The next presentation in this ICA 2018 session is by Drew Margolin, who highlights the growing use of computational methods in communication, and therefore the need to further scrutinise the methods that are popular here. Truth is revealed and reviewed through a succession of studies.
Success therefore depends on collective efficiency at testing and corroborating ideas, and replacing discarded ideas with new work. Existing theory must be tested for its relevance, by applying it to explain observable patterns in the available data; observations must also be used to generate hitherto unimaginable hypotheses. This should also encourage multi-causal explanations through causal …
The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Theo Araujo, whose focus is especially on analysing image content from social media. There are a number of API solutions now becoming available for the analysis of such images, including from Google and Microsoft. The project tested such image analysis tools in the context of the visual self-representation of companies discussing their corporate social responsibility.
Such image recognition platforms may not necessarily produce intuitive or meaningful results. The project automatically extracted the most salient labels these tools had provided for the images, and then computationally grouped these into a number of overarching topics …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.
User information is also incomplete, and geodata is largely unreliable and limited to some 1% of all tweets. Further, genuine users are mixed with bots in the datasets – better bot …
I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.
Keyword query data collected via the Twitter API are not representative of the underlying population: it returns representative, but not necessarily complete data. When the rate limits are hit, the data are truncated, though not on the basis of specific features. The biases that result from such selection are likely to be substantial.
What factors drive such search API sampling, then? Content …
Impressively, the Monday keynote at ICA 2018 is by Elihu Katz, whose considerable impact on communication research does of course reach back to the 1950s. He begins by noting the important role that Paul Lazarsfeld played in restoring interpersonal communication to the study of communication, a development which is crucial to the study of social networks today.
Lazarsfeld became interested in radio in the 1930s, and was also intrigued by the psychology of decision-making; he combined this in his studies of voters in Ohio over an extended period of time. This enabled him to identify voters who changed their minds …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Chenjerai Kumanyika, who notes his growing scepticism about the effectiveness of visual protest media. We must pay more attention to the changes that are occurring at this time, and to what new interventions still work.
There is a particular need to the visual ways in which media activism reproduces existing media tropes, and how else such activism may be presented. There are elements in such videos that may work against the analyses that are now required: the videos constantly tether us to the present; they do not enable us to reflect …
The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Sarah Banet-Weiser, who begins by highlighting the popular Trump masks now available for purchase. What does it mean to see through Trump in such a way – more generally, what is the authenticity of Trump’s persona?
Trump is a serial misogynist, who has serially attacked, abused, and insulted women, in public and apparently without sanction; we appear to have got used to such misogyny and barely even respond to it any more. His abuse circulates in the mainstream and social media, and enables the routine dismissal of such misogyny as ‘locker room talk’ …
The next speaker in this very fast-paced ICA 2018 session is Jayson Harsin, whose interest is in the emergence of post-truth or emo-truth in the context of the Trump Presidency. Post-truth appeals to emotion and personal belief rather than facts; this is a periodising term that refers to a widespread culture of distrust in an era of channel fragmentation and the emergence of micro-truthtellers who dine out on such emotional appeals.
This is powerfully connected to cynicism and distrust in a new, hypercapitalist, neo-liberal environment and builds on aggressive, strategic, political communication apparatuses. Distrust is now at a record high …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Jack Bratich, who introduces the concept of necro-populism as a description of the Trump Presidency. Hardcore Trump supporters present a particular form of fan culture: they engage in adolescent military play-acting, and can be described as fanboys of tyranny engaging in a form of militant cosplay.
This acknowledges the artificiality of this display; it takes an ironic stance and reuses the visual symbols of ruined empires (Sparta, Rome, the Southern Confederacy, the Third Reich) or uses those of mythical empires (Kekistan). It also displayed an indifference to one’s own survival in …
Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Roopali Mukherjee, who begins by noting the #TrumpArtworks campaign that repurposed famous art by placing Trump in the scene. Such alterations focussed especially on Trump’s counterfactual boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, and were part of a larger social and mainstream media storm that sought to fact-check and correct the President’s obviously incorrect claims.
This is in fact part of a much wider effort to fact-check the Trump Presidency and document the effects of its policies – from mapping hate crimes to assessing public opinion – that seeks to drown …
