Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space (ASMC) 2014

The final speaker in this session at ASMC14 is Ben Light, whose interest is in disconnection in social media spaces. Social media sites are all about connectivity, of course – at least as far as their corporate rhetoric is concerned; disconnection tends to be less closely investigated in current research.

There are different forms of disconnective power, which are differently implemented in social media spaces. The simplest is actual disconnection functionality; the second is by limiting the scope of user decisionmaking; a third is to create the social environment where certain disconnections are enshrined without needing to be articulated. Such disconnective power may be affected by geographic or sociocultural contexts, or by technological frameworks and algorithms.

The next speaker in our ASMC14 session is Wilfred Wang, who shifts our interest to Sina Weibo – launched in 2009, and modelling itself to some extent on Twitter, the platform now has some 280 million users. It now plays an important role in Chinese public debate. Wilfred's study is especially on Weibo use in Guangzhou, particularly for constructing a local identity, separate from China itself, during the nationalist protests against Japan over the Diaoyu / Senkaku Islands dispute.

During this time, there were significant public protests, with some rioting and damage to Japanese restaurants and Japanese-made cars. People in Guangzhou in turn reacted against such riots, which damaged key local landmarks as well – and what emerged here was a sense of local ownership, separate from generic Chinese identity. This became a kind of counter-movement against nationalism, and there were even calls to boycott anti-Japanese protests. Wilfred collected the posts of a local opinion leader in this movement.

The next speaker in this ASMC14 session is Brian McNair, whose interest is in the impact of social media during crises. It is difficult, of course, to isolate the role of social media in such circumstances; we cannot know how social media have changed the world, and nor can we know what the world would be like without social media.

Brian notes Luhmann's view that boundary maintenance is system maintenance – so is the boundary dissolution that we see with social media the precursor for a form of collapse of whole systems of social, civic, or institutional governance? How do the different communicative affordances that new and especially social media provide affect who can speak and what can be said?

My paper with Theresa Sauter was next at ASMC14. As always, I'll try to post the audio some time soon – in the meantime, here are the slides:

The Emergence of Trending Topics: The Dissemination of Breaking Stories on Twitter

The next ASMC14 session is by the QUT Social Media Research Group, and starts with my colleague Jean Burgess, whose focus is on the use of Twitter hashtags as a public forum. Hashtag studies tend to focus variously on specific events and issues (enabling the emergence of hashtag publics), develop hashtag typologies (praeter, ad, and post hoc hashtags, for example), or consider hashtags as agents in their own right. Hashtags, then, serve as hybrid fora, and are remarkably hybrid because they take place in such a complex, volatile media environment.

The next keynote at ASMC14 is by W. Lance Bennett, whose begins by highlighting the use of social media by NGOs. For them, the game has shifted in recent years – the emphasis now is less on continuing membership than on temporary calls to action. Other recent political movements – from the Spanish Indignados to the global Occupy movement – also appear to be crowd-based movements pursuing some form of collective action, and are moving away even further from conventional organisational models.

Conventional collective action in organisations has its problems – with free riders, for example –, and communication here simply reinforces the existing organisation. By contrast, in connective action there is more self-motivated networking well beyond the organisational setup: social technology enables sharing, using personal action frames, and thereby enlists a greater range of participants beyond the organisation itself.

And my own paper was last in this session. Audio to come later, I hope – for now, here are my slides:

All Politics Is Local? The Twitter Performance of Local Candidates in the 2013 Australian Federal Election from Axel Bruns

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 a scale from A to F in relation to their opposition to non-insane gun laws. The organisation runs a variety of Twitter accounts, which are largely used to cover its own conferences and to promote its statements – not really to advocate direct action and conduct grassroots lobbying.

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.

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 exist for various purposes – including #auspol for explicitly political debate, and #qanda as a backchannel for a well-known political talkshow, as well as #[state]votes hashtags for specific state and federal elections. But there is plenty more political discussion, especially during election campaigns, outside of such explicit spaces. This tends to spike in volume on and around election day, for a range of reasons, and on that day especially around the time that first results of the vote begin to emerge.