Some Talks in Oslo ahead of AoIR 2016 in Berlin

I’m on my way to Berlin for this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference, which will be one of our biggest yet – but on my way I’ve also swung by Oslo to visit my colleagues in the Social Media and Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns (SAC) project which is now coming to its conclusion. While there I gave a couple of invited talks on my recent research – and the slides from those presentations are now available here.

First, I visited Anders Larsson at Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology, where I outlined my thoughts on what I’ve started to call the second wave of citizen journalism, now taking place through social media. This essentially provides an overview of the key themes in Gatewatching Revisited – the update to my 2005 Gatewatching book which I’m currently writing:

Axel Bruns. “How the Person in the Street Became a Journalist: Social Media and the Second Wave of Citizen Journalism.” Invited presentation at Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology, Oslo, 27 Sep. 2016.

The second presentation was at the impressive Norwegian National Gallery, and offered an overview of the key findings from our efforts to comprehensively map the Norwegian Twittersphere – in analogy to similar work done on the Australian Twittersphere, which we’re also about to update again. As of the end of 2015, we managed to identify nearly one million Norwegian Twitter accounts, and to map the follower/followee relations between them. The result is a picture of a national Twittersphere that seems quite thoroughly interconnected, with few signs of echo chambers or filter bubbles:

Axel Bruns. “Analysing the Norwegian Twittersphere.” Plenary presentation at the Forskningsdagene, Norwegian National Gallery, Oslo, 28 Sep. 2016.

More details on all of this soonish, once we have a chance to write it all up fully – but for now these two presentations should offer a useful indication of what’s to come…