Twitter

The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is the great Anders Larsson, whose interest is in the use of Twitter and Instagram in the 2015 Norwegian regional elections. Instagram in particular has ben underresearched to date, especially given its substantial userbase and its ability to attract younger audiences. The underlying assumption here is that smaller parties may be early movers on these platforms, and that such uses are gradually normalised with the adoption by the major parties; this has already been observed for the case of Twitter in Norway.

Data collection here was via TCAT for Twitter, and instaR for …

The final speakers in this ECREA 2016 session are my QUT colleague Brenda Moon and I, presenting our comparative analysis of the uses of Twitter in the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election. Below is our presentation:

Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns from Axel Bruns

The final speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Caja Thimm, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in politics. She begins by noting the transnational adoption of standard Twitter affordances across a variety of political uses, by actors on all sides (from protesters to police). This can be understood using a functional operator model across the levels of Twitter operators, text, and function; but this is merely functional and not analytical. More needs to be done here.

Instead, the question here is one of media logics: this combines elements of technology, culture, context, actors, and power, and examines …

The next speaker at AoIR 2016 is Jacqueline Vickery, whose focus is on the use of feminist hashtags such as #YesAllWomen as networked publics. These combine affective expressions of support with intimate citizenship and political activism in an ad hoc way. Political and affective dimensions are combined with the goals of such actions, and coordinated through the affordances of the platforms, such as the mechanism of hashtags themselves.

Hashtags are curational, polysemic, memetic, enable duality and tension across communities of practice, and support articulated subjectivities. Within them occur dynamics of agenda setting, re-framing, cooptation, (strategic) essentialism, awareness and mobilisation, and …

The next speakers at AoIR 2016 are Daniela Ibarra Herrera and Johann W. Unger, whose focus is on second-screen engagement with Chilean political talk shows. These shows often show tweets on screen, and promote their own hashtags as a form of engagement. There are current constitutional problems in Chile, as a hangover from the Pinochet dictatorship, and there are also ongoing issues with political corruption; this means that there is considerable engagement with current political debates.

Second-screen engagement with politics points to the everyday relevance of politics, and introduces some shifts to frontstage/backstage distinctions in politics; what emerges here is …

The final presenters in this AoIR 2016 session are my colleagues Peta Mitchell and Felix Münch, who also focus on the Twitter reaction to David Bowie's death. Twitter as a platform can be useful for studying public responses to such events, but at the same time the focus on a hashtag only also limits the study to deliberately self-selecting tweets and users; a focus on 'Bowie' as a keyword provides a different perspective. This is also complicated by the one percent rate limit of the Twitter API, as 'Bowie' tweets spiked well above that limit.

Most of the millions of …

The next paper in this AoIR 2016 session is by Hilde van den Bulck, which shifts our focus to the mourning of David Bowie after his death on 10 January 2016. Bowie had had a stellar and constantly shifting career, of course, but had also managed to keep his private life comparatively private, which is why his death came quite unexpectedly. Not least because of this there was a massive reaction to news of his death on Facebook and Twitter.

One of the spaces that quickly emerged for such 'i-mourning' was the #bowie hashtag on Twitter. This became …

The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2016 is my DMRC colleague Brenda Moon. She points out that hashtag studies on Twitter are subject to significant limitations because they capture only those tweets that have been explicitly marked with those hashtags, but may not also examine the broader conversation that might unfold around those hashtagged tweets without being itself hashtagged. There is a need here to move beyond quantitative and computational analysis of these datasets as well – so the challenge here is to identify reply chains and to examine them more qualitatively.

The present study focusses on discussion …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Fabio Giglietto, who shifts our focus to Netflix. This was launched in Italy in October 2015, and has become especially popular with young adults in the 18-24 age range. There has been a growth in the practice of binge-watching TV series as part of this adoption process, too – and other online video providers have also become available in Italy, along with unauthorised sources.

Italian users have been especially attracted by the content discovery features that Netflix provides – especially the algorithmic recommendations of new shows to watch based on …

The final session at AoIR 2016 today starts with a presentation from Daniela van Geenen. She begins by noting that much Twitter research has focussed on specific events, incidents, and groups rather than on longer-term, everyday uses. Is it possible instead to identify local publics on Twitter, based for instance on geographic co-location? Are such publics connected with national networks?

A mapping of Twitter users in Utrecht has found some evidence for this. Can this be expanded to the national Twittersphere of the Netherlands, which comprises some 2.6 million accounts (of which 0.9 million are active), or 5.7% of …