The final speaker in this panel at AoIR 2012 is Delia Dumitrica, whose interest is in how citizens conceptualise the use of social media in political communication. Her premise is that this can be understood as an attempt to discursively articulate wider issues of trust in politicians. Articulations mobilise people, and tell us something about what we expect of politics; young people, for example, long for democracy and want to be heard – they are far from disengaged (but misplaced faith in the role of technology in communication with politics can also disappoint).
Inn the recent Calgary mayoral campaign, candidate …
The second presenter in this session at AoIR 2012 is Sander Schwartz, who shifts our attention to the use of social media during the 2011 Danish election. His project drew on a panel of 6,000 volunteers whose Internet use was monitored, as well as on a survey of some 2,000 respondents from this group. The panel was representative of the wider Danish population; the survey group was self-selecting.
Denmark is interesting because it shows high levels of voter turnout (at over 80% on average), while support for traditional parliamentary politics is declining. Facebook is strong in Denmark, with a penetration …
It’s that time of the year again, when I set off for the usual end-of-year round of conferences – and this year has turned out to be an especially busy one. As I write this, I’m already in Toronto for the inaugural workshop of a Canadian-funded, multi-partner research project on Social Media and Campaigning which is led by Greg Elmer of Ryerson University; this comes at an interesting time, of course, with electioneering south of the border in full swing. We’re already tracking the Twitter performance of both campaigns’ key accounts – more on that as it develops.
OK, so to save this blog from turning completely into a conference blog (watch out for the Australia/New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, starting next week), here’s a round-up of my most recent publications. Most of these build on our Twitter research – and you can find more detailed updates about those projects over at Mapping Online Publics.
I’ve had three co-authored journal articles published over the past few weeks. Of these, the most recent one is in First Monday, and was co-authored with Eugene Liang Yuxiang from the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, following …
Krems. The final session at CeDEM 2011 is a series of five-minute lightning talks – so I’ll try to cover them all in two combined blog posts. Let’s see how we go…
The first speaker is Siobhan Donaghy, whose interest is in the transparency of electronic vote counting: after voting (using traditionally paper ballots and ballot boxes) has taken place, how are the results dealt with? Can technological solutions improve the counting process – and how can we keep the counting process transparent even though counting is no longer manual?
Siobhan says that voter education is key to this; her …
Krems. The next speaker at CeDEM 2011 is Jakob Svensson, who shifts our attention towards the individual in political participation. He does this against the background of the 2010 Swedish elections, which for the first time used social media in a significant way. Jakob focussed on Nina Larsson, a politician of the conservative Liberal’s Party, who used two blogs during her campaign.
Jakob notes the different forms of rationalities (deliberative, but especially also expressive) which are on display in such uses; beyond this, there is also a more instrumental use of social media to influence election outcomes, of course (at …
As 2010 draws to a close, its perhaps appropriate that my last couple of conference presentations for the year take a somewhat retrospective nature, summarising and reflecting on the 2010 Australian federal election, with a particular view on what we’ve learned about the state of Australian journalism in general and the role of Twitter in election coverage and debate in particular. I’ll present both those papers at different conferences in Sydney this Friday (26 November):
Though it may not have had a substantial effect on the eventual outcome, Twitter was a highly visible component of the 2010 Australian election coverage. During the campaign, the #ausvotes hashtag alone generated over 400,000 tweets. This paper provides an overview of key trends in Twitter-based discussion of the Australian election.
