Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Gabriela Zago, who shifts our focus to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ in Brazilian politics; she is looking especially at the use of Twitter in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Twitter is an important social medium in Brazil, and especially features many social influencers including politicians, journalists, and celebrities.

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:

Impressively, the Monday keynote at ICA 2018 is by Elihu Katz, whose considerable impact on communication research does of course reach back to the 1950s. He begins by noting the important role that Paul Lazarsfeld played in restoring interpersonal communication to the study of communication, a development which is crucial to the study of social networks today.

Lazarsfeld became interested in radio in the 1930s, and was also intrigued by the psychology of decision-making; he combined this in his studies of voters in Ohio over an extended period of time. This enabled him to identify voters who changed their minds during the course of an election campaign – a change which was attributed not mainly to media coverage, but to the role of better-informed opinion leaders. This was the basis for the theory of the two-step flow, which was be proven in subsequent studies that examined the roles of both influencers and influencees and identified different spheres of influence.