Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.
We finish the sessions at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium with our second keynote, by Rebekah Tromble. She begins provocatively by suggesting that we as digital media researchers need to get over ourselves, so this should be interesting.
Many of the current problems for digital media research stem from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted in the shutdown of many of the primary sources of social media research data – especially the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of leading platforms. Most applications for API access to Facebook are now denied, for instance; the Instagram platform API was scheduled for shutdown even …
The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Tetyana Lokot, who points out the value of ephemerality for citizens living in autocratic regimes. Russia is one example of this: there are significant differences in how the state and its citizens define what networked citizenship means, and ephemerality plays an important role in this context.
Such differences manifest in understandings of whether citizenship is conferred by the state, or achieved by citizens in their actions; this implies different views on individual agency, too. Digital acts of citizenship further complicate this picture, not least also because digital networks do …
The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Lucia Bainotti and Alessandro Gandini, who at presenting a tentative research protocol for studying Instagram stories. Stories are a means for sharing ephemeral content rather than permanent posts on the platform, and such ephemeral content has also become more popular across a wide range of other social media platforms. This represents an overall shift from an archival to a more ephemeral culture.
This shift needs to be addressed in the further development of digital methods approaches. Instagram stories can be understood as small social media stories that contain a plurality …
The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Esther Hammelburg, who uses ethnographic as well as digital methods to study mediatised events. For such events, this work might include online and on-the-ground observations; screenshots of Instagram stories; Instagram posts themselves, as gathered via the API when it was still available; media diaries; and interviews with participants.
People engaging in these events post online partly simply in order to show the world that they are there – here, the aim is to create posts that are as permanent and public as possible, especially in the context of public …
The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Marco Toledo Bastos and Shawn Walker, whose interest is in the ephemerality of hyperpartisan news content. Posts, images, and videos often disappear within hours and days of posting, before they can be fact-checked and before standard archiving platforms such as national archives or the Internet Archive would capture them. Alternatively, the content of these posts may change after posting, meaning that the captured content does not reflect what users first saw.
There is a need for a very high-fidelity, rapid archiving approach especially around critical events, therefore, that captures content …
Up next at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Tiziano Bonini and Alessandro Gandini, who are interested in ethnographic research in the age of platforms, even in spite of the black boxing strategies now employed by many platforms to protect themselves from scrutiny.
They apply this principally to the field of music streaming – where they were met with a total denial of access to the inner workings of the platform production and operation teams. In the face of such a rejection of access, how is it possible to conduct ethnographic research into these new places of cultural production?
The next paper in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is presented by Felix Münch and Ben Thies, and Cornelius Puschmann and I have also made a small contribution to it. Our project adapted an experimental algorithm to sample a language-based Twitter follower network, and this was necessary because gathering Twitter follower networks at scale has become increasingly difficult.
Information on such follower networks would open up significant new avenues for investigation that cannot be answered by examining actual interactions (via @mentions and retweets) alone. We did some such work in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre by mapping follower …
The next presenter at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Ylva Hård af Segerstad, who begins by pointing out how much harder the study of social media phenomena has become as platform APIs have been curtailed and closed down. Additionally, and relatedly, new policy settings such as the European GDPR, have also imposed new limits on data collection, processing, and sharing. This creates critical new ethical challenges for research.
Ylva’s own work focusses on online communities supporting bereaved parents; such communities are especially important in societies such as Sweden, where cultural values mean that death and other ‘difficult’ topics are …
