Social Media

The final IAMCR 2019 session I’m attending today is on news consumption, and starts with Eylem Yanardagoglu. Research shows that news consumption in general appears to be in decline around the world, with a distinct generational difference in the platforms being used for accessing the news – there is also a substantial shift to online and social media as news sources amongst younger users.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Claudia Mellado, whose interest is in the impact of Twitter and Instagram on journalistic performance. Such platforms are now widely adopted in journalistic practice, and this can be understood as a hybrid normalisation that blends mainstream and social media logics.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Motti Neiger, who shifts our focus to the mediatisation of shared social futures in Israel. These represent the mirror image to the well-known idea of collective memory: such shared social futures contain societal fantasies, fears, aspirations, concerns, and expectations instead.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2018 session is Mikko Villi, whose interest is in the reserve of news media journalists on Twitter. There are already a number of studies of journalists’ use of the platform; the present paper focusses especially on Finnish news media and journalists, however.

The next session at IAMCR 2019 starts with a paper by Matthias Degen, whose focus is on the challenges that journalists face when distributing news on Facebook in Germany. The platform is now reasonably well established in Germany, too, and this means that news outlets and journalists are also beginning to explore its use and perhaps normalising its use as part of their daily practices.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.