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The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 panel is Lene Pettersen, who begins by highlighting the rise of the sharing economy. In this economy, the key stakeholders are service providers, users, and intermediaries, and these may not necessarily represent traditional commercial actors. Professionals and small firms are now emerging that use sharing economy platforms to provide professional services.

Lene’s previous work interviewed platform providers such as Airbnb and Uber as well as smaller platforms, and the consumers and users of these platforms. Most of these platforms stated that they would also include professional service providers on their …

The next panel at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Mathieu O’Neill, who focusses on peer production in the sharing economy. How does peer production fit into the precarious, gig economy environment that has emerged over the past few years? Firms might devote some of their employee time to participation in peer production, but this also means that they lose control over their staff productivity for at least some of their time.

Mathieu’s focus here is on Debian, and his interest is in questions of power and legitimacy in this context. What’s emerges here is an ethical-modular organisational logic …

The final paper in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is the result of a collaboration between my QUT colleagues and me and our friends at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, exploring approaches to detecting Twitter bots that promote SoundCloud tracks. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Max Sjöblom, whose focus is on the nexus between social media and eSports. eSports has become increasingly popular in recent times, and refers to forms of sport that are facilitated by electronic systems, where input as well as output are processed by computers. This can take place in a networked environment, but increasingly there are also eSports tournaments being staged in live venues (with additional online streaming).

The present study examined these developments through surveys distributed during the Assembly 2016 eSports event in Finland, extracting psychometric measures of …

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Michelle Gorea, whose focus is on the role of visuality in everyday communication among young users. Many more recent social media applications are designed to be accessed via smartphones, and representations of the visual self have therefore become a far more routine activity. Much of the research into these activities are only talking about teens, however, rather than with them. Instead, it is important to understand from these users themselves how they integrate images into their daily communicative practices.

This can be understood from the perspective of ‘deep …

My next conference for this year is Social Media & Society 2018, where I’m also presenting two papers with different research teams. The first session I’m in starts with Jeff Hemsley, who highlights the need to look at niche social media sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter.

Therefore, his focus here is on Dribbble: a site for designers that asks “what are you working on”, and uses basketball metaphors (players, shots, rebounds, playoffs) for users, posts, etc. The site does not provide affordances for content sharing, however, because designers see this as an unauthorised use of …

The next presentation in this ICA 2018 session is by Drew Margolin, who highlights the growing use of computational methods in communication, and therefore the need to further scrutinise the methods that are popular here. Truth is revealed and reviewed through a succession of studies.

Success therefore depends on collective efficiency at testing and corroborating ideas, and replacing discarded ideas with new work. Existing theory must be tested for its relevance, by applying it to explain observable patterns in the available data; observations must also be used to generate hitherto unimaginable hypotheses. This should also encourage multi-causal explanations through causal …

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.

Such image recognition platforms may not necessarily produce intuitive or meaningful results. The project automatically extracted the most salient labels these tools had provided for the images, and then computationally grouped these into a number of overarching topics …

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.

User information is also incomplete, and geodata is largely unreliable and limited to some 1% of all tweets. Further, genuine users are mixed with bots in the datasets – better bot …

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.

Keyword query data collected via the Twitter API are not representative of the underlying population: it returns representative, but not necessarily complete data. When the rate limits are hit, the data are truncated, though not on the basis of specific features. The biases that result from such selection are likely to be substantial.

What factors drive such search API sampling, then? Content …