Politics

The first morning at ECREA 2016 starts with a session that celebrates the launch of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, and begins with a paper by my co-editor Gunn Enli. Her interest is in the question of authenticity: this has become a big theme in advertising for just about any product or service, also including politics. This may be seen as a response to the artificial aspects of the postmodern world.

The more artificial ands focus group-tested political messaging becomes, the more the idea of authenticity has come to the fore. Such authenticity has been approached …

The second ECREA 2016 keynote this evening is by Sabina Mihelj, who begins by acknowledging the substantial growth in eastern European media research, which has challenged and surpassed Cold War frameworks. We now have a better understanding of how the Cold War affected media and communication in east as well as west, and there is much in this history to be optimistic about.

But the ground has shifted again: several European countries now no longer want to be part of a democratic Europe, and the United States have just democratically elected a leader who actively opposes many democratic principles. The …

It is 9 November and there are a few other things going on in the world, but here I am in Prague at the ECREA 2016 conference, which opens this evening with a couple of major keynotes. Time to put the shock about the electoral success of naked neo-fascism in the United States to one side and explore the broader trends in late western democracy, in a keynote by Peter Dahlgren.

He begins by suggesting that the events of today represent a historical rupture; late democracy has become a whole lot later, and the times are a great deal darker …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Caja Thimm, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in politics. She begins by noting the transnational adoption of standard Twitter affordances across a variety of political uses, by actors on all sides (from protesters to police). This can be understood using a functional operator model across the levels of Twitter operators, text, and function; but this is merely functional and not analytical. More needs to be done here.

Instead, the question here is one of media logics: this combines elements of technology, culture, context, actors, and power, and examines …

The next speaker at AoIR 2016 is Jacqueline Vickery, whose focus is on the use of feminist hashtags such as #YesAllWomen as networked publics. These combine affective expressions of support with intimate citizenship and political activism in an ad hoc way. Political and affective dimensions are combined with the goals of such actions, and coordinated through the affordances of the platforms, such as the mechanism of hashtags themselves.

Hashtags are curational, polysemic, memetic, enable duality and tension across communities of practice, and support articulated subjectivities. Within them occur dynamics of agenda setting, re-framing, cooptation, (strategic) essentialism, awareness and mobilisation, and …

The next speaker in this packed AoIR 2016 session is Eugenia Siapera, whose focus is on hate speech and its regulation in social media. This is analysed by examining the Terms of Service of major social media platforms, as well as through interviews with key informants from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What constitutes acceptable and non-acceptable speech from the point of view of these companies? What underlying ideologies does this point to?

The definition of hate speech on these platforms is usually not derived from existing legislation, but emerges from within the platforms themselves, informed especially by …

The final (no, really) session at AoIR 2016 starts with a paper by Stefania Milan, whose interest is in online protest. She begins by noting that semiotechnologies now play an important role as brokers. The emerging protest/media configurations affect the materiality of the process of meaning construction.

This may be seen as a somewhat techno-determinist argument: the algorithmically mediated environment of social media certainly has the power to restructure the dynamics of social action, and social media perform a function in political socialisation and within groups. Collective action as a social construct is the result of interactions between social actors …

The final speaker in this morning panel at AoIR 2016 is Elliot Panek, who points out that social media are only one venue for political discourse, and that different platforms support different forms and qualities of discourse. Is it possible to develop robust, lasting frameworks for understanding such discourse that are not inherently tied to specific specific platforms, then?

Elements that are important here are technological affordances, social context, regulation, and user attitudes. Technological attributes include identity disclosure, message display, and message categorisation; the qualities of discourse we may be interested in include the levels of hostility, relevance, and tolerance …

The next speakers at AoIR 2016 are Daniela Ibarra Herrera and Johann W. Unger, whose focus is on second-screen engagement with Chilean political talk shows. These shows often show tweets on screen, and promote their own hashtags as a form of engagement. There are current constitutional problems in Chile, as a hangover from the Pinochet dictatorship, and there are also ongoing issues with political corruption; this means that there is considerable engagement with current political debates.

Second-screen engagement with politics points to the everyday relevance of politics, and introduces some shifts to frontstage/backstage distinctions in politics; what emerges here is …

The next AoIR 2016 speaker is Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, who shifts our focus to the use of WhatsApp groups for informal political talk, especially in an Israeli context. In Israel there is a comparatively more open environment for online political talk, but also a greater propensity to violent, inciting, or racist discussion, especially in the context of major political, military, and terrorist events.

Political talk that is beneficial to democracy cuts across dissimilar political perspectives, but remains civil if robust in doing so. Such civility may be platform-dependent, however; there are distinctions between the major social media platforms and their roles …