Social Media

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Tetyana Lokot, who points out the value of ephemerality for citizens living in autocratic regimes. Russia is one example of this: there are significant differences in how the state and its citizens define what networked citizenship means, and ephemerality plays an important role in this context.

Such differences manifest in understandings of whether citizenship is conferred by the state, or achieved by citizens in their actions; this implies different views on individual agency, too. Digital acts of citizenship further complicate this picture, not least also because digital networks do …

The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Lucia Bainotti and Alessandro Gandini, who at presenting a tentative research protocol for studying Instagram stories. Stories are a means for sharing ephemeral content rather than permanent posts on the platform, and such ephemeral content has also become more popular across a wide range of other social media platforms. This represents an overall shift from an archival to a more ephemeral culture.

This shift needs to be addressed in the further development of digital methods approaches. Instagram stories can be understood as small social media stories that contain a plurality …

The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Esther Hammelburg, who uses ethnographic as well as digital methods to study mediatised events. For such events, this work might include online and on-the-ground observations; screenshots of Instagram stories; Instagram posts themselves, as gathered via the API when it was still available; media diaries; and interviews with participants.

People engaging in these events post online partly simply in order to show the world that they are there – here, the aim is to create posts that are as permanent and public as possible, especially in the context of public …

The next speakers at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Marco Toledo Bastos and Shawn Walker, whose interest is in the ephemerality of hyperpartisan news content. Posts, images, and videos often disappear within hours and days of posting, before they can be fact-checked and before standard archiving platforms such as national archives or the Internet Archive would capture them. Alternatively, the content of these posts may change after posting, meaning that the captured content does not reflect what users first saw.

There is a need for a very high-fidelity, rapid archiving approach especially around critical events, therefore, that captures content …

The next paper in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is presented by Felix Münch and Ben Thies, and Cornelius Puschmann and I have also made a small contribution to it. Our project adapted an experimental algorithm to sample a language-based Twitter follower network, and this was necessary because gathering Twitter follower networks at scale has become increasingly difficult.

Information on such follower networks would open up significant new avenues for investigation that cannot be answered by examining actual interactions (via @mentions and retweets) alone. We did some such work in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre by mapping follower …

The next presenter at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Ylva Hård af Segerstad, who begins by pointing out how much harder the study of social media phenomena has become as platform APIs have been curtailed and closed down. Additionally, and relatedly, new policy settings such as the European GDPR, have also imposed new limits on data collection, processing, and sharing. This creates critical new ethical challenges for research.

Ylva’s own work focusses on online communities supporting bereaved parents; such communities are especially important in societies such as Sweden, where cultural values mean that death and other ‘difficult’ topics are …

The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Angela Cirucci, who is exploring the question of place and space in social media apps. How do users perceive the social media environments in which they engage, from a quasi-geographic perspective?

This research considers users as experts on their own experiences, and investigates the digital identities they have created for themselves. Such identity creation involves performance and exhibition, building on the data and infrastructures available to them, and their understanding of these practices can be explored through structured sketching, structured app walks, and autoscreenography (involving users capturing screenshots of their …

The post-lunch session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Christina Neumayer and Luca Rossi, who are interested in invisibilities in social media data. For instance, studying protest movements through social media means studying only what is visible about these movements in specific social media platforms – the data must exist in the various technological layers of these platforms in the first place, and those layers significantly constrict what data are available to the researcher. Additionally, such data must also be perceived as meaningful; this requires a shared understanding in the scholarly community that such data can be used …

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Gabriele de Seta, whose focus is on connective practices and selective visibility on Chinese social media platforms. Guided by his Chinese social media friends, Gabriele has tracked social media practices through MySpace and its Chinese equivalent Douban, via early messenger app QQ and the microblog Sina Weibo, to the latest messaging app WeChat.

Such platforms show a range of Chinese social media practices, and perhaps display different conceptualisations of sociality. These have been explained with reference to different understandings of individuality and collectivity in China; to …

The next speakers in this session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti, whose focus is on the use of the Telegram platform for the distribution of nonconsensual sexual imagery (including but not limited to revenge porn). The term they use to describe this is image-based sexual abuse, and it arises to some extent from sexting as a new digital practice.

Victims of such image distribution tend to be 90% female, and more than half of the victims have thought of suicide as a result. More generally, for context, in Italy some 20% of all …