Seattle. My own paper (with Jean), on the Twitter response to the second Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 through the #eqnz hashtag, was next at AoIR 2011. Here are the slides – audio soon, hopefully now also added.
Seattle. The next speaker in our AoIR 2011 panel is Frances Shaw, who focusses our attention on the December/January 2010 Queensland floods crisis; the peak period in southeast Queensland followed 9 January 2010. The floods washed down from Toowoomba through the Lockyer Valley (were a significant number of lives were lost) and into Ipswich and Brisbane. On Twitter, discussion of the floods was coordinated through the #qldfloods hashtag, and the Queensland Police Service Media Unit account @QPSMedia emerged as a leading actor.
Frances worked through the #qldfloods dataset as well as through tweets sent by and directed at the …
Seattle. The next session at AoIR 2011 is our own, fabulous panel on crisis communication. We begin with an overview paper by my CCI colleagues Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford, who introduce the idea of acute events. Kate begins by outlining the idea of media ecologies involving a wide range of different media platforms, and their specific performance during acute events (such as crises, but also a range of similar events).
Jean follows on by defining acute events as significant real-world events which are associated with intense bursts in media activity – from political elections to royal weddings, from celebrity …
Seattle. The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.
Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.
Seattle. The next AoIR 2011 speaker is Aristea Fotopoulou, whose interest is in digital networks. She focusses on the Feminism conference in London in 2009, using both ethnographic and Webcrawling methods. The conference is connected with the wider London Feminist Network, which not least engages with recent political changes in the UK. The network reframes views on violence against women, prostitution and pornography, but Aristea’s ethnographic work was able to trace a range of different versions of feminist identity.
Older divisions are reinvoked in networked conditions, and an imaginary perspective of feminism as a movement is evoked in the process …
