I’m delighted to announce the completion of another major project: Blackwell has just published A Companion to New Media Dynamics, edited by my CCI colleagues John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and me. The title of this substantial volume may seem a little strange at first – why not just “… to New Media”? –, but with this collection we aimed specifically to highlight new media as a set of dynamic, evolving, and sometimes elusive practices rather than a static, easily defined thing.
The volume brings together contributions from a long list of researchers in the field, and combines international …
As we’re hurtling down the last few hours towards 2013, it seems like a good idea to take stock of what was an incredibly busy 2012. Here, then, is a round-up of all (I think) of my publications and presentations for the year, organised into loose thematic categories. In all, and with my various collaborators from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and beyond, I seem to have generated some 4 book chapters, 12 journal articles, 22 conference presentations and one major report – and that’s not counting various articles in The Guardian, The Conversation …
From the excitement of AoIR and ECREA 2012, I’ve arrived back in Australia – and have gone on almost directly to another presentation, this time at the University of Queensland Digital Humanities Symposium, where this morning I presented our research on Twitter as an example of the more general push towards ‘digital humanities’ and ‘big data’ research. Here are my slides and audio from the event – many thanks to Kerry Kilner and Peta Mitchell for the invitation to speak.
The third speaker in this ECREA 2012 session (I'm afraid Blogsy swallowed my notes on John Downey's very interesting presentation on the BBC's coverage of the Arab Spring – sorry) is Ingrid Dahlen Rogstad, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in political agenda-setting in Norway. Can new mediaspheres challenge the dominance of conventional media gatekeeping practices? This is also a question about how new media and mainstream mediaspheres overlap, of course.
Ingrid engaged in a manual coding of mainstream and online media news as well as of the 1,500 most retweeted tweets during a specific time period; she …
The next session at ECREA 2012 begins at a more reasonable time, and is on news representations of foreign affairs. Melanie Magin begins by presenting on the mass media representation of the Arab Spring as a 'social media revolution'. This is an overstatement, of course, driven by the mass media's focus on social media in their coverage.
Such coverage in turn also feeds back to the protesters themselves, becoming a self-fulfilling fiction. The myth is aided by the fact that few people outside the region had direct access to the protests, enabling the perpetuation of the myth. As such myths …
The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Irène Bastard, whose interest is in the use of the Facebook 'like' button to engage with the news. Talking about news can be a democratic expression, or can enhance social interactions; it can be a driver of attention and buzz, activate weak social links, or serve as a 'bubble' filter. I ordinary conversations, there may also be a range of acceptable or unacceptable topics, depending on the social situation.
On Facebook, the 'like' button provides the simplest possible way of engaging with the news; by liking a news article, it is shared …
The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Rob Procter, who shifts our attention to the London and UK riots in August 2011. His project collected some 2.6 million tweets from some 700,000 accounts using relevant hashtags from the Twitter firehose, and combines quantitative and qualitative analysis.
A corpus of tweets consists of tweets and retweets, and the tracking of retweets provides us with a clear identification of information flows, and enables a ranking of content by how far it flowed over time. Many of the longest information flows (the most retweeted messages) were for post-riot cleanup messages, especially …
The next ECREA 2012 paper is presented by Nina Krüger, and focusses on brand communication activities during corporate crises. Enterprises are increasingly using social media for communication with their customers, of course, but to some extent still regard social media as black boxes; much more development – and research – needs to be done here.
Research on brand communication covers both day-to-day communication and issue-related communication, but much of this is still in its infancy; the patterns of communication around brands are still poorly understood. It seems that tweets containing URLs are retweeted more widely than others, for example; also …
The next presentation in this ECREA 2012 session is my co-authored paper with Jean Burgess on our research into the uses of Twitter in the 2011 Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake. The slides are below, and audio will follow soon. I'm afraid the audio recording didn't work out. Feel free to listen to some of my other presentations on social media and crisis communication instead...
