Day two at ECREA 2012 starts with a panel on political communication using social media which I've had a hand in organising, and the panel begins with our paper on Twitter in the recent Queensland state elections. The slides are below – audio to follow... is also available now.

Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election from Axel Bruns

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Sonia González Molina, whose interest is in the use of social media by the Catalan Road Service, the main source of official road information in Catalunya. She interviewed the responsible communication officers and analysed the organisation's Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as corporate documents.

Digital technology was introduced to the organisation in the 1990s, in order to enhance public communicate and develop new information services. This represents a process of convergence, and specifically enabled a greater amount of dialogue communication which – ideally – connects the organisation and its audiences, enables it …

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Frauke Behrendt, whose interest is in the use of mobile media for sharing bike riding information as generated by electrically assisted bikes. Such bikes are now also being introduced into the UK, and Frauke's research in Brighton is interested in using mobile media to monitor the use of such bikes and enable riders to provide feedback. Brighton is a useful test case as the hilly and windy environment means that electrical assistance for pushbikes is especially welcome.

This is a thoroughly interdisciplinary project, involving media studies, transport research, computer science, and other disciplines …

The next session at ECREA 2012 starts with my colleague Tim Highfield, presenting a paper on the Tour de France on Twitter which was co-authored with Stephen Harrington and myself. My notes on the session are below ; slides and audio will follow later. Tim's slides and audio.

The Tour is a global media event with a substantial social media audiences, and is watched for the sporting action, as an act of sports fandom, as well as as a media event in its own right …

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Maria Bakardjieva, who begins by noting the legacy of the public sphere concept – it has been enormously influential, especially also on central and eastern European scholars after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In the current environment, an important question is the evaluation of the deliberative quality of online discussion spaces. Mainly, hopes for rational critical debate in such spaces have been disappointed: nothing close to the Habermasian ideal has been observed here, and it needs to be understood why this is the case.

But the approach in such studies has almost …

My own paper starts the ICA-flavoured session at ECREA 2012 this afternoon; my presentation built on our research into the uses of Twitter to explore how we might reconceptualise the public sphere. The slides are below; audio will follow. now online, too.

Social Media, Big Data, and the Public Sphere from Axel Bruns

We move on to Stefania Milan as the next presenter at ECREA 2012. Her interests are in the social organisation of protest movements, especially through social media; what is the role of such media in the overall process, both at micro and meso levels? Collective action is a social construct which results for the interactions of social actors; their meaning construction is contextually embedded.

Social media and mobile devices are not only tools in this, but are also actors in their own right. This leads to the potential for a form of cloud protesting, representing a potential evolution of …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Julie Uldam, who shifts our focus to the climate change debate, in the context of the UN climate change conferences. When the conference came to Copenhagen in 2009, it generated a substantial amount of activity by the climate change activists who are based in London, but the same cannot be said for the 2011 conference in Dublin.

There is a difference here between the radical and the reformist end of climate change activism – the former performs a wider critique of global capitalism, while the latter is seeking to effect change …