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Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 18:13

Citizen Journalism on Twitter in Saudi Arabia

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2018 |

The next ICA speaker is Aljawhara Almutarie, whose focus is on citizen journalism via Twitter in Saudi Arabia. Twitter has become an important space for such citizen journalism in the country, in part in response to the economic crisis in the country that followed the 2014 collapse in oil prices.

Aljawhara interviewed both professional and citizen journalists for this study, and on the citizen journalism side these are largely focussing on hyper local matters. For them, Twitter serves as a kind of unofficial ‘Saudi Parliament’, where citizens are able to discuss current issues and make their voices heard. This has …

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Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 18:01

Attributes in Swedish Journalists’ Social Media Profiles

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ICA session is Ulrika Hedman, who shifts our focus to journalistic self-presentation on Twitter, and especially to the extent to which they provide personal and private information in their social media profiles.

The need to provide such personal and private information shows an adoption of social media logics by journalists, shifting away from conventional news media logic. Such social media logics demand that journalists should personalise their activities and portray a more rounded, multifaceted public persona.

Ulrika’s study examined the Twitter profiles of some 2000+ Swedish journalists in 2014 and 2017, and found that …

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Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 17:52

Homophily in Twitter Interactions amongst Australian Journalists

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | ICA 2018 |

I’m on one of my rare visits to ICA, and at a journalism session that starts with my colleague Folker Hanusch. He points out the considerable offline homophily between journalists - they hang out and interact with each other, and this may also translate to an online context. Some of this also intersects with news organisations, news beats, gender, and other identity traits, however – and on specific platforms, of course, homophily may also result in different patterns for different forms of interaction (e.g. @mentions vs. retweets on Twitter).

This study worked with the Australian TrISMA infrastructure and …

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Snurb — Thursday 19 April 2018 15:16

Now Live: The Australian Twitter News Index as a Dashboard

Industrial Journalism | Social Media | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship |

For the past few years I have published regular monthly updates of the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) at The Conversation and at Mapping Online Publics. As that partnership has now come to an end and the writing of regular updates had become somewhat onerous, we’ve developed a new approach to sharing the trends in how content from Australian news sites is being shared on Twitter.

From now on, ATNIX is published through a live, interactive dashboard which shows day-to-day trends and lists the most shared URLs for any given timeframe (click ‘full screen’ to enlarge):

I’ll continue …

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Snurb — Monday 12 March 2018 09:25

New Book: Gatewatching and News Curation

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

I am delighted to formally announce the publication of my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. This is the culmination of a long period of intensive research – partially supported by funding from the Australian Research Council – that investigated the increasingly complex intersections between journalism and social media in the current media ecology. I’ve made the introductory chapter available on this site as a reading sample; it also provides an overview of the contents.

The book is designed as a sequel – not as a new edition – to my …

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Snurb — Saturday 10 March 2018 15:29

Social Media, Habitual Gatewatching, and the News Industry

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Conferences |

A few weeks ago I visited Israel to present a keynote at the inaugural Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers. The keynote draws on my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, and focusses especially on the news industry’s responses to the growing role that gatewatching and newssharing via social media play in the dissemination of news and related journalistic content. The presentation slides are below.

Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past …

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Snurb — Tuesday 2 January 2018 15:56

A New Map of the Australian Twittersphere

'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications | Future of Journalism 2017 |

Together with some of my colleagues from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, I’ve just released a new, detailed analysis of the structure of the Australian Twittersphere. Covering some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts, the 167 million follower/followee connections between them, and the 118 million tweets posted by these accounts during the first quarter of 2017, the new article with Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, published in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the …

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Snurb — Monday 23 October 2017 15:23

Some Thoughts about Internet Research and Networked Publics

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2017 |

Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:

What are the major challenges in Internet research?

The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even …

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Snurb — Monday 23 October 2017 14:57

Talking Internet Research at AoIR 2017

AoIR | AoIR 2017 |

Before the AoIR 2017 conference last week, in my role as the incoming President of the Association of Internet Researchers I also participated in a Webinar at the University of Tartu to discuss the field of Internet research, alongside AoIR co-founder Steve Jones and AoIR Vice-President Lynn Schofield-Clark. Here's the full video:

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Snurb — Saturday 21 October 2017 22:06

Twitter Bots and Hate Speech in Persian Gulf Countries

Politics | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2017 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Mark Owen Jones, whose focus is on social media propaganda in Persian Gulf states. Overall, there is still a considerable lack of research into social media propaganda in Arabic; in Gulf states, there is a long history of 'fake news' in social media, and hate speech towards particular groups, ethnicities, and countries is not uncommon. Hate speech may be operationalised by ruling autocrats as a tool to divide and rule the population; different religious groups are allowed to attack each other, to keep them from uniting and toppling the government.

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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