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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 04:02

Uncovering Early Twentieth-Century Citizen Journalism

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | ECREA 2016 |

The final speaker at ECREA 2016 for today is Bolette Blaagaard, who shifts our focus back to citizen journalism. This has largely been understood as a process of citizens distributing news and journalism, often in opposition to conventional professional journalism; but here the focus is more on citizens making (or citizen-making) journalism, with an emphasis on the creative and the embodied political.

The present work is therefore also a postcolonial case study of citizen journalism in the then Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) in the early decades of the 20th century. The emergence of the Herald newspaper …

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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 03:46

Factors Affecting Media Trust in the Czech Republic

Politics | Journalism | ECREA 2016 |

The third speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Jakob Macek, who turns out focus to the apparently increasing polarisation of political discourses in many developed nations – he cites Brexit, the U.S. elections, elections in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other countries as examples. This generates huge challenges for the social sciences: for opinion polling, most obviously, as well as for other forms of studying public debate and public opinions.

Such phenomena may also be linked to changing attitudes towards the news media, changing news consumption processes, the rise of a more diverse range of digital and online …

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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 03:30

Does e-Participation Generate More Positive Attitudes towards Democracy?

Politics | e-Government | Internet Technologies | ECREA 2016 |

The second speaker in this ECREA 2016 speakers are Dennis Friess and Pablo Porten Cheé, who shift our attention to e-participation tools and platforms. They begin by noting that there is a democratic crisis which manifests itself in growing scepticism about representative policy-making. One response to this is a call for more opportunities for citizen participation, especially also through online platforms; but does such e-participation lead to more positive attitudes towards democratic processes?

This is raises the question of how this might be measured. Deliberative and participatory theories suggest that participation will affect participants positively, increasing their democratic values; such …

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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 03:15

Commenting Patterns at De Correspondent and Krautreporter

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | ECREA 2016 |

The final session at ECREA 2016 today begins with Lena Knaudt, whose focus is on the democratic potential of slow journalism. Examples for this kind of journalism are especially platforms like De Correspondent and Krautreporter.

There are issues in online comment spaces with discursive equality (a small minority of commenters produce the vast majority of comments); debate quality (there is significant uncivil behaviour); and moderation (participation policies and guidelines substantially influence debates). These issues, which may be at least in part a result of the comparatively ill-thought-out initial deployment of these spaces, have led a number of comment section …

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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 02:26

How Audience Measurement Approaches Construct Different Audience Imaginaries

Creative Industries | ECREA 2016 |

The final presenter in this ECREA 2016 session is Jakob Bjur, whose interest is in the media measurement of media work. There is now plenty of work on audience measurement systems, and also a growing wave of criticism of these systems: such systems are viewed as capturing audience labour, but with very one-dimensional metrics that generate measurement currencies that are very far removed from actual audiencing practices.

These systems have generated market-wide conventions for benchmarking media performance and trading audiences between media organisations and other stakeholders (such as advertisers) – which also means that more complex audiences that cannot easily …

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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 01:50

What Factors Influence Experiences of News Overload?

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ECREA 2016 |

The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is Miriam Steiner, whose focus is on news overload amongst the well-educated elite. This is an increasingly important issue as it appears to be in the process of becoming a serious condition in contemporary society. Well-informed citizens are a fundamental precondition for a functioning democracy, but there is now a high-choice news environment that provides an immense volume of news which is at the same time also easier to ignore. This generates a widening news consumption gap, especially between populations of various levels of education, and may result in a growing polarisation between news …

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Snurb — Saturday 12 November 2016 01:21

Do Conspiracy Theorists Leave More Critical Comments on News Websites?

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ECREA 2016 |

The next ECREA 2016 session starts with Marc Ziegele, whose focus is on the presence of conspiracy theories and truth demands in user comments on the news. Some theorists have had high hopes for the role of user comments as a deliberative medium, increasing the diversity of viewpoints and enabling a broad discussion about the news by ordinary participants.

Comments can have a broad reach and can contribute to opinion formation, but there are also many problems: first, there is often an unnecessarily disrespectful and uncivil tone; some 20-25 per cent of comments on news Websites as well as on …

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Snurb — Friday 11 November 2016 21:20

Platform Power in Turbulent Times

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | ECREA 2016 |

The second keynote speaker at ECREA 2016 today is Rasmus Kleis Nielsen from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He begins by noting the rise of platforms such as Google and Facebook as new digital intermediaries: these major global companies enable interactions between at least two different kinds of actors, host public information, organise access to it, and give rise to new information formats, and influence incentive structures around investment in public communication (including journalism).

News organisations are both empowered and controlled by these platforms. The platforms themselves, we should note, are usually still very young businesses; they …

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Snurb — Friday 11 November 2016 20:43

Foregrounding the Implications of Technological Obsolescence through Ecomedia

Internet Technologies | New Media Arts | ECREA 2016 |

There is another double-barrelled ECREA 2016 keynote session today, and it starts with Joanna Zylinska, whose interest is in technical obsolescence in media history. Media forms and devices emerge and decline again over time; Joanna is interested in a kind of shallow media geology that explores the various media pasts and futures at local, national, and global levels. This enables an exploration of the dynamics of the contemporary media ecology. In part this is also about the planned media obsolescence that is now designed into many devices.

Joanna's focus here is especially on photography, but this is also part of …

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Snurb — Friday 11 November 2016 19:04

Twitter in Frankfurt's Blockupy Protests

Politics | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ECREA 2016 |

The final speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is the great Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Blockupy Frankfurt protests, directed against the inauguration of the new European Central Bank building. These protests used social media as a central means of generating engagement and activity.

The movement used a number of key hashtags (#blockupy, #destroika, #notroika) to mobilise its supporters; tweets in these hashtags largely consisted of retweets of a number of key messages. It is notable that there are a comparatively limited amount of URLs in these tweets, however, positioning these hashtags outside of common patterns.

Interestingly, the …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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