Social Media

The AoIR 2015 keynote today is by Jack Linchuan Qiu, whose begins by highlighting the contributions Asian communication and Internet researchers and practitioners have made to their fields, from very early research publications to Korea. citizen journalism site OhmyNews, Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, and most recently the incomplete "umbrella revolution" in Hong Kong.

But Asia is also the industrial base of the global digital revolution, and in this it remains part of the global south. Here, classic 19th century-style industrial struggles take place using 21st-century communication technologies. The problems around Apple iPhone manufacturer Foxconn represent just the tip of the iceberg for these kinds of struggles.

To illustrate this, Jack discusses the picture of a handwritten protest poem which was posted to a tree in the manufacturing town Dongguan, and was shared virally using social media. Transmitted through social media, this is an expression of digital activism, similar to so many other campaigns around the world. But in Asia it also has a special meaning, as it represents workers armed with smart phones challenging the Chinese social and industrial model. The recent tidal wave of social media use amongst Chinese workers is just as important to study as the Arab Spring uprisings.

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Jessa Lingel and Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the resistance of incarcerated populations to surveillance processes. How does protest against surveillance work for prisoners?

Jessa begins by highlighting the Foucauldian idea of askesis: a deliberative exercise of the self which also helps shape the norms of community around the practitioner. The way one person does things can thus shape the practices of those around them, and this applies to prison populations as well – hunger strikes are an obvious example of this, and they are especially effective here as state authorities are in charge of providing food.

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Mathieu O'Neil, whose focus is on the use of social network analysis in exploring online publics. Social network analysis treats the diffusion of information online as a form of contagion. It draws distinctions between leaders and followers in the social network, and the network properties of these accounts affect how information is disseminated across the network; there are certain threshold levels for information diffusion and the emergence of information cascades.

What different categories of actors exist in social networks, then? What is the impact of social status or structural positions, and what cultural dynamics may apply? One way to approach such questions is through the concept of fields, which have their own structural features and dynamics; indeed, the recent concept of the strategic action field suggests that collective actors are attuned to and interact with each other based on their shared understandings of the field itself.

The next session at AoIR 2015 starts with Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, whose focus is on the use of social media in the 2013 upper house election in Japan. Online campaigning has been studied for some time already, with considerable focus on the impact of technological innovation; such research has found that online practices often mirrored offline practices. Online political marketing in particular has been an extension of traditional offline marketing techniques, and the use of social media for campaign involvement has also been explored recently.

Post-war electoral reforms in Japan set up multimember electoral districts where members of the same party would vie for the same seats. The law also distinguishes between political and campaign activities, and governs the distribution of campaign materials (including geographical distribution, the means and content of messages, and the distribution channels).

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on news diffusion across social media platforms. The Internet has become a main source of news, of course, and social media platforms play an increasingly important role in this. Social media are now not just a source of news content, but also act as a multiplier promoting the sharing of news; and of course they also enable follow-up communication about the news.

The various social media platforms available also enable a kind of cross-pollination between different platforms, and this needs to be researched in greater detail. How do sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter interact with one another, for example?

The next speaker in this morning session at AoIR 2015 is Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose focus is on the social sharing of news. The landscape of news is changing, of course, and the question is whether the nature of news itself is changing. To some extent, our practices remain, and only our devices have changed – but at the same time, recent changes have also afforded us greater access to the production of news, as well as to new modes and a greater diversity in consuming news.

Perhaps the most important change is to how the news is being shared, as the borderline between production and consumption. Several studies have explored the processes of sharing the news through social media, in particular; Jakob is calling Facebook a meta-medium which incorporates multiple other media within its content, for example.

The first presenters on this second day at AoIR 2015 are Bernhard Rieder and Carolin Gerlitz, whose interest is in using data from Twitter's 'spritzer' firehose! which delivers a random 1% or all current tweets. How can this be used to identify individual types of activity in relation of the wider platform ecology? In particular, for the purposes of this paper, what light does it shed on the use of different devices for tweeting?

The project collected some 32 million tweets from the spritzer firehose over the course of one week, and key tools for tweeting were especially iPhone and Android devices. This may also be combined with the tweet contents themselves, to see which devices contribute especially strongly to specific hashtags, for example.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is my QUT colleague Wilfred Wang, whose focus is on the Chinese platform Weibo. His interest is in geography online – how do we understand local geography through our online activities?

Weibo is a Chinese microblogging platform, launched by Sina in 2009 and now featuring some 280 million accounts. Like Twitter, it works with 140-character messages, but given that these use Chinese characters they enable substantially longer texts. Weibo also incorporates more extended functionality than Twitter.

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in social television practices in Italy, around political talkshow Servizio Pubblico and reality TV contest X-Factor. What moments of these broadcasts trigger audience engagement? What similarities or differences are there in communication styles?

Fabio's project gathered relevant tweets from the shows' hashtags, and generated a number of key volumetric statistics on user activity; X-Factor audiences were considerably more active. They then algorithmically identified the major peaks in each of the shows' episodes, and explored the key dynamics for each peak.

The next session at AoIR 2015 starts with CCI graduate Jonathon Hutchinson, whose work is on the integration of user participation into the activities of public service media. User participation is not new, but in fact some form of user participation may just be interaction – there is a need to also make sure that participation is relevant, to both users and organisations.

A useful concept to use in this context is the idea of co-creation, bringing together users and organisations as mutual stakeholders in the participatory process. This may also result in a clash of heterarchical community and hierarchical organisational structures – and the organisational staff charged with managing institutional online communities are the ones to negotiate that clash. These community managers serve as cultural intermediaries between the two sides.