SM&S 2018

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Andra Siibak, whose interest is in opinion polarisation on social media and the question of whether these constitute ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’. Individual abilities and digital literacies might affect the extent to which users find themselves in such environments, or are aware of them. Andra examined this in the context of an anti-immigration Facebook community in Estonia.

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Lea Stahel, who begins with the story of two Muslim schoolkids in a Swiss school, who refused to shake the hand of their female teacher for cultural reasons. This was settled quickly within the school itself, but was raised again out of context by online media coverage some three months after the event, demonstrating how non-mediated and mediated contexts can diverge in the digital age.

The next paper in this Social Media and Society 2018 session is by Michael Bossetta, Chris Zimmermann, and Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, whose interest is in patterns in post-Brexit Facebook discussions. In particular, what is the role of emotions in these discussions, and what are their implications? The project gathered data using the Vox Populi data collection, enhanced with other data.

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 today is one I’m moderating, and starts with a paper by Ivan Kalmar, Nicholas Worby who explores the connections between Islamophobia and antisemitism in extremist online communication. Islamophobic politicians go to great lengths to claim that they are not antisemitic, in order not to be painted as fascists, yet give enough hints to their followers to still be seen as anti-Jewish.

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 panel is Lene Pettersen, who begins by highlighting the rise of the sharing economy. In this economy, the key stakeholders are service providers, users, and intermediaries, and these may not necessarily represent traditional commercial actors. Professionals and small firms are now emerging that use sharing economy platforms to provide professional services.

The next panel at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Mathieu O’Neill, who focusses on peer production in the sharing economy. How does peer production fit into the precarious, gig economy environment that has emerged over the past few years? Firms might devote some of their employee time to participation in peer production, but this also means that they lose control over their staff productivity for at least some of their time.

The final paper in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is the result of a collaboration between my QUT colleagues and me and our friends at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, exploring approaches to detecting Twitter bots that promote SoundCloud tracks. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Max Sjöblom, whose focus is on the nexus between social media and eSports. eSports has become increasingly popular in recent times, and refers to forms of sport that are facilitated by electronic systems, where input as well as output are processed by computers. This can take place in a networked environment, but increasingly there are also eSports tournaments being staged in live venues (with additional online streaming).

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Michelle Gorea, whose focus is on the role of visuality in everyday communication among young users. Many more recent social media applications are designed to be accessed via smartphones, and representations of the visual self have therefore become a far more routine activity. Much of the research into these activities are only talking about teens, however, rather than with them.