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.

Such coverage in turn also feeds back to the protesters themselves, becoming a self-fulfilling fiction. The myth is aided by the fact that few people outside the region had direct access to the protests, enabling the perpetuation of the myth. As such myths …

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.

A corpus of tweets consists of tweets and retweets, and the tracking of retweets provides us with a clear identification of information flows, and enables a ranking of content by how far it flowed over time. Many of the longest information flows (the most retweeted messages) were for post-riot cleanup messages, especially …

The next speakers in our ECREA 2012 panel are Laura Ahva and Maria Hellman, whose interest is in the citizen eyewitnessing of crises. Witnessing has always been a central task of crisis journalism, but citizen-generated content is now increasingly important; citizen eyewitness images are especially central now, and are mediated from the sites of crises to the global audience. The Arab Spring provides a very useful recent example for this.

Professional media and citizen eyewitnessing have become co-dependent on each other, leading perhaps even to a symbiotic relationship or congruence between the two. Audiences use such content to make sense …

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.

Research on brand communication covers both day-to-day communication and issue-related communication, but much of this is still in its infancy; the patterns of communication around brands are still poorly understood. It seems that tweets containing URLs are retweeted more widely than others, for example; also …

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. All of this is related to issues of surveillance, user profiling, and other data …