Our next speaker at ASMC14, Christian Christensen, takes a slightly different approach, focussing on the political role of the United States' National Rifle Association (NRA) rather than on a conventional party – and in the US, the NRA is considered to be a very powerful political organisation; it describes itself as the country's "longest-standing civil rights organisation", in fact.
The NRA in its current, rabidly pro-guns form is a product of the 1970s, and surprisingly it is not a very rich organisation – but its strength comes from its 4 million members. It rates and ranks political candidates on …
The next speaker in our ASMC14 panel is Anders Larsson, whose interest is in the professionalisation of politics – especially in the context of the increasing use of social media and other ICTs. Campaigns now regularly use social media for political marketing, and Anders's study focusses on the use of Facebook for such purposes – using Netvizz, he gathered activity around the Facebook pages of Swedish and Norwegian parties, party leaders, and other politicians.
For Norway, such activity by political actors spikes around the September 2013 election, of course; activity in Sweden is more stable, and spikes around a major …
The first session at ASMC14 is one I'm in, and focusses on social media and politics – and my QUT colleague Tim Highfield is the first speaker. His interest is in how diverse social media platforms have been integrated into election campaigns and related aspects. This involves a range of new and established actors, and a range of platforms which are used for various purposes from campaigning, activism, and backchannel discussions for televised events, through to being a third space for public discussion and engagement with established voices including journalists and politicians.
In Australia, a number of established Twitter hashtags …
After the excitements of our research collaborations in Germany I've made my way to Amsterdam for the Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space conference (ASMC14 for short). We begin with a keynote by José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, which sets the theme for the conference. José begins by noting the growth of user-generated content platforms and social media over the past decade, replacing some intermediary organisations (from commercial industries to state institutions).
While some of this has been received very positively, this also raises issues of privacy and publicness – is the social Web a public …
I’m currently on the road again, as part of a trip which has already taken me through Hamburg (for a meeting with our research partners at the Hans-Bredow-Institut) and Göttingen (for the inaugural workshop of our new ATN-DAAD-funded research collaboration with colleagues at the Göttingen Digital Humanities Centre. The latter will focus especially on developing new methods for analysing and visualising social media networks, building on the considerable work we’ve already done in this area – and at the workshop last week we’ve already made good progress towards a few new ideas for what we can do. With my …
I’ve continued to update my lists of publications and presentations over the past months, but I think it’s time to do another quick round-up of recent work before all the new projects start in earnest.
First off, my colleagues Darryl Woodford, Troy Sadkowsky and I have been making some good progress developing further methodological approaches to Twitter research – focussing this time especially on examining how accounts gain their followers (for some of the outcomes from that research, also see our coverage at Mapping Online Publics):
This blog has been somewhat slow again since the last round of conferences, and I'm hoping to do more in the future to change this. In the first place, I'm planning to post more regular updates again as I publish new articles and book chapters (watch out for a round-up of recent work soon, most of which already appear in my list of publications). There are also a number of new research projects which have started this year – and while more detailed updates about the day-to-day work of some of these will appear on Mapping Online Publics and …
It’s been a little quiet again here, as I’ve taken February and March off on Long Service Leave. That’s all about to change, though, because two major new research projects are about to start now – more of these soon.
For the moment, here’s my first conference presentation for 2014, from the Media Talk symposium at Griffith University in Brisbane. I used this to work through the three layers of communication on Twitter which Hallvard Moe and I have identified in our chapter in Twitter and Society, and to provide some examples for how these layers operate in practice …
With some 2.5 million accounts, especially representing the influential 25-55 age range, Twitter has become an important social media platform in Australia. It has found key applications in areas ranging from politics and crisis communication to entertainment and sports, but also facilitates everyday communication between like-minded individuals and communities. In spite of the increased scholarly attention on the uses of Twitter across these practices, however, the question of what kind(s) of communication Twitter represents remains largely underexplored, and the forms of interaction that the platform enables have yet to be fully theorised.
Building on prior work by Bruns & Moe (2014), this paper explores the various layers of communication which exist on Twitter, from direct, dyadic @reply exchanges between clearly identified communication partners at the micro level through narrowcast message dissemination to the followers of an account at the meso level to many-to-many exchanges in ad hoc publics created by hashtags at the macro level. It outlines the different types and formats of talk which are able to occur at each of these levels, and shows the interweaving of the information and communication flows which take place on each of them. In doing so, it outlines the complexities of communication on Twitter, and points to new challenges in Twitter research.
References:
Axel Bruns and Hallvard Moe. (2014). “Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter.” In Twitter and Society, eds. Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 15-28.
