Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Politics

Snurb — Saturday 26 May 2018 16:37

Nudging Users Vulnerable to Poor Information Use

Politics | Internet Technologies | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Laleah Fernandez, who begins by highlighting the moral panics around echo chambers, filter bubbles, and ‘fake news’. There is limited evidence that these issues are major concerns, but to the extent that these are genuine problems, key users might be useful in addressing these problems, by nudging vulnerable users towards more sensible behaviours.

Who are the vulnerable, however? They include those who are interested in politics but not skilled in search, and this population could be identified from their responses to the Quello Search Project. (The most vulnerable group ranged from …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 26 May 2018 16:26

Algorithmic Literacy in Search

Politics | Internet Technologies | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, whose focus is on the role of algorithms in shaping information flows, and on users’ understandings of the impact of such algorithms. Algorithmic literacy is not yet well researched; it extends beyond digital literacy and is specific to different platforms, too.

The present study examined algorithmic literacy in the U.S. and Germany, to capture user attitudes and practices across very different media and political systems. It captured a range of personal and behavioural variables, and it seems that algorithmic knowledge, amount of use, and search skills strongly affect users’ …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Saturday 26 May 2018 16:14

The Limited Effects of the Personalisation of Search

Politics | Internet Technologies | ICA 2018 |

The second day at ICA 2018 starts for me with a panel on the personalisation of search, and the first presenter is Grant Blank. He begins by noting the importance of free-flowing information for society, but of course the media through which such information flows have changed over time, and this has affected media biases. Contemporary media now form a diverse media ecology.

Do online media in their diversity empower citizens to make better-informed decisions, then, or does the personalisation of online media distort the information that citizens encounter? Much of the present discussion is severely undertheorised. There is a …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 20:02

News Media Use and Perceived Threats to Political Performance

Politics | Journalism | ICA 2018 |

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Nicholas Robinson, who starts by challenging the idea that the relationships between news media and politics operate on a linear basis. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse, and the ‘war on the news media’ now being waged by Donald Trump and other populists, this perception may need to be challenged.

Trump and others are openly hostile towards the media, and this may undermine the political apparatus. One possible reading is that as people perceive greater threats to political performance, their political interest declines; but at a closer look it …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 19:46

German News Outlets’ Responses to the ‘Lügenpresse’ Attacks

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 19:30

The Implications of Donald Trump’s Attacks on ‘Fake News’ Outlets

Politics | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | ICA 2018 |

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The study downloaded some 1,000 tweets from Trump during the first six months of his presidency, and identified terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘fraud news’ in his tweets. These were contextualised against contemporary media coverage, and the study also explored the online and offline consequences of this rhetoric.

First, Trump …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 19:15

Contested Legitimacy between Mainstream and Outsider Journalists and Politicians

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | ICA 2018 |

The next ICA 2018 session is on journalism under attack, and starts with Arjen van Dalen. He notes that journalists and politicians have traditionally been seen as societal actors who are closely interlinked and indeed mutually dependent, but that the emergence of outsider politicians and journalists has disrupted that relationship.

That relationship is also based on certain normative aspects – seeing journalists as watchdogs on behalf of citizens, for instance. But such norms are themselves founded in mutually accepted values, and the societal consensus that governs those values may be breaking down. Indeed, we may no longer be able to …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 18:39

Mainstream and Non-Mainstream Journalists on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Election

Politics | Elections | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2018 |

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.

How did these two groups compare in their use of social media …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 25 May 2018 18:27

The Impact of Journalists’ Amplification of Politicians’ Tweets

Politics | Elections | Journalism | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ICA session is Jan Kleinnijenhuis, who asks whether journalists are still necessary in promoting the social media messages of politicians. Current research is unclear on this: there are few time-series studies that would be able to show trends in this field; many studies also remain quantitative and fail to examine the specific content of politicians’ social media posts.

Jan’s study is attempting to address this by observing developments in the Netherlands, combining data from Twitter and the mainstream media about the candidates’ own activities, responses to them, and coverage of their activities in the media …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Sunday 25 February 2018 14:54

Gatewatching and News Curation: Industry Responses to Habitual Newssharing by Audiences (Haifa-LINKS 2018)

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Conferences |

Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers 2018

Gatewatching and News Curation: Industry Responses to Habitual Newssharing by Audiences

Axel Bruns

  • 18 Feb. 2018 – Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers, Haifa
» continue reading...

Pagination

  • Previous page
  • 74
  • Next page
Politics
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

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

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.