Social Media

The second speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Judith Möller, who shifts our attention to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit. In its original conception, this appears only in enlightened discussion – for instance in the coffeehouses of the 19th century –, and it is highly disputable whether this translates to an online and social media environment.

For instance, does Twitter provide the basis for a public sphere? It is public, interactive, and dynamic, and therefore exhibits some of the basic features of a public sphere; journalists frequently regard it as a representation of the …

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Dina Vozab, who combines the concepts of high-choice media environments in the current media ecology, of the news repertoires that news users develop in such high-choice environments, and of the effects of media use across multiple platforms on political participation. She examines this in the context of Croatia, whose media system is characterised as peripheral in the European context, and remains comparatively underresearched. What types of news repertoires exist here, and what is their effect on political participation?

This was analysed using a representative survey of Croatian news users, and found …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Maja Šimunjak, who shifts our focus to the Twitter activities of Donald Trump in the early stages of his presidency, and to the responses these received from foreign leaders.

Trump mentioned some six leaders and 19 countries in the first months of his presidency, and this is considerable greater than the activity of many other national leaders; his mentions are often directed more at America’s (or Trump’s) perceived enemies than acknowledging its friends. Such mentions can then be analysed for their use of conventional diplomatic language (qualifying, hedging, polite, positive, and/or …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 panel is Oscar Westlund, who highlights the dislocation of news journalism in our contemporary multi-platform media environment. Journalists and news organisations have at times been eager to jump on new bandwagons and explore news delivery through new platforms – most recently, for instance, through voice-controlled information systems such as Alexa or Google Home.

This may mean changing the shape of the news itself, adjusting it to such new platforms – and it is often done in pursuit of greater reach for news content, but this reach is not usually rewarded by greater advertising …

The fourth speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Agnes Gulyas, whose focus is on how news is defined by audiences. The meaning of news is often taken for granted, and this is problematic – not least in the context of present ‘fake news’ debates. What makes a piece of information ‘news’, and is that understanding shared between participants? What expectations do audiences have of news?

This debate about what news is is not new: historically there are four key approaches to this question. The first is journalism-centric, and defines news as the professional output of journalistic practice; it builds …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Steve Paulussen, whose fundamental question is who now makes the news in a hybrid cross-media news system. His project examined this especially in the context of the 2014 Belgian parliamentary election, and it recognises the crossmediality of news and news flows, the collective produsage of news, and the real-time meaning-making of news in the contemporary moment. To understand this, it is crucial to look beyond merely binary conceptions of news and media, and see the current environment as considerably more complex and hybrid.

We should therefore look at the interactions between …

My own presentation is next in this ECREA 2018 session, and covers the central themes of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. The slides are below:

The next session at ECREA 2018 is one that I have a paper in as well – but we start with Marcel Broersma. He begins by asking whether journalism is truly at home in social media: do its strategies align with user tactics in these platforms, and are the platforms being colonised by news organisations? How are publics for journalism constructed on these platforms, and do users have any interest in being interpellated as publics here?

Audiences may consider social media as spaces to connect for interpersonal communication; in that case, social media predominantly have a social function. There could …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Svetlana Bodrunova, whose focus is on polarisation in Twitter-based discussions of inter-ethnic conflicts in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. She also notes that the debate about whether echo chambers and filter bubbles are real is still ongoing, and that attitudes towards political actors have been most researched to date; divergence in such attitudes is often interpreted as polarisation, but this often mistakes the formation of homophilous clusters for actual polarisation. Importantly, too, cluster formation is often non-binary, and instead leads to the development of multiple, overlapping, and dynamic thematic clusters …