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:
It’s the second and last day of the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference in Berlin, and it starts with a panel on polarisation that I’ve had a hand in organising. We begin with Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on discursive polarisation. He begins by pointing out that polarisation is often ill-defined, and the communicative dimension in particular is often under-conceptualised and under-researched.
Discursive polarisation is when debates break apart: a multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication. There is also a more intuitive aspect to polarisation, as is demonstrated for instance with the German debate around the Letzte Generation climate activists …
The next session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference starts with a paper by Pablo Jost, whose interest is in protest events. Protests often aim to generate media attention, yet such media attention is often not supportive of protests, especially when they are disruptive (or can be portrayed as such) – and this produces more critical perception and less identification with protests.
To explore this further, this project therefore studied the Website of the Last Generation climate protest movement in Germany to identify their protest events, and coded their 108 protests between November 2021 and December 2022 by type; it also …
The final speaker in this THREATPIE panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Patrick van Erkel, who explores the role of media literacy in addressing misinformation. Media or news literacy has been promoted substantially in response to the infodemic of mis- and disinformation in recent years, and some such approaches can be affective. But what are the mechanisms for such effects: do they genuinely increase news literacy, or simply create more general distrust in the media? Does the framing of news literacy messages play a role here?
The present study thus begins by assuming that news literacy messages will generally …
The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.
For the Web tracking data, this focusses on visits to any on a list of news outlets, and from this determined how selective participants media diets were (in terms of time spent with left- or right-wing media. This also depends on a coding of the partisan slant of news media, of course, which was …
The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Nicoleta Corbu, who explores the same dataset as the previous two speakers by examining third-person perceptions about misinformation detection. People generally tend to perceive greater media effects on third persons than on themselves; this might also have consequences for their own behaviours, such as less active fact-checking practices – but to date, there is no empirical data to prove this assumption.
The present study used the survey data also used by the past two speakers to establish participants’ third-person perceptions and explore their own engagement in active or passive …
The second speaker in this panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Christine Meltzer, whose focus is on the perception of social cohesion in society, and its relationship with media use. Such cohesion is critical as it plays a crucial role in societies’ responses to crises.
Media use can contribute to perceived social cohesion in society if people consume the same media, if such media content supports some level of social cohesion and shared experience, and supports trust and tolerance. Such media often tend to be high-quality rather than alternative and hyperpartisan media.
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 …
The third speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Miriam Milzner and Vivien Benert, presenting a content-based classification of German alternative news media. Recent definitions of such alternative media have moved away from a focus on these media as supporting subaltern counterpublics, and towards a focus on the emergence of right-wing online media as self-proclaimed alternatives to the mainstream.
The present project, then, explores the extent to which German alternative media use topical foci as a means of establishing themselves as alternatives to the mainstream, and uses those topical foci to categorise a diverse selection of these media …
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 …
