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Finally in this ECREA 2012 session, we move on to Anne Mette Thorhauge, whose interest is in using mobile technologies to collect data about people's everyday lives. This involves log data, but also combines it with other information, such as semi-structured interviews, diaries, audiovisual recordings, and many more, and may be used to map patterns of work, leisure, transport, and so on.

Our lives – and particularly, our mobile devices – leave traces which we may be aware of, but which leave important clues for understanding society. In studying these, we combine automatically generated data with sel-reported information; some of …

The next session at ECREA 2012 starts with my colleague Tim Highfield, presenting a paper on the Tour de France on Twitter which was co-authored with Stephen Harrington and myself. My notes on the session are below ; slides and audio will follow later. Tim's slides and audio.

The Tour is a global media event with a substantial social media audiences, and is watched for the sporting action, as an act of sports fandom, as well as as a media event in its own right …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Peter Lunt, who notes that Habermas was initially especially attracted to the diverse and disorganised nature of the early formations of the public sphere, before the massification of the mass media. How are these institutionalised forms of mass media going to respond to the transformation of the contemporary media environment, then, which returns the mediasphere to a more complex, diverse, disorganised state, then? How can the BBC, for example, be repositioned if the excitement of where the public is has escaped from traditional institutional spaces, even online.

Traditional public service broadcasting …

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). …