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Snurb — Tuesday 16 July 2019 13:30

A Round-Up of Some Recent Publications

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of …

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Snurb — Friday 12 July 2019 00:52

Towards Social Journalism: Rediscovering the Conversation

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Online Publishing | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 22:53

Online Influencers and the Long History of Paid Promotional Content

Produsage in Business | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The next presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jeremy Shtern, who begins by noting that the quantification of the influence of online and social media actors is a tricky problem – but it may not be as hard to qualify such influence. It is important in this context to understand online environments as working largely on the basis of a monetisation philosophy, too.

Online influencers are individual content creators in online and social media spaces who monetise their large followings to advertise particular products and services. Such influence can also go badly wrong, however, as influencers choose the ‘wrong’ …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 22:36

Understanding the Rhythms of Social Media Platforms

Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The next presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Elinor Carmi, whose interest is in the power behind spam, noise, and other disruptive behaviours. In most forms of creative media, there is a form of direction, often aimed at generating an emotive response from the audience. This is also true in online spaces, where we are directed by algorithmic rhythms. We might be able to understand these by borrowing concepts from sound.

The intentions of a theatre director and a social media executive are quite different, however; they seek to engender different audience responses. In social media, for instance …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 17:43

A Theory of Flak as a Political Weapon

Politics | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.

One of these factors is flak: a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside of news organisations. Flak comes into play when internal filters are insufficient …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 17:09

Strategies for Dealing with Online News Overload

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The third speaker in this IAMCR2019 session is Zhieh Lor, whose focus is on coping strategies for dealing with news overload in social media. Such cognitive overload is becoming a problem because of the considerable increase in news dissemination and sharing through a complex multitude of channels. How do users manage this?

The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing suggests that this volume of content encountered triggers symptoms of cognitive overload, and the hypothesis here is that the size of a user’s news repertoire will be positively associated with their level of news overload. Strategies for avoiding such …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 00:13

Why Do People Share ‘Fake News’ on Social Media?

Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The final IAMCR 2019 panel I’m attending today is on ‘fake news’ and hate speech, and we start with Andrew Duffy. His focus is on why people share ‘fake news’ stories via social media.

Much of the research on ‘fake news’ points out that it damages democracy – but it can also have significant negative or positive impacts on personal relationships. The sharing of such content fits into existing sharing behaviours; sharing the news with others is now a widespread social practice, and news is usually shared especially because stories are useful, emotions, bizarre, positive, entertaining, or exaggerated.

’Fake news’ …

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Snurb — Wednesday 10 July 2019 19:07

If Network Heterogeneity Is Important for Information Diets, What Are Its Causes?

Politics | Journalism | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | IAMCR 2019 |

The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …

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Snurb — Wednesday 10 July 2019 17:48

Debunking the ‘Filter Bubble’ and ‘Echo Chamber’ Myths

Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications | IAMCR 2019 |

The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.

It's Not the Technology, Stupid: How the ‘Echo Chamber’ and ‘Filter Bubble’ Metaphors Have Failed Us from Axel Bruns

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Snurb — Wednesday 10 July 2019 05:32

Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network (AoIR FPS 2019)

'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | AoIR Flashpoint Symposium 2019 |

AoIR FPS 2019

Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network

Felix Victor Münch, Ben Thies, Cornelius Puschmann, and Axel Bruns

  • 24 June 2019 – Association of Internet Researchers Flashpoint Symposium, Urbino
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Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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