The second ECREA 2012 keynote speaker this morning is Clemencia Rodríguez, who will be shifting our focus further towards citizens' media. She notes that it is important to take historical precedents seriously – reacting against the popular representation of recent political unrest as driven and determined by social media, and as leaderless revolutions.
But media have always played a role as mediators, of course – in political communication, social actors negotiate their identities through interaction; media effects theory has this wrong. The visibility of today's ICTs has led to a resurgence of media effects theory, and this needs to be …
Here are some more updates on my recent adventures in the world of Twitter research. First, I’m very happy to report that a new chapter on the impact of Twitter on the long-standing melée between industrial and citizen journalism has now been published. In the article, co-written with my CCI colleague Tim Highfield, we explore how the emergence of Twitter as a middle ground between the branded spaces of news Websites and citizen journalist blogs and other sites complicates the previously somewhat more obvious battle lines between the two sides – extending a process of, if not convergence then at …
