Blogs

The next presenter at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Ylva Hård af Segerstad, who begins by pointing out how much harder the study of social media phenomena has become as platform APIs have been curtailed and closed down. Additionally, and relatedly, new policy settings such as the European GDPR, have also imposed new limits on data collection, processing, and sharing. This creates critical new ethical challenges for research.

The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Angela Cirucci, who is exploring the question of place and space in social media apps. How do users perceive the social media environments in which they engage, from a quasi-geographic perspective?

The post-lunch session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Christina Neumayer and Luca Rossi, who are interested in invisibilities in social media data. For instance, studying protest movements through social media means studying only what is visible about these movements in specific social media platforms – the data must exist in the various technological layers of these platforms in the first place, and those layers significantly constrict what data are available to the researcher. Additionally, such data must also be perceived as meaningful; this requires a shared understanding in the scholarly community that such data can be used to examine a particular phenomenon.

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Gabriele de Seta, whose focus is on connective practices and selective visibility on Chinese social media platforms. Guided by his Chinese social media friends, Gabriele has tracked social media practices through MySpace and its Chinese equivalent Douban, via early messenger app QQ and the microblog Sina Weibo, to the latest messaging app WeChat.

The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.

The next speakers in this session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti, whose focus is on the use of the Telegram platform for the distribution of nonconsensual sexual imagery (including but not limited to revenge porn). The term they use to describe this is image-based sexual abuse, and it arises to some extent from sexting as a new digital practice.

The first paper session after the opening keynote at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Daphna Yeshua Katz and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, whose focus is on online support groups for stigmatised communities. They argue that such groups may actually limit these communities’ access to online support. This may be a problem related especially to scalability and searchability.

I’ve arrived at the University of Urbino for the inaugural AoIR Flashpoint Symposium, our new initiative that highlights important current issues in Internet research through one-day, concentrated events. This year’s symposium operates under the title “Under the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms, and Ephemeral Contents.”

The first keynote at the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is by Crystal Abidin, whose focus is on Internet celebrities. There are a number of different types of such celebrities, from well-recognised global celebrities to more niche micro-celebrities who are known mainly to a specific subculture. These people cannot be identified from their engagement metrics alone: they require a different set of research approaches.

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!