Politics

The next paper at ECREA 2012 is presented by Jean-Marc Francony, who shifts our attention to the French presidential election and begins by noting the difficult process of shuttling between data analysis and theory-development in the context of political uses of social media. His approach is to consider the election as a media event, and the research builds on some 2 million tweets from the socialist primaries and the French presidential election. Specific live media events during this time were also investigated.

This research considers the Twittersphere as connecting individuals, organisations, and live events. The data include time-specific materials as …

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 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

The final speaker at this ECREA 2012 session is Marco Bräuer, whose interest is in rural protests in Germany against the extension of major powerlines. These protest could be seen simply as a NIMBY phenomenon, but they involve a wide range of participants and protest repertoires; they appropriate innovative protest repertoires of global protest movements.

Local protest groups can be seen as part of the wider environmental movement, but this view can be challenged – they involve protesters who would not see themselves as aligned with such movements. As these groups emerge, they build on framing processes (conscious strategic efforts …

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 …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Tessa Houghton, who begins by noting the 2009 New Zealand blackout of Websites and avatars, in protest against new copyright legislation. This is a form of spectacular viral publicity, and has been repeated in a number of national contexts over the past years – variously protesting copyright or Internet regulations. The anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout of early 2012 is another example for this.

Socially mediated antagonistic publicity is increasingly characteristic for such protests; for all the differences between the specific publics involved in the protests, it highlights contemporary configurations of power. This departs …

For the next ECREA 2012 session, I'm attending a panel which starts with Christian Christensen's presentation on WikiLeaks. His interest is in how WikiLeaks has been engaging with mainstream media in its publishing of leaked content; WikiLeaks relied on mainstream outlets as a means of summarising and promoting such materials.

This relationship with mainstream journalism might position WikiLeaks as a form of radical media, subject to some very aggressive rhetoric from the US government and other interested parties which refuse to classify it and its participants as journalists (which would afford it constitutional protection in the US, of course). …

The second ECREA 2012 keynote speaker this morning is Clemencia Rodríguez, who will be shifting our focus further towards citizens' media. She notes that it is important to take historical precedents seriously – reacting against the popular representation of recent political unrest as driven and determined by social media, and as leaderless revolutions.

But media have always played a role as mediators, of course – in political communication, social actors negotiate their identities through interaction; media effects theory has this wrong. The visibility of today's ICTs has led to a resurgence of media effects theory, and this needs to be …