Social Media

Our paper was next at ECPR 2011 – and we presented our thoughts on the role of Twitter hashtags in providing a space for ad hoc online publics. This also builds on some of the work we’ve done during our week-long workshop at the University of Münster last week. I’ll add audio shortly Audio included below, PDF available here:

Reykjavík.
The final speaker in this ECPR 2011 session is Giovanna Mascheroni (or is it Alice Mattoni?), whose interest is in online politics in Italian regional elections during 2010. Her team developed a code book for assessing online party presence and performance during these elections, which is now also being applied to local and European elections. This included Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube as well as general online presence.

To what extent does the use of social media in Italian elections bear any traits of a convergence culture, with political debate taking on elements of transmedia storytelling involving different political actors? To what extent did candidates appropriate the interactive potential of social media?

Reykjavík.
The next ECPR 2011 speaker is Rachel Gibson, who focusses on online campaigning in the 2010 Australian federal election. Has the type of Web campaigning that candidates engage in changed over time, and who is using social media for their campaigning activities? And does it matter – in other words, does it convert to support?

Part of this is related to the normalisation vs. equalisation debate – does online campaigning level the playing field between larger and smaller parties, or do the larger, richer parties also spend more funds on online campaigning (and more effectively so)? Is this different again with the move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0? And how effective are these different modes of campaigning in generating support for a party?

Reykjavík.
The next session at ECPR 2011 starts with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, whose interest is in the performance of politicians on Facebook. There have been a few spectacular successes, of course (most obviously, Barack Obama), and social media have now become a key tool in political campaigning, but it remains unclear how widespread such successes really are. Most politicians who use social media are largely ignored, in fact.

Rasmus’s study tracked candidates in the 112 most competitive electoral districts in the U.S. House and Senate races (who might be assumed to have the most resources at their disposal, given the strong competition); however, most of them found only a relatively small audience. Engagement with candidates is concentrated on a small number of politicians; while most people (and most politicians) are online, only a few are actually successful with their online activities. These people may not be ahead of the curve as much as on top of the curve, Rasmus suggests. We should look for the implications of using online media through different lenses, therefore: by examining the institutional and indirect effects of social media in politics.

Reykjavík.
The next presenter at ECPR 2011 is Matthew Wall, whose interest is on the 2011 Irish general election – with a specific focus on Sinn Féin. The 2011 elections reshaped the Irish party system (in response to the global financial crisis), and meant a further step for SF away from its close associations with the nationalist ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and towards becoming a mainstream party in the Republic of Ireland.

SF has a mixed history in terms of online initiatives: they were the first Irish party to launch a Website, and had presences in Bebo and MySpace, but also still struggle to manage their message in conventional media as they’re regularly confronted with their terrorist links. Their candidates traditionally have poor individual Web presence (5% of candidates as opposed to 32% of other parties’ candidates had their own sites), and remain somewhat elusive to the media in general.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Ben O’Loughlin, whose interest is in the effect of near real-time semantic analysis of public sentiments (online) on continuing political processes: in the end, we may end up with a kind of semantic polling of available social media and other electronic data, which enables political actors to target their messages to voters with unprecedented precision and speed. The 2010 election in the U.K. may have been the first rudimentary example of such a feedback loop.

Ben’s study examined the social media data used by TV and print journalists during the election, and interviewed key actors about their emerging practices in dealing with such data. Three main types of reporting were notable: anecdotal (pulling random tweets out of the timeline); quantitative (general stats on user activity as reported by various polling companies); and semantic (processing the content of social media sources).

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Andreas Jungherr, whose interest is in using Twitter data to detect events by identifying sudden bursts of activity in the continuing stream of updates. Such research is especially straightforward on Twitter, due to its convenient API access formats; additionally, the short format of Twitter messages means that key themes in messages can be more easily identified.

Twitter itself does some of this, of course, with its ‘trending topics’ (also broken down for specific geographical regions); further, it is possible to identify the links which are shared as part of tweets, of course, as well as identifying hashtags, @replies, and retweets. And tweets are exactly timestamped, allowing for close analysis of temppral developments.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Rosalynd Southern, whose interest is in the UK general election. In the first place, this examined the Web presence of the various political candidates for the six largest parties (2424 in total), from profiles on their party sites through Web-in-a-box pages solutions organised by the parties to personalised sites. This provides an indication of the role the Web plays in each candidate’s campaigning.

Reykjavík.
The final session for the day at ECPR 2011 (well, before we go and hear from the President of Iceland) has a distinct Twitter theme, and starts with Greg Elmer. His focus is on the use of Twitter in the Canadian election debate of 2008, and on the question of how Twitter contributes to intensifying the permanent election campaign.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Anastasia Kavada, whose focus is on claims that the Net leads to more decentralised forms of organising which help to unite heterogeneous participants in loose collectives. Such claims place communication in a central position, but there appears to be a lack of systematic theoretical frameworks – organisational communication may help here, she suggests.