Social Media

The final speaker in this morning panel at AoIR 2016 is Elliot Panek, who points out that social media are only one venue for political discourse, and that different platforms support different forms and qualities of discourse. Is it possible to develop robust, lasting frameworks for understanding such discourse that are not inherently tied to specific specific platforms, then?

The next speakers at AoIR 2016 are Daniela Ibarra Herrera and Johann W. Unger, whose focus is on second-screen engagement with Chilean political talk shows. These shows often show tweets on screen, and promote their own hashtags as a form of engagement. There are current constitutional problems in Chile, as a hangover from the Pinochet dictatorship, and there are also ongoing issues with political corruption; this means that there is considerable engagement with current political debates.

The next AoIR 2016 speaker is Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, who shifts our focus to the use of WhatsApp groups for informal political talk, especially in an Israeli context. In Israel there is a comparatively more open environment for online political talk, but also a greater propensity to violent, inciting, or racist discussion, especially in the context of major political, military, and terrorist events.

The final presenters in this AoIR 2016 session are my colleagues Peta Mitchell and Felix Münch, who also focus on the Twitter reaction to David Bowie's death. Twitter as a platform can be useful for studying public responses to such events, but at the same time the focus on a hashtag only also limits the study to deliberately self-selecting tweets and users; a focus on 'Bowie' as a keyword provides a different perspective. This is also complicated by the one percent rate limit of the Twitter API, as 'Bowie' tweets spiked well above that limit.

The next paper in this AoIR 2016 session is by Hilde van den Bulck, which shifts our focus to the mourning of David Bowie after his death on 10 January 2016. Bowie had had a stellar and constantly shifting career, of course, but had also managed to keep his private life comparatively private, which is why his death came quite unexpectedly. Not least because of this there was a massive reaction to news of his death on Facebook and Twitter.

I'm afraid I've missed most of today's AoIR 2016 conference because of meetings, but at least I've made it to the final session of the day, which starts with Paula Kiel. Her interest is in the emerging practices of the collective afterlife: Websites created for post mortem digital interaction. Such sites are usually created before death, and enable their users to actively configure how they want to be remembered online after they have died.

Tonight is the night of the AoIR 2016 public plenary, and while it's a panel discussion which I won't blog we are going to start with a few short statements from the panellists. We begin with Kate Crawford, who notes the contribution of so many AoIRists to our understanding of the Internet as more than a utopian cyberspace, and instead as a complex stack of network protocol, platform, infrastructural, connectivity, Internet of Things, and other Internet governance layers.

But we have a new problem: more and more artificial intelligence backend systems are being deployed now to ingest and process the data that we constantly generate. These are also moving beyond what we have traditionally called 'the Internet', operating in a wide range of institutions and influencing our perceptions of the world around us. The processes are not particularly intelligent, after all; the famous image of a naked girl fleeing napalm bombings in the Vietnam war was recently censored by Facebook, for instance, and while this image was reinstated this is only the tip of the iceberg of the many arbitrary and opaque decisions that are being made by such algorithms. But the decisions being made by humans are not necessarily all that better – there is overall an irrational confidence in the calculability of reality.

The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2016 is my DMRC colleague Brenda Moon. She points out that hashtag studies on Twitter are subject to significant limitations because they capture only those tweets that have been explicitly marked with those hashtags, but may not also examine the broader conversation that might unfold around those hashtagged tweets without being itself hashtagged. There is a need here to move beyond quantitative and computational analysis of these datasets as well – so the challenge here is to identify reply chains and to examine them more qualitatively.

The second speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Fabio Giglietto, who shifts our focus to Netflix. This was launched in Italy in October 2015, and has become especially popular with young adults in the 18-24 age range. There has been a growth in the practice of binge-watching TV series as part of this adoption process, too – and other online video providers have also become available in Italy, along with unauthorised sources.

The final session at AoIR 2016 today starts with a presentation from Daniela van Geenen. She begins by noting that much Twitter research has focussed on specific events, incidents, and groups rather than on longer-term, everyday uses. Is it possible instead to identify local publics on Twitter, based for instance on geographic co-location? Are such publics connected with national networks?