Politics

The final speaker in this ASMC14 session is Marie Gillespie, whose interest is in the tweeting of global events – she focusses here especially on the controversial Sochi Olympics in early 2014, which were also affected by the unfolding political crisis in Ukraine.

One player in the media environment around the Olympics is the Russian state broadcaster Russia Today, whose mission is to present a Russian perspective on world news. It receives $300m per annum, at the same time that comparable public diplomacy broadcasters like BBC World Service or the Australia Network are being downsized or discontinued.

The next speaker in this ASMC14 session is Rhiannon Were, whose focus is on the use of social media alongside public broadcasting in the Palestinian Territories. People there feel very powerless towards their leaders, given the lack of effective governance and accountability frameworks, and two political talk shows with ancillary multiplatform elements, conducted in part in collaboration with BBC Arabic, have been created to address this problem. The shows reach an audience of some 500,000 viewers, and research is underway to inform programming, evaluate the project, and generate evidence of impact.

Next up at ASMC14 is Philip Pond, whose focus is on tweets during televised political debates in Australia. He takes a particularly temporal perspective to his research, and highlights the impact of electronic media on our experience of time and space; there is a kind of hyper-fast network time which is qualitatively different from its predecessor, the time of the clock.

Philip's focus is on the Australian political talk show Q&A and it's associated hashtag #qanda, which has a weekly audience of around 900,000 viewers. It invites journalists, politicians, and other panellists to its conversations (centred around largely pre-scripted questions), also streams live online. Its hashtag attracts some 20,000 tweets per week, and some 50-100 tweets from this are superimposed onto the live broadcast as the show airs.

Today's first keynote at ASMC14 is by the excellent Alfred Hermida, who uses the Canadian protest hashtag #idlenomore as an example of contested media spaces. In such spaces, which voices are being listened to, and what coverage does this enable?

The #idlenomore movement for Indigenous rights had been going for some time, but really went off when one of the Canadian Indigenous leaders went to meet with PM Stephen Harper about the issued it raised – a move condemned by the protesters who felt that this leader did not speak for the protest movement, since the movement had not emerged from organised Indigenous groups. That condemnation was especially strong on Twitter, with protest leaders actively encouraging followers to tweet their indignation.

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.