Politics

The final speaker in our AoIR 2013 panel is Fabio Giglietto, who presents a season-long study of Twitter use alongside 11 Italian TV talkshows. Twitter use alongside such shows can reveal the power struggles between political and media actors and everyday citizens.

Fabio's team bought Gnip data for the relevant hashtags related to these 11 talkshows, adding up to some 2.5 million shows. 76% of these were made while the shows were on air, with some 187,000 unique on-air contributors. The team also identified the key peaks in engagement, and associated them with specific time windows within the broadcasts; they then conducted a content analysis of the tweets posted and the content broadcast during these windows.

The next presentation in this AoIR 2013 panel is by Pieter Verdegem and Evelin D'Heer, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in second-screen viewing. Twitter has been pushing this very strongly, but is social TV actually something new? We've seen attention to the social uses of television at least since the 1990s, through ethnographic research, but the use of social media has spread these practices further and connected users more widely.

Twitter can be a useful tool for measuring audience participation, but we also need to take into account the Twitter userbase in each country - in Belgium, some 20% of the population are said to be on Twitter, for example, but that group is neither demographically representative nor are they necessarily all active participants.

The final paper in our panel at AoIR 2013 is by Anders Larsson and Bente Kalsnes, looking at the Norwegian election on 9 Sep. Their work examines the use of Twitter by citizens, politicians, and journalists. One starting point for this were the #valg2013 and #valg13 hashtags, to identify what users are being mentioned in these hashtags - which showed that then-PM Jens Stoltenberg was @mentioned frequently but did not often reply, while the Greens party both sent and received many hashtagged tweets. Amongst the retweeters, one-off messages which receive substantial retweets can become prominent, but more frequently retweeted users tend to be celebrities (comedians, journalists, etc.)

A second approach was to examine the Twitter uses by some of the key party leaders. As it turns out, during the month before the election there was a strong focus on @replying, especially from the leaders of the smaller parties. Their communication is mainly with their own supporters - there are very few users who received @replies from two or more leading politicians (and these are largely journalists and other media figures, not everyday citizens).

The next paper in our AoIR 2013 panel is by Julia Neubarth and Christian Nuernbergk, covering the German federal election two days after the Australian one. The Net is playing an increasingly important role in political communication in Germany, but there is still very little active participation by citizens, and active participants are mainly male, younger, and left-wing. Politicians are getting more active - some 60% of federal parliamentarians are on Twitter, although Chancellor Merkel still isn't.

German politicians on Twitter will find a mixed audience - use in the country is growing, but still limited; however, active participants are especially interesting as they represent journalists and other media personnel as well as especially politically interested users.

The next paper in our AoIR 2013 panel is by Theresa Sauter, Tim Highfield and me. Here are the slides - audio to come later now with audio...

#ausvotes Mark Two: Twitter in the 2013 Australian Federal Election from Axel Bruns

The next panel at AoIR 2013 is one which I'm presenting in as well - we've brought together a number of presentations on the use of Twitter in national elections. The first presenter is Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the 2013 Italian election. He and his colleagues have examined activity on Twitter and Facebook during the month before the February election, gathering some 2 million @mentions and finding Facebook content which its own metrics reported some 25 million users talking about.

Is such activity related to the eventual election results at all? Can it predict the election outcome, in fact? This would mean taking the role of opinion polls, which in this election also turned out to be incorrect, partly due to the shifts in the party systems resulting from the rise of the Cinque Stelle party.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2013 plenary is Gina Neff, who notes that the study of online practices and texts can only provide a limited perspective on resistance to capitalism. The political and economic affordances of the Internet are less open to resisting capitalist models than we might have thought; it tends to subsume resistant practices into online capitalism in the end.

This leads Gina to suggest that the era of the amateur is over. Capitalist dynamics privilege the platform developers, policy makers, proprietors and others over users; the Net is tool for and symbol of the reproduction of this set of power relations. Through it, proto-, pseudo-, and not-quite-yet-professional media makers are subsumed into the system.

The next AoIR 2013 plenary starts with Tarleton Gillespie, whose interest is in the politics of platforms. His initial thought was that users would be unaware of the issues related to platform politics, because of the seductive apparent openness and permissiveness of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But this is no longer true - there has been a shift from complaints about policies by aggrieved users towards a subversive use of platform rules as a way to highlight their problematic nature, by increasingly politicised users.

In 2010, for example, Apple purged some 5,000 apps from its App Store for "unacceptable" content. These removals were contentions because the distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable nudity, political expression, or transgression against societal norms were far from clear; Apple pulled some "gay conversion" apps following complaints, for example, but there was nothing explicitly in Apple's rules which prohibited their content - they did not contain strong hate speech, for example, but in articulating their perspectives were seen to promote it.

When this site goes quiet, it’s usually because work is exceptionally busy. My apologies for the long silence since the launch of our major collection A Companion to New Media Dynamics – a range of projects, variously relating to the uses of social media in crisis communication, of Twitter in a number of national elections, of social media as a second-screen backchannel to televised events, and of ‘big data’ in researching online issue publics, have kept me occupied for the past eight months or so.

Now, I’m about to head off to Denver for the annual Association of Internet Researchers conference and on to a number of other events, and you can expect the usual bout of live blogging from these conferences – but before I do so, here’s a quick update of some of the major publications and papers I’ve completed during the past few months. For some more frequent updates on the work of my colleagues and me, you can also follow our updates at Mapping Online Publics and the site of the QUT Social Media Research Group, of course. On the SMRG site, we’ve also posted a list of the presentations we’ll be making at AoIR and beyond – hope to see you there!