Blog

We move on in this session at AoIR 2015 to Nicole Ellison, who highlights the different frames through which we might understand mobile uses; one is the affordances frame which might highlight the differences between content persistence and ephemerality, for instance. She points to Snapchat in this context, as a particularly interesting object of research.

Snapchat uses were studied here by exploring the interaction experiences of a cohort of undergraduates across different media and using Snapchat as the baseline. They were surveyed for instance on the pleasantness of their interactions (where face-to-face ranked high, email and texting low); on supportiveness …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on the ubiquitous nature of Internet access in contemporary society. Prior to this, households may have had different mediators as determined by the location of connection plugs; later, patchy wireless availability made Internet use nomadic as we moved between islands of connectivity. Today, use is truly ubiquitous.

This creates substantial variations in place – the surroundings of where we use the Internet are no longer predetermined by connectivity limitations. But scholarship has so far largely failed to take such situational contexts into account. Context-related variables show up in …

The final (!) session of AoIR 2015 is on the mobile Internet, and starts with Katy Pearce. Her interest is in the experiences of mobile-only Internet users: a phenomenon which is especially prevalent in developing countries. Here, resource constraints make it more likely that users will buy multi-purpose devices such as feature phones or smartphones with direct network access rather than desktop, laptop, or tablet devices that require a wifi connection. >

The devices people use impact on their usage patterns, of course. But other factors, such as age, educational and sociodemographic status, also impact on such patterns. In Armenia …

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Chris Paul and Mia Consalvo, who shift our interest towards games. What is a game, in the first place? Game styles now vary wildly, and address many different communities of gamers; this is a matter of constitutive rhetoric as the language being used brings distinctions into existence through repetition.

One element that defines games is their payment structure: in mobile gaming, are they free to play or do we pay to win, for instance? Which companies create fair and good or exploitative and greedy games?

There are many genres now emerging, such as …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Nicole Hentrich, who shifts our focus to the problem of geoblocking in accessing televisual content online. Such Internet content is still controlled on a geographic basis; the Internet is thus not experienced the same by everyone, on both an individual, regional, and national basis.

Even when new services enter a local market – as Netflix did in Australia earlier this year – these issues do not go away. Netflix became officially available in Australia in March 2015, though some 200,000 subscribers had already been using it through VPNs – more than …

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Katrin Tiidenberg, whose focus is on young Estonians' social media use. European electoral turnout has been on a steady decline, especially amongst young people, but some forms of non-institutional political participation are on the rise; young people's lives have changed considerably over past decades, and this may have given greater emphasis to everyday political activities over formal political participation.

This research, then, focusses largely on ordinary young people, and on the political dimensions of their social media practices. Three key social media mechanisms are relevant here: social media provide information, produce social pressure, and …

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is Sava Saheli Singh, whose focus is on subverting social media. Our use of such social media, such as Twitter, is shaped by the biases built-in by the people who design these spaces; and these have changed over time. Users reinterpret and repurpose the features of social media spaces, so there is a constant struggle between platform providers and users.

In academic communities and elsewhere, there is a common use of Twitter called subtweeting: speaking about someone behind their back in as anonymous a way as to maintain plausible deniability; the same …

The final day of AoIR 2015 has dawned, and it begins with a paper by Samuel Woolley; his interest is in political bots. Bots are software tools that automate human tasks on the Web; political bots, then, are social bots that engage with human users, largely through social media, to promote specific political causes.

The project has built a broad dataset of events that bots were involved in, is engaging with bot coders on an international basis, and will use this to build computational theory. The focus here is on stage one, though: the collection of cases in which political …

Finally in this AoIR 2015 session, we move on to Greg Elmer, one of the editors of Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data. His contribution is focussed on the practice of collecting data from social media sites, some of which is done using some very simple Web scraping tools (as Edward Snowden did at the NSA, apparently).

Scraping is now a common practice in a number of contexts; some sites scrape from mainstream news sites in order to gain better search rankings, for example. Google briefly introduced a tool to identify where site content had been scraped …