Politics

OK, so to save this blog from turning completely into a conference blog (watch out for the Australia/New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, starting next week), here’s a round-up of my most recent publications. Most of these build on our Twitter research – and you can find more detailed updates about those projects over at Mapping Online Publics.

I’ve had three co-authored journal articles published over the past few weeks. Of these, the most recent one is in First Monday, and was co-authored with Eugene Liang Yuxiang from the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, following on from a workshop on Twitter and crisis communication research which took place there last October. In the paper, Eugene and I compare our approaches to tracking disaster-related communication on Twitter – I discuss our work with yourTwapperkeeper and Eugene outlines the infrastructure the Taiwanese team have built. For more, see:

Axel Bruns and Eugene Liang Yuxian. “Tools and Methods for Capturing Twitter Data during Natural Disasters.” First Monday 17.4 (2012).

Two other publications are co-authored with my QUT colleague Jean Burgess, and appeared in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice within two days of each other. The first of these is another methodology article, and outlines how our methods for Twitter research may be used by journalists and journalism researchers; it’s based on the paper we presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2011. More details are here:

Canberra.
The final speaker in this DHA 2012 session is Julie Freeman, whose interest is also in online political participation; her focus is on the City of Casey local government authority in Victoria, comprising a population of 256,000 citizens served by 11 councillors. How are online tools and platforms used in local government in this case?

Casey has its own council Website, of course, as well as a Twitter and Facebook presence (which is mainly used to disseminate media releases), the civic networking site Casey Connect (a council-provided platform for local clubs and associations to present themselves, at arms’ length from council) and the civic consultation facility Casey Conversations (a PhD project which offers discussion boards on key advocacy issues, without direct council involvement in the discussions).

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Sora Park, whose interest is in the processes of online discussion participation, initially especially in the context of the 100 days of political protest in South Korea in 2008. Different online discussion platforms have different affordances, of course – some will list only the most recent or most popular (or most recently popular) posts, for example, thus directing users’ attention towards specific contributions.

Berlin.
The second day of the Berlin Symposium begins with a keynote by Rebecca MacKinnon, who begins with the story of an arts installation, the Berlin Twitter Wall, which reflected on the fall of the Wall in 1989 through the medium of Twitter. As it happened, though, the hashtag #fotw (fall of the wall) was taken over by Chinese Twitter users, protesting against the continuing censorship in China; this cold war view of state censorship as an ‘information curtain’, and of digital media as the samizdat of the day, continues to permeate today.

But this ‘iron curtain 2.0’ view of the Internet has also been criticised – there are more complicated problems that mere barriers to access, and more complex divisions than those commonly perceived to exist between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’ countries. We may be succumbing to historicism, even to technological determinism, blinding us to what’s actually going on. Where, in fact, are we going, then?

Seattle.
The final paper at AoIR 2011 is presented in absentia of the original authors, who were led by Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, and focusses on the use of Twitter during the continuing Arab Spring uprisings. It examines the linguistic features of the forms of Arabic used in these tweets, as well as the topics and sentiments expressed. The authors examined some 2000 tweets sampled at random from some 233,000 tweets gatered between November 2009 and February 2011. Tweets were coded for topic across a range of thematic categories, for language (standard vs. non-standard Arabic), and sentiment (objective, subjective; positive, negative, neutral, mixed).

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Shawn Walker, whose interest is in the viral diffusion of information. He focusses here on the viral diffusion of videos during the last U.S. presidential election. Such diffusion addresses the dynamics of viral information flows online; videos sometimes managed to generate some millions of views in a very short time. Shawn’s project compared the diffusion of a number of videos across the blogosphere over the course of a year and a half.

How is this done methodologically? How can relevant data be gathered and analysed? Shawn generated data for some 125 videos across 10,000 blogs; this involves substantial data scraping and capturing, as well as (hand-)coding and analysing data. Extracting data on videos from YouTube is far from easy, and it’s impossible to predict which videos will go viral; instead, the project used a tool called Viral Video Chart to determine the top viral election videos, as well as exploring YouTube manually to identify different versions and mashups of the same video. Shawn also used paid access to viewing data provided by TubeMogul – which was not always comprehensive or entirely accurate, however.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Bjarki Valtysson, whose focus is on an Icelandic comedian who established the Best Party to contest the mayoral elections in Reykjavík, and won. After the 2008 financial crash in Iceland, there was a widespread mistrust of the political establishment, enabling comedians to successfully make the argument that Icelanders might as well elect clowns to political positions – and the party received 35% of the vote by doing so.

The Best Party successfully used cross-media platforms for promoting its subversive, carnivalesque election campaign, and thereby to perform democracy. It promoted values of positivity, honesty, trust, love, and equality, but in a sarcastic way – honesty is planned to be achieved by lying openly, for example. The now elected mayor’s Facebook page has some 35,000 likes – that’s around 10% of the entire population of Iceland.

Seattle.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Susan Kretchmer, whose focus is on the continuing digital divide. The U.S. ranks surprisingly lowly on broadband Internet adoption; some 14 million Americans do not have access to broadband, and 100 million could have access but don’t use it because they can’t afford it or don’t realise the advantages. Rates are especially low amongst the most disadvantaged groups.

This is being addressed through the development of a National Broadband Plan by the FCC, under instructions by the Obama administration. This envisages the U.S. as a 21st century information society, realising the social and economic benefits of broadband access. This builds on the language of a social contract for the development of greater access. Susan argues that this project must serve the public interest, and needs a clear nuanced understanding of the shifting demographics of diversity, and the ability to harness the lessons of past attempts and failures to achieve universal access.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose focus is on media selection practices online. She begins by noting the concerns that people don’t necessarily gain a full understanding of current political trends online, if they flock only to those Websites which already speak to their political preferences; this may give them a fundamentally skewed perspective on politics. Additionally, of course, people may also avoid exposure to political news altogether – so there’s a two-dimensional framework here, from low to high political partisanship and from low to high interest in the news.

There is also selective exposure, selective perception, and selective retention. In the first place, people may seek or avoid content which challenges their political views; indeed, the two don’t necessarily go together: just seeking out content even without avoiding other content already generates a selective exposure.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Annette Vee, who positions the Wisconsin protests in a wider context of protest movements in recent years. How do social movements travel across transnational networks? What role do digitally-shared social media play in this context?

Annette suggests that synchronous online digital communication platforms are globalising our imagined communities, so that we identify not with our fellow citizens, but with those around the world who share our ideologies. There are some similarities between the revolt against the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and the protests against Governor Walker’s draconian unionbusting laws in Wisconsin; they took place around the same time, at least.