Social Media

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in our AoIR 2018 session is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose research interest is on the study of selective exposure; this is often studied through surveys or lab experiments, but can be usefully complemented with Web history data. Such an integration between conventional social science data and digital trace data provides a blueprint for new possibilities across a range of research interests, in fact.

I’ve spent the morning in an AoIR Executive meeting, but I’m back for the second session on this Friday morning at AoIR 2018 – and I also have a paper in this session. First off is Rasmus Helles, though, who presents the People’s Internet Project: a major global study, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, that seeks to map out global variations in Internet development.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Megan Boler, who continues our focus on algorithms. She begins by noting a concern about the affective politics of information warfare, as well as about the increasing targetting of emotions through social media activity.

The final speakers in this AoIR 2018 session are Emma von Essen and Joakim Jansson, whose focus is on online hate speech towards women and foreigners, and the role of anonymity in enabling the expression of such hate; her project’s interest is especially in the Swedish context, and it hopes to predict the expression of hateful ideas.

Next up in this AoIR 2018 session is Julia deCook, who shifts our focus to Reddit – and particular its /r/TheRedPill men’s rights activism (MRA) space. MRA has grown in recent years, and represents a particularly virulent and misogynist form of male hegemony; Reddit’s TheRedPill forum plays an important role as a hub for this online community, which focusses on hypermasculinity, pick-up artistry, and anti-feminist topics.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Luke Heemsbergen, whose interest is in the evolution of radical leaking online, after the initial WikiLeaks moment. Originally, circa 2007, the platform suggested the possibility of a new form of radical transparency, yet for WikiLeaks itself that moment subsequently passed because of the way it has evolved further; other, more recent platforms have stepped into that breach to offer alternative models, however.

The next session at AoIR 2018 starts with Daniel Trottier’s paper on on digital vigilantism. He begins with the story of a video of an elderly woman in the Netherlands who was captured on in-store CCTV pocketing a lost wallet; that video went viral and the woman subsequently took her own life. In such cases, clearly, digital vigilantism against misbehaviour can be amplified well beyond the severity of the original offence, and can produce lasting effects on the initial culprits’ (but potentially also the accusers’) personal standing and reputation, as well as their mental and physical wellbeing. Further, because of the archival longevity of Web content, traces of such accusations may remain prominent for many years.

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Mariëlle Wijermars. She continues our focus on the recent Russian election, and shifts our attention to banned presidential candidate Alexey Navalny and the role of YouTube in his campaign and related political activism.