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Snurb — Friday 15 October 2010 01:21

Contextual Influences on Social Media Activists' Media Imaginaries

Politics | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Veronica Barassi, whose interest is in researching social media and political activism. The relationship between these practices remains underresearched, and while the democratic potential of social media has been highlighted, it is also undermined by a political culture of free labour, neoliberal surveillance, and corporate control.

One way of addressing this is to understand social media as practice – and Veronica has conducted an ethnographic study of three political groups of in Britain, Italy, and Spain. Key conclusions from this is that social media become tools of opportunity and challenge for social …

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Snurb — Friday 15 October 2010 01:03

News Choices in Covering the Iranian Election

Politics | Elections | Journalism | Twitter | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Max Hänska-Ahy, whose interest is in the use of Twitter and satellite TV in the recent Iranian election and its aftermath. The outcome of the election was highly disputed, of course, with widespread protests; domestic media and other channels of communication were shut down or disrupted by the government. External media sources (BBC World News, CNN, etc.) remained important sources of information during this time, but their satellite channels, too, were disrupted.

Such satellite channels are produced at a great distance from Iran, however, and relied almost exclusively on user-generated content which …

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Snurb — Thursday 14 October 2010 23:28

How News Media in Latvia and Russia Cover Each Other's Countries

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Inta Brikše, whose interest is in Latvian and Russian news media’s coverage of each other’s countries. Russia is still seen as a major enemy of Latvia, for historic reasons, so it is interesting to examine how each country is framed by the news media of the other.

The study examined the Websites of three Russian and three Latvian newspapers, as well as of three Latvian newspapers which are published in the Russian language. This content was examined for issues, sources, source types, causes for coverage (events, opinions, …), and levels of neutrality …

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Snurb — Thursday 14 October 2010 18:33

Online Media and Democracy?

Politics | Journalism | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Natalie Fenton, who highlights four key themes in research on media and democracy during the online age. There is a need for deeper contextualisation of the available research, she sees, which will also help realise the full potential of what is happening here.

The first dimension is the idea that social media are communication-led rather than information-driven. Social media are used for a variety of reasons, with the sense of being connected, being part of a community, as a key driver. What’s missing from a lot of that is that some basic …

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Snurb — Wednesday 13 October 2010 23:38

How News Media Influence Political Participation

Politics | Journalism | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Adam Shehata, whose interest is in the extent to which the news media influence gaps in political participation between socioeconomic groups, and how this can be analysed from a cross-national comparative perspective. The study examines nine European countries, and builds on an institutional framework that examines the joint impact of institutional mechanisms on participation.

There are two dimensions of influence here: institutional strength (the effects of news consumption on political participation, which is a necessary condition for influencing gaps), and the distinctiveness of the population base of the media (the socioeconomic characteristics …

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Snurb — Wednesday 13 October 2010 23:25

Online Political Participation in Italy

Politics | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next speakers at ECREA 2010 is Emiliana de Blasio, whose focus is on Italian politics in the age of Web 2.0. Key themes here are access, interaction, and participation. Participation here means both participation in content production (co-deciding on content), in content producing organisations (co-deciding on production), and in technology producing organisations (co-deciding on technology).

Advantages of these shifts are greater interactivity, connectedness, participatory deliberation; disadvantages include a loss of control, and other negatives. The present research examined the information, fundraising, involvement, and mobilisation functions of Italian political Websites, to determine the interrelationships between social networking and political …

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Snurb — Wednesday 13 October 2010 23:01

Political Engagement in Local Swedish Referenda

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | ECREA 2010 |

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 starts with Elisabeth Stúr, whose interest is in the mediated debates in the lead-up to a referendum in a small community in Sweden about the extension of a hydroelectric power scheme. In this case, public opinion was communicated both through old and new media, as well as through public meetings, raising the question to what extent political debates moved to new media platforms.

The two local papers were considered to be the most important sources, and most reliable for inhabitants of the region; public meetings also played an important role. The Internet was …

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Snurb — Tuesday 12 October 2010 20:24

Mapping Online Publics: Methodological Observations

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | ECREA 2010 |

Bremen.
The next speaker at ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, presenting on our Mapping Online Publics research project; this presentation is the methodological part, and I’ll show some more results at the main ECREA 2010 conference later in the week. Our research is part of an ARC Discovery project exploring methods for examining Australian social media use – the aim is to develop methods for computer-assisted cultural analysis. Over the course of the three years, we’ll examine blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Here’s Jean’s Powerpoint, and my transcript is below, too. I’ll …

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Snurb — Tuesday 12 October 2010 20:23

Understanding European Online Publics

Politics | Elections | ECREA 2010 |

Bremen.
The next speaker at this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 is Asimina Michailidou, whose interest is in online public opinion formation in the European Union. This is deliberately avoiding an examination of party politics or opinion polls, but rather goes straight to online interaction – in this case, in the context of the EU parliamentary elections in 2009. The focus here was on twelve EU nations as well as a number of pan-European opinion and debate sites.

There are a number of methodological challenges with this – across the three areas of sampling, analysis, and interpretation …

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Snurb — Friday 27 August 2010 09:31

The Trouble with the Fourth Estate

Politics | Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism |

I spoke at an event organised by the Queensland Chapter of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group last night, in the Queensland Parliamentary Annexe – alongside Democrats leader turned Greens candidate Andrew Bartlett, On Line Opinion founder Graham Young, and Courier-Mail political journalist Craig Johnstone.

The theme of the evening was ‘whether bloggers are the new fourth estate’ – and here’s what  had to say (a bit of a rant, as is pretty much unavoidable after the election campaign we’ve had):

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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