Blogs

The next ECREA 2022 session is on media exposure, and begins with Ole Kelm. He notes the expansion of political participation through the use of online and social media; we now have institutional participation, protests, civic engagement, political consumerism, online activities, and other forms of participation both on- and offline. Political consumerism in particular includes elements such as boycotts, buycotts, discursive political consumerism, and lifestyle political consumerism.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Jule Scheper, who again highlights both the Spiral of Silence theory, but also the limited effects of such dynamics that have been observed empirically. Under what circumstances, then, might there be more significant effects? The present paper explores this for health communication in the context of COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

Next up in this lively ECREA 2022 session on the Spiral of Silence is Oana Stefanita, whose focus is on the expression of hate speech against the Roma community in online spaces in Romania. Hate speech is now widespread and a major problem in online and social media, and takes a number of forms; while platforms are taking some efforts to remove such content, this also conflicts with ideas of ‘free speech’, and can be amplified by platform algorithms. And hate speech can have some very severe psychological and physical effects, of course.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Liz Solverson, who asks why the majority might remain silent on social media, with a particular focus on why young adults remain silent on political topics on social media. Liz worked with focus groups of young adults, exploring how they used social media for political and general purposes, how they experienced their relationship to political expression, and what they understood as good citizenship.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Marius Gerads, whose focus is on integrating hostile media perception into Spiral of Silence theory. People with such perception see the media tenor as dissonant with their own opinion; this leads them to perceive themselves as being in the minority, and Spiral of Silence theory thus suggests that these people would fall silent. But this isn’t what we can now observe; rather, many people with such perceptions are highly vocal in their media critiques.

For this first morning of ECREA 2022 proper, I’m starting with a session that explores the idea of the Spiral of Silence, and we start with a paper by Christiane Eilders. She begins by noting the importance of public opinion expression as a prerequisite to the public deliberation.

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Aarhus, and I’m at the ECREA pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, organised by the DigiWorld research network. Today, my QUT DMRC colleague Dan Angus and I presented our paper with Ehsan Dehghan, Nadia Jude, and Phoebe Matich on the use of social media during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. Here are the slides:

The sessions at this Norwegian Media Researcher Conference are organised in the form of particularly constructive feedback on work-in-progress papers – which is great as a format, but doesn’t lend itself particularly well to liveblogging. So, I’ll skip forward right to the next keynote by Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on the datafication of everyday life. This is something of a departure from his previous work on the gamification of the news.

He begins by outlining the datafication of the mundane: the way people’s social action – as well as non-human action, in fact – is being transformed into quantifiable data, especially online, and that such data therefore become a resource that can be utilised, operationalised, and exploited. Indeed, the sense in the industry is now that ‘everything starts with data’, which reveals a particular, peculiar kind of mindset. Over the past years, the Internet of Things has moved from an idea to a reality, and this has fuelled the “smart” delusion: the belief that more datapoints mean smarter decision-making processes (they usually don’t).

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even they might be aware are far removed from any objective truth.

Here are the slides from my presentation: