How Do the ICA and IAMCR Communities on Twitter Differ?

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Franziska Thiele, whose focus is on what communication scholars are saying on Twitter, and on whether this reflects different styles in international research communities. The principal focus here is especially on the ICA and IAMCR communities on Twitter.

Twitter has been an important tool for such scholarly communication over the past decade and more, though this is now under threat given the disastrous leadership of Elon Musk, but this activity is unevenly distributed: biomedical and social scientists appear to be especially active on the platform. Twitter use in the context of communication associations can be seen as an expression of institutionalised communities, where peer pressure might enforce particular styles and approaches in tweeting; IAMCR, for instance, is a highly inclusive, truly international association founded in 1957 in support of UNESCO; ICA, by contrast, founded in 1950, is a great deal more US-centric, with a focus on academic research more than on political impact.

Are these differences expressed in tweeting styles, then? What are the modes of public engagement (scientific, non-scientific; content- or actor-centred) of participants in these scholarly communities on Twitter? The present project identified these scholars by examining whether they followed the ICA and/or IAMCR Twitter accounts (as well as of ECREA, but this is not included in the present presentation), and thereby identified some 35,000 Twitter profiles. From those accounts in this that could be geolocated, a stratified sample of 3,000 profiles were selected, and 648 of their most recent tweets were coded. (Only 25% of accounts followed at least two of the three association accounts.)

ICA was followed by a comparatively high percentage of US scholars (25%), while IAMCR had a much more diverse following. In terms of topics, IAMCR scholars talked more about society, as well as somewhat more often about research; and ICA scholars commented somewhat more than IAMCR scholars did. Overall, though, the variation in topics and styles between the two groups was fairly limited – there does not seem to be a strong impact on tweeting patterns from which organisation account people followed on Twitter.