Social Media

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Anja Bechmann, whose focus is on algorithms from the designer's point of view. Often, users are portrayed as the victims of victorious algorithms – but algorithms are only powerful if they have the right data to process.

We assume that algorithms are streamlining and simplifying activities and are sensitive to our wants and needs, and to do so most effectively they need to interact and interoperate with each other; algorithmic identity thus rests not on an essentialist but on a constructivist approach as identity is enacted when databases meet databases through algorithms.

Anja demonstrates this through the example of the Danish algorithm project Det Sociale Bibliotek (The Social Library), which draws on Facebook users' newsfeeds to present them with relevant library materials. It does not draw simply on their own posts, as the newsfeed also represents the interests of users' friends, and thus of their social environment.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Annette Markham, who begins by asking about the voice of nonhuman agency. Nonhuman agency has long been recognised in Internet studies, but what is its voice: what are the hidden discourses of algorithmic structures; how do we give voice to technology; how may we represent it?

The key focus here is the rhetorical function of algorithms. Current discourse on algorithm is a theoretical, abstract levels, while it is also important to consider the level of everyday talk and put this into interaction with the theory. This doesn't just operate at the surface level of discourse, in fact, but also at a deep structural level explores the creation of new metaphors and meanings.

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose approach is to examine algorithms from an actor/structure perspective. In this, we need to avoid the twin fallacies of techno-optimism as well as techno-pessimism, and move beyond such extreme positions. Algorithms are both good and bad, and a perspective which examines the interplay between actors and structures is useful to shed more light on them.

Actors and structures are ultimately inseparable and inherently intertwined. There are three useful perspectives that may be brought to bear here: Goffman on algorithms and socialisation; Foucault on algorithms and knowledge and biopolitics; and Deleuze and Guattari on algorithms and politics.

For the post-lunch session at AoIR 2015, I'm in a session on algorithms, which begins with a paper by Dylan Wittkower. He suggests that social media experience is influenced by algorithms of display and access on both user and system side.

The most important system algorithm is the newsfeed algorithm that determines what posts from their friends and followers a user engages with. This is based often on social presence - on the recency and frequency of interaction between with specific followers - and thus helps to generate stronger ties between specific users, as well as potentially leading to dominant groupthink. This is because we tend to share things that we have a positive affect towards, and that we think our friends will like – even if we are sharing negative things, we share them in the expectation that our friends will agree with our views.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Linda Kronman, whose interest is in transmedia storytelling. She organised the Re:Dakar Art Festival, which emerged from a scam invitation to an "art festival" in Dakar – Linda and colleagues created fake characters who corresponded to the fake characters created by the scammers, and the interaction between them became a form of transmedia storytelling in its own right. Linda and colleagues created fake Facebook pages for their characters, as well as artworks which incorporated the material created by the interactions.

Transmedia storytelling itself emerged over the past decade or two, driven especially also by a number of major movies and other events; but the definitions of such approaches are still varying widely. Some of it links back to hypertext storytelling and digital fiction research from one perspective, hypertext fiction evolved into hypermedia fiction, cybertext fiction, and finally social media fiction. Recent social media fiction projects include The Big Plot and Grace, Wit & Charm, for example.

I'm in Daegu, Korea, for this year's AoIR conference. The first paper session I'm in starts with Amy Johnson, who notes that existence on Twitter is manifested by voice – and voice is understood as the linguistic construction of social personae. Popularly, social media platforms are also described as giving people a voice, though this view is heavily disputed.

On Twitter, anyone with an email address and the technological literacy can have a voice, so from that perspective it is a surprisingly permissive environment – people, groups, bots, group of bots can all have a voice, and this makes Twitter a post-human and post-individual space.

There is a long history of research into the imagined and imaginary nature of participation, participants, and communities, of course – from Anderson to Appadurai and beyond. Amy's focus is on Twitter bot accounts as technical objects, especially also because Twitter explicitly allows and embraces such bot accounts.

The annual end-of-year conference season is upon us again, and I’ll be heading off tomorrow to the annual Association of Internet Researchers conference – the most important conference in my field. In spite of the considerable troubles AoIR has faced this year – its first conference location, Bangkok, was no longer feasible following the military coup in Thailand, and there still seem to be some teething problems with the replacement location in Daegu, Korea – it will be great to catch up with leading colleagues in the field again.

This year, we’re presenting the first outcomes of our latest big data studies of the Australian and global Twitterspheres. One major paper will present what we’ve been able to glean so far of the overall patterns within the global Twitter userbase – we now have data on some 870 million Twitter profiles, which provides us with a unique perspective on how Twitter has grown and diversified as a platform. Further, we’ve also got a brand-new map of follower/followee  networks in the Australian Twittersphere, based on our dataset of some 2.8 million Australian users, and we’re using this to explore the footprint of recent television programming to shed new light on second-screen viewing practices, as part of our Telemetrics project (more on this at Darryl Woodford’s site). I’ll be live-blogging the conference again if I can get online, so expect to see much more over the next few days. As a preview, my slides for the two presentations are below.

My own paper was next at CMPM2014, presenting our work on the Twitter activities by and directed at candidates in the 2013 Australian federal election. Here are the slides, with audio to come:

Twitter in the 2013 Australian Election from Axel Bruns

Up next at CMPM2014 is Stephen Dann, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by Australian political parties. He followed the 31 of the 77 candidates in the Western Australian Senate re-election who were present on Twitter (27 of whom actually posted any content), and found, in short, that what they were posting was not authentic communication.

Stephen's approach was to examine what candidates were doing in Twitter before, during, and after the election campaign. This may include original content, reactions to other people's tweets, or sharing material from outside of Twitter. Overall, then, tweets fit five broad categories: conversation (through @replies), news updates (sharing newsworthy content), passing along other people's content, maintaining a social presence, and broadcast of experiences and opinion. And spam is another possibility, sadly, often hijacking hashtags or conversations or replaying the same message from multiple accounts.

Next up at CMPM2014 is Wayne Burns from ACIL Allen Consulting, who presents the corporate perspective on campaigning. Corporate public advocacy campaigning is back in Australia, he says – previously, the marketplace of voices in public policy making had been quite small, but especially through the incorporation of social media into political discourse this has changed considerably.

Australians have very low trust in corporations, while NGOs are seen very positively; this has led to corporations becoming increasingly active in public campaigning as well. Corporate public affairs efforts are essentially on methamphetamine these days, Wayne says, and shows The Guardian's "Three Little Pigs" ads as an example of how social media are now affecting public discussion about political issues.