Blogs

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Theo Araujo, whose focus is especially on analysing image content from social media. There are a number of API solutions now becoming available for the analysis of such images, including from Google and Microsoft. The project tested such image analysis tools in the context of the visual self-representation of companies discussing their corporate social responsibility.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.

I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.

Impressively, the Monday keynote at ICA 2018 is by Elihu Katz, whose considerable impact on communication research does of course reach back to the 1950s. He begins by noting the important role that Paul Lazarsfeld played in restoring interpersonal communication to the study of communication, a development which is crucial to the study of social networks today.

Lazarsfeld became interested in radio in the 1930s, and was also intrigued by the psychology of decision-making; he combined this in his studies of voters in Ohio over an extended period of time. This enabled him to identify voters who changed their minds during the course of an election campaign – a change which was attributed not mainly to media coverage, but to the role of better-informed opinion leaders. This was the basis for the theory of the two-step flow, which was be proven in subsequent studies that examined the roles of both influencers and influencees and identified different spheres of influence.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Chenjerai Kumanyika, who notes his growing scepticism about the effectiveness of visual protest media. We must pay more attention to the changes that are occurring at this time, and to what new interventions still work.

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Sarah Banet-Weiser, who begins by highlighting the popular Trump masks now available for purchase. What does it mean to see through Trump in such a way – more generally, what is the authenticity of Trump’s persona?

The next speaker in this very fast-paced ICA 2018 session is Jayson Harsin, whose interest is in the emergence of post-truth or emo-truth in the context of the Trump Presidency. Post-truth appeals to emotion and personal belief rather than facts; this is a periodising term that refers to a widespread culture of distrust in an era of channel fragmentation and the emergence of micro-truthtellers who dine out on such emotional appeals.

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Jack Bratich, who introduces the concept of necro-populism as a description of the Trump Presidency. Hardcore Trump supporters present a particular form of fan culture: they engage in adolescent military play-acting, and can be described as fanboys of tyranny engaging in a form of militant cosplay.

Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Roopali Mukherjee, who begins by noting the #TrumpArtworks campaign that repurposed famous art by placing Trump in the scene. Such alterations focussed especially on Trump’s counterfactual boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, and were part of a larger social and mainstream media storm that sought to fact-check and correct the President’s obviously incorrect claims.

The next session I’m seeing at ICA 2018 is on the U.S. national trauma that is the Trump Presidency. We start with Laurie Ouellette, and she begins with the (fake) story of Trump signing on to a reality TV show based around the Trump White House. This actually confused some readers given that the premise of the show seemed uncannily familiar; reality TV or not, the Trump Presidency is a media spectacle whose political logics cannot be fully separated from those of reality TV and social media.