Politics

The next speaker in our ASMC14 session is Wilfred Wang, who shifts our interest to Sina Weibo – launched in 2009, and modelling itself to some extent on Twitter, the platform now has some 280 million users. It now plays an important role in Chinese public debate. Wilfred's study is especially on Weibo use in Guangzhou, particularly for constructing a local identity, separate from China itself, during the nationalist protests against Japan over the Diaoyu / Senkaku Islands dispute.

During this time, there were significant public protests, with some rioting and damage to Japanese restaurants and Japanese-made cars. People in Guangzhou in turn reacted against such riots, which damaged key local landmarks as well – and what emerged here was a sense of local ownership, separate from generic Chinese identity. This became a kind of counter-movement against nationalism, and there were even calls to boycott anti-Japanese protests. Wilfred collected the posts of a local opinion leader in this movement.

My paper with Theresa Sauter was next at ASMC14. As always, I'll try to post the audio some time soon – in the meantime, here are the slides:

The Emergence of Trending Topics: The Dissemination of Breaking Stories on Twitter

The next keynote at ASMC14 is by W. Lance Bennett, whose begins by highlighting the use of social media by NGOs. For them, the game has shifted in recent years – the emphasis now is less on continuing membership than on temporary calls to action. Other recent political movements – from the Spanish Indignados to the global Occupy movement – also appear to be crowd-based movements pursuing some form of collective action, and are moving away even further from conventional organisational models.

Conventional collective action in organisations has its problems – with free riders, for example –, and communication here simply reinforces the existing organisation. By contrast, in connective action there is more self-motivated networking well beyond the organisational setup: social technology enables sharing, using personal action frames, and thereby enlists a greater range of participants beyond the organisation itself.

And my own paper was last in this session. Audio to come later, I hope – for now, here are my slides:

All Politics Is Local? The Twitter Performance of Local Candidates in the 2013 Australian Federal Election from Axel Bruns

Our next speaker at ASMC14, Christian Christensen, takes a slightly different approach, focussing on the political role of the United States' National Rifle Association (NRA) rather than on a conventional party – and in the US, the NRA is considered to be a very powerful political organisation; it describes itself as the country's "longest-standing civil rights organisation", in fact.

The NRA in its current, rabidly pro-guns form is a product of the 1970s, and surprisingly it is not a very rich organisation – but its strength comes from its 4 million members. It rates and ranks political candidates on a scale from A to F in relation to their opposition to non-insane gun laws. The organisation runs a variety of Twitter accounts, which are largely used to cover its own conferences and to promote its statements – not really to advocate direct action and conduct grassroots lobbying.

The next speaker in our ASMC14 panel is Anders Larsson, whose interest is in the professionalisation of politics – especially in the context of the increasing use of social media and other ICTs. Campaigns now regularly use social media for political marketing, and Anders's study focusses on the use of Facebook for such purposes – using Netvizz, he gathered activity around the Facebook pages of Swedish and Norwegian parties, party leaders, and other politicians.

The first session at ASMC14 is one I'm in, and focusses on social media and politics – and my QUT colleague Tim Highfield is the first speaker. His interest is in how diverse social media platforms have been integrated into election campaigns and related aspects. This involves a range of new and established actors, and a range of platforms which are used for various purposes from campaigning, activism, and backchannel discussions for televised events, through to being a third space for public discussion and engagement with established voices including journalists and politicians.

In Australia, a number of established Twitter hashtags exist for various purposes – including #auspol for explicitly political debate, and #qanda as a backchannel for a well-known political talkshow, as well as #[state]votes hashtags for specific state and federal elections. But there is plenty more political discussion, especially during election campaigns, outside of such explicit spaces. This tends to spike in volume on and around election day, for a range of reasons, and on that day especially around the time that first results of the vote begin to emerge.

The final speakers in this Digital Methods panel are Jürgen Grimm and Christiane Grill. They're interested in moving beyond the analysis of individual tweets to the aggregation of Twitter data which can be used reliably in media research. This requires the use of transparent and clear search or tracking strategies, and a further manual reduction of the data to weed out irrelevant material; further, the intertextual connections of tweets need to be identified and examined, both between each other and with external texts (e.g. from mass media).

The idea in this is to move from an atomistic Twitter universe, based on individual tweets, to a conversational and/or intermedial Twitter universe (variously recognising tweet relationships through @mentions and retweets, or through links and other pointers to external media texts). In the context of the Salzburg state election in Austria, for example, the former means focussing on conversations rather than individual tweets; the latter means identifying all links being shared by Twitter users and generating a hybrid network including tweets and other resources.

The second speaker this morning at Digital Methods is Andreas Jungherr, who shifts our focus back to Twitter: he is interested in how we may use observations from this platform to understand what happens in society as such. What, if anything, may we read out of, for example, the patterns around an election which could help us predict the outcome of the election?

In the German election 2009, for example, Andreas found substantial activity around the Pirate Party, but this is an artefact of the specific demographics of Twitter in the country at the time rather than a sign of genuine pandemic interest in the party. In the same campaign, the volume of political news being shared during the campaign clearly shows the gradual growth of interest ahead of Election Day, and pinpoints key moments like debates and state elections in the run-up.

The final paper in this Digital Methods panel is by Axel Maireder and Stefan Schlögl, whose interest is in the #aufschrei discussion about sexism in German politics. How did this emerge from a small-scale conversation on Twitter to a major trending hashtag, and subsequently to a cross-media event, over the course of a few hours? What happened here was the growth of a communicative network in the form of a partial public or issue public related to the topic on Twitter, interleaved with other publics as enabled by the conventional mainstream media.

New forms of discussion fora and spaces, especially also including social media, enable new and lasting connections between themes and individuals. These connections are increasingly manifested in the data structures which are available through social media APIs, too, and structure the flow of communication. URLs shared in tweets and other social media updates further document the connection of such communication with other, external media, while hashtags enable the development of ad hoc publics independent of existing follower networks.