I am presenting the next paper in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference, providing a brief overview of our Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of polarisation and partisanship. Here are the slides:
The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Luna Staes, whose focus is also on online user engagement with street protests. Social movement organisations are using social media to engage with the public, and this also generates user engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.) that provide instant feedback on online publics’ appetite for protest messages.
But to what extent do protest messages actually resonate, and what explains such user engagement: is this related to the features of the actual protest, of the content about the protest, or of the digital communication style itself? The present study examined …
The next panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on the THREATPIE project, and begins with Karolina Koc-Michalska presenting data on perceptions of misinformation. Such perceptions are informed by how people understand the world around them, and leads them to actively shape incoming stimuli rather than passively receiving them.
Do such perceptions of misinformation levels vary across countries, then, or across platforms? Does news interest or previous knowledge affect such perceptions? The present project surveyed people across 17 European countries and the US, and asked about perceptions for a range of social media platforms, messaging apps, conventional media, and alternative …
Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.
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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …
The first panel session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference that I’m attending starts with a presentation by Curd Knüpfer, on elite radicalisation. The context for this is the pattern of elite-level radicalisation especially on the political right in a number of countries: this leads to a form of asymmetric polarisation, where the right drifts far further to the extremes than the left, in part through the influence of right-wing “alternative” “news” sites (the abundance of share quotes here is quite deliberate, Curd says).
This also follows a reconceptualisation of communication flows, to match the hybrid media systems that we …
Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In …
Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previousposts.
First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by …
And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.
It distinguishes between coordinators (mediating information flows within the in-group), itinerants (an in-group member mediating information flows between two out-group members), representatives (mediating information flows from in- to out-group), and gatekeepers (mediating information flow from out- to in-group). In these scenarios, the …
The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.
Institutions are seen as durable, multifaceted social structures that are socially constructed and therefore subject to change; the people are variously constructed by populist or nationalist …
The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa. Science journalism is a specialised form of journalists covering science, medicine, and technology, and has gained particular prominence especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; the pandemic has also exposed the value-laden aspects of science journalism, however, pointing to the centrality of politics in the scientific enterprise in the post-war era and the predominant Global North perspectives embraced by science journalism. This does not necessarily serve countries like South Africa well.
