The final presenter in this AoIR 2013 session (and thus, the final presenter this year!) is Hazel Kwon, whose aim is to better understand the flows of communication on social media during protests. Her frame of research in this is Emergent Norm Theory, whose emphasis is on the rapid and transformative potential of word of mouth on collective behaviours. This is a process of diffusion for a collective identity.
Protests can be understood as collective behaviours. They may be prompted by the circulation of rumours, which are characterised by the informal and improvised circulation of situational information; gradually, key themes …
The next AoIR 2013 paper is by Pieter Verdegem and Evelien D'Heer, who shift our focus to regional elections in Flanders. The role of Twitter in politics has been described from both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives; the Twittersphere has been seen by many to reflect existing social structures. Is there a move from formal and representative politics towards networked politics, though? From broadcasting to convergence logic?
Pieter and Evelien captured all @mentions in the #vk2012 debate, engaging in both content and network analysis. The hashtag was promoted by the public service broadcaster in Flanders, so it provides a useful point …
The next presenter on this AoIR 2013 panel is Christian Christensen, whose interest is in the minority parties in the US presidential election. He examined the tweets of four minority parties, defined as parties which had enough ballot listings across the states to technically be able to win the election: the Libertarians, the Greens, the Constitution Party, and the Justice Party. This, then, is a study of third party politics - and such parties have traditionally adhered to a polarising and populist style of politics.
In combination, the four parties' candidates had some 129,000 Twitter followers, led by the Libertarians …
Well, with our Twitter and Society book officially launched, I'm now in a final AoIR 2013 session on politics and Twitter. First off, Kevin Driscoll is presenting on the role of Twitter in the US presidential election, noting how much "Twitter's opinion" was used as a yardstick for overall public opinion. There is some slippage here: "Twitter" as the Twitter community, "Twitter" as Twitter, Inc., and "Twitter" as a source of opinion data.
Kevin and his colleagues examined the Twitter activity around the three US presidential debates, following the live Twitter streams as the debates happened and dynamically adding more …
I'll be writing much more about this very soon, but for now just a quick note to say that one of the major events at AoIR 2013 was the launch of Twitter and Society, the new collection edited by Katrin Weller, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann and me which will be published by Peter Lang in the coming days. The book contains more than 30 chapters by a stellar line-up of Internet scholars, and should be listed on Amazon and the Peter Lang site within the next week - I'll post an update then. For a preview of …
The final presentation in our AoIR 2013 panel is Stine Eckert, whose focus is on the #aufschrei hashtag in the German-language Twittersphere that reacted to the issue of sexual harassment, in January 2013. It was prompted by a number of mainstream media articles about sexism and sexual harassment, from a prominent German politician as well as in other public spaces; as more such examples came to light, the Twitter hashtag #aufschrei was suggested as a means to compile and curate such stories! continuing over several days. The hashtag itself received further mainstream media attention.
This AoIR 2013 also contains a paper by Theresa Sauter and me, on the tone of debate in the #auspol hashtag for the discussion of Australian politics. Here are the slides - audio to follow now online as well...
The next panellist at AoIR 2013 is Raquel Recuero, whose interest is in symbolic violence in online spaces: violence which emerges from words, from discourse (and which is therefore caught up with humour and stigma). Networked publics, in which such violence circulates, are persistent and replicable.
Raquel's research investigates the Brazilian use of Facebook, and she points our that Brazilian teens are now leaving Facebook. Her study examines three Facebook meme pages: Depression Diva, which makes fun of models and other female celebrities (and whose humour about body issues, gender issues, and class divides is shared especially by …
The final day at AoIR 2013 starts for me with a panel on conflict, controversy and aggression in online spaces in which Theresa Sauter and I also have a paper - but the first presenter is Heather Ford, whose focus is on Wikipedia. She has been involved with Wikipedia for some time, and has seen a substantial level of conflict (leading to article deletions and user bannings) during that time. Her paper here focusses on the specific case of a Wikipedian being stalked and banned.
Being a Wikipedian means being part of a peer-production community, which Benkler and Nissenbaum …
