the tweets. This is part of a wider practice of tagging in computer-mediated content; tags are widely used for a wide variety of online materials.

However, there are also problems with this, as these tags are user-generated (and thus examples of folksonomies), and may not necessarily be consistent; this conference, for example, can be found on Twitter under the hashtags #ECC10, #ECC2010, or #ECREA2010… In this, they are different from hierarchically coordinated taxonomies.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 starts with Jennifer Jones, whose focus is also on Twitter: she was an embedded journalist at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. There is a significant historical connection between the Olympic Games and technology, and new media have been especially prominent in recent years; there has been substantial growth especially in alternative media coverage (by non-accredited journalists and others). In Sydney, there even was an alternative media centre for the Olympics.

Independent media were prominent in Vancouver, too – people set up their own media centres, and printed their own unauthorised media passes, which were eventually tacitly accepted as valid media passes. The more people printed their own passes, the more ‘official’ they became. A number of Twitter lists (official, as well as fan-curated or adapted) were set up to aggregate the various alternative journalists covering the events.

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 is the one I’m in as well – but we start with Stine Lomborg, whose interest is in relationality on Twitter. This build on my concept of produsage, and examines this especially for the case of mundane, ordinary conversational activities. To engage in such communication, Twitter users must establish networks with each other – but such networks are non-symmetric, as followees won’t necessarily always follow back. This creates a particularly interest network structure.

Stine examined the activities of six Danish Twitter users, and captured their tweets and @replies over the course of a lengthy period of time. How does the Twitter network shape the emergent communicative practices on the site; how does an individual user’s network affect their negotiation of topics and purposes of interaction, and what types of relationality do Twitter-based networks facilitate?

Hamburg.
The final speakers in this very engaging morning session at ECREA 2010 are Jeroen de Keyser and Annika Sehl, presenting a comparison of German and Flemish efforts to encourage public participation in the news media. To begin with, there clearly are increases in the online activities of ‘ordinary’ people, for example through blogs, social networking, and citizen journalism; some traditional media offer similar tools to also encourage participatory journalism activities. Such participation may take place at various stages of the journalistic process (input, output, commentary), and tools which enable participation at different stages are differently popular amongst journalists; there still is relatively limited conversation of journalists with the public overall.

The present study examined the current situation in Flanders and Germany, then. In 2008 and 2010, it analysed the participatory tools available on journalism Websites to examine the structural characteristics of audience participation, comparing eight national newspaper Websites each in Flanders and Germany.

Hamburg.
The next speaker in this session at ECREA 2010 is Mirjam Gollmitzer, whose interest is in audience participation in journalism. Such participation can take any number of different forms, of course – from commenting to the creation of whole new articles and other forms of content. Such types of participation can be conceptualised in relation to the degree of audience control over content, can be categorised into different forms of interaction and creation of content, and can be evaluated with reference to the overall visibility of audience contributions, for example.

What is interest here is what happens when such typologies enter into a dialogue with various established journalism theories – Bourdieu’s field theory, which examines the media as a field with its own structures and institutions; Habermas’s public sphere theory which establishes an ideal of public communication and political debate; and Shoemaker & Reese’s hierarchy of influences, which postulates concentric circles of influence extending from the media content at the centre through journalists, their routines, organisations, and extra-media influences, to ideology as the wider background. The impact of the audiences could be mapped at every level here, for example.

Hamburg.
The next speaker in this ECREA 2010 session is Mervi Pantti, whose interest is in the role of amateur images in the Iran election crisis. This was a key moment for using citizen-created content in mainstream news coverage, and such images became a focal point for the public response to the election aftermath. Such images were also very difficult to verify, however, raising questions for the journalistic process. Mervi examined the coverage of these protests by CNN, BBC One, and the Finnish broadcaster YLE.

Citizen-provided images are used to support the journalistic mediator’s claims about the truth of the event; they are valued as evidence of the events, and provide immediacy and a heightened reality effect. At the same time, they also present a risk to the journalist’s trustworthiness, especially if there is confusion about the origin of these images. Additionally, there are questions of responsibility here – some of the images show scenes which journalists themselves would not have covered or shown, for ethical reasons; amateur footage of violence, for example, can be used as an excuse from standard journalistic ethics. Transparency is the new strategic ritual in journalistic justifications in this context; it serves as a means of letting the audience know where these images come from.

Hamburg.
The second speaker in this session at ECREA 2010 is Tobias Eberwein, whose interest is in media watchdog blogs. This is part of a larger pan-European/Arab research project, MediaACT (media accountability and transparency), which is engaging in comparative research across 13 nations.

Media accountability means a number of things, but can be summed up as any non-state means of making media responsible to the public. This may include press councils, ombudspersons, media journalism, blogs, social network commentary, entertainment formats (like news critique shows), and others; some of these are institutionalised (and some of those are facing various institutional crises), while some operate from the grassroots but nonetheless can have significant impact.

Hamburg.
The last day at ECREA 2010 starts with a paper by Tom Bakker, whose interest is in mapping participation in citizen media activities in the Netherlands. He notes that participation in social media still appears to be growing strongly overall – and these shifts in the media ecology necessarily bring about some significant changes. The potential for such change has been highlighted for journalism (gatekeeping is said to be declining, agenda setting, news values, standards, and ethics are shifting, and diversity is increasing), as well as for the wider public sphere (thought to be more inclusive, active, deliberative, with more political discourse that is more representative of public opinion).

The present study tested this in a large-scale study in the Netherlands. It surveyed some 2130 people over 13 years of age during December 2009. One question asked in this context was whether people were reading comments: some 55% never did, the rest read them at various levels of intensity. 75% never read political comments, 83% never posted comments, and 94% never posted political comments online.

Hamburg.
The last ECREA 2010 speaker for today is Laura Sūna, whose interest is in identity construction by young people in Latvia (from both the Russian and Latvian communities). To what extent do the cultural identities of Latvian and Russian speakers in Latvia overlap, and could popular culture potentially mediate between these two groups? Laura interviewed 27 users in 2007 to examine this, who also kept media diaries.

Cultural identity is understood as combining a communicative articulation of self-understanding, ascription from outside, identification patterns and value orientations; cultural identities are therefore also media identities. Individuals obtain different aspects of their identities from mediated resources, and draw on these media for the roles they take on; additionally, the media provide spaces for identity construction and group membership.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is José Simões, whose interest is in examining the different media uses of Portuguese families. The key interest here is to understand the conditions and tendencies of access to digital media (as well as other media), and the findings will be compared with similar research being conducted in Texas. This will influence education, industry, policy-makers, and social agents, as well as contribute to public debate in this area.

This starts from questions of digital exclusion and participation, of course; exclusion, in fact, is not just about access, but also about other factors, including resources, skills, choices, and representations of technology. Part of this exclusion may be unwanted or unavoidable, then, but in part, people also may not wish to be included in the first place, because of the choices they’ve made and the attitudes they have. Such constraints and choices may be explained by a range of contextual factors.