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:
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 …
Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In …
Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previousposts.
First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by …
And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.
It distinguishes between coordinators (mediating information flows within the in-group), itinerants (an in-group member mediating information flows between two out-group members), representatives (mediating information flows from in- to out-group), and gatekeepers (mediating information flow from out- to in-group). In these scenarios, the …
The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.
Analysis of Facebook data from 2013 and 2014 seems to support such patterns: after the major protests in 2013, there …
The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else. Spain has seen the emergence of several new parties, and this shifts the structure of the overall party system considerably.
New parties include centrist parties, extreme left parties, and far right parties …
The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose interest is in dynamic polarisation in online discussions. She notes that polarisation has often be confused with the idea of echo chambers, but that our methods have generally overlooked the dynamics of polarisation. A better approach to understanding the idea is to use the concept of cumulative deliberation, which recognises that opinions form online through the gradual accumulation of posts and engagement.
Time and dynamics are dimensions with their own logics here, and lead to a divergence of discourses within online talk. What emerges here (and Svetlana …
