The third speaker in this ECREA 2012 session (I'm afraid Blogsy swallowed my notes on John Downey's very interesting presentation on the BBC's coverage of the Arab Spring – sorry) is Ingrid Dahlen Rogstad, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in political agenda-setting in Norway. Can new mediaspheres challenge the dominance of conventional media gatekeeping practices? This is also a question about how new media and mainstream mediaspheres overlap, of course.

The next session at ECREA 2012 begins at a more reasonable time, and is on news representations of foreign affairs. Melanie Magin begins by presenting on the mass media representation of the Arab Spring as a 'social media revolution'. This is an overstatement, of course, driven by the mass media's focus on social media in their coverage.

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Irène Bastard, whose interest is in the use of the Facebook 'like' button to engage with the news. Talking about news can be a democratic expression, or can enhance social interactions; it can be a driver of attention and buzz, activate weak social links, or serve as a 'bubble' filter. I ordinary conversations, there may also be a range of acceptable or unacceptable topics, depending on the social situation.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Rob Procter, who shifts our attention to the London and UK riots in August 2011. His project collected some 2.6 million tweets from some 700,000 accounts using relevant hashtags from the Twitter firehose, and combines quantitative and qualitative analysis.

The next ECREA 2012 paper is presented by Nina Krüger, and focusses on brand communication activities during corporate crises. Enterprises are increasingly using social media for communication with their customers, of course, but to some extent still regard social media as black boxes; much more development – and research – needs to be done here.

The next presentation in this ECREA 2012 session is my co-authored paper with Jean Burgess on our research into the uses of Twitter in the 2011 Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake. The slides are below, and audio will follow soon. I'm afraid the audio recording didn't work out. Feel free to listen to some of my other presentations on social media and crisis communication instead...

Analysing Twitter Activity in Crisis Contexts from Axel Bruns

The next ECREA 2012 session is on social media and crisis communication, and I have my final paper for this trip in this session as well. We start with Farida Vis, though, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by the London Metropolitan Police. This relates also to the emergence of data journalism, to the work to understand the positioning of Twitter in the wider mediasphere, and to the overall interest in the 'big data' question which has grown over the last year or so.