Vienna.
The next session at Challenge Social Innovation starts with my own paper, on Twitter as a case for social innovation (and the challenges which exist in such a proprietary environment, governed by competing interests). My Powerpoint is below, and I’ll try to add the audio later the audio is online now, too. The full paper is also online here.

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Alfred Hermida, who is interested in how news consumption changes as a result of the greater use of social networking platforms. Such users may now start to constitute network publics: mediated public spheres where networking technologies and social interactions influence one another. How does such a networked audience use the news?

The Pew Center has already shown that 75% of U.S. audiences get part of their news via email and other sharing; this mediated sociability is increasingly simply part of what we do, and social media have infiltrated our daily habits. What questions does that raise for the media industry, which has long managed to control its content distribution channels?

Alfred conducted a national survey in Canada to examine how people consume online news; of the 1600 people surveyed, some 1000 also visited social networking sites at least once per month. Half of the Canadian population is on Facebook, some 20% of Canadians are on Twitter. Do such networks play a role in the distribution of news, then?

Cardiff.
Leslie-Jean Thornton finishes the session at Future of Journalism by discussing the spread of information on Twitter. She points us to the San Diego fire and the #sandiegofire hashtag, which really was a breakthrough for the use of hashtags on Twitter; this was the first time that hashtags were successfully used for the coordination of discussion around major crisis events.

It is interesting for such breaking news stories to examine the timeline of events on Twitter, of course; this also requires detailed qualitative, even ethnographic work. Early on, journalism on these events hasn’t even emerged yet, so we can study how events are being characterised by the users who just raised them; especially at these early stages, gatewatching and citizen journalism practices may be able to be observed particularly clearly.

Cardiff.
Our own paper was next at the Future of Journalism conference. Here’s the presentation (and the full paper) – audio to follow soon, hopefully… now online, too.