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The final AoIR 2015 session for today starts with Tama Leaver, whose focus is on the sharing of very early childhood images as a form of co-created online identity. There are a number of approaches to understanding online identity: the networked self is persistent, replicable, scalable, and owned; identity is always under construction, and never complete, and it is also generated by users other than ourselves – identity is co-created.

Users have internet footprints (their purposeful presence) as well as digital shadows, created by others, and these turn into social media rivers that we as users try to curate. This …

The AoIR 2015 keynote today is by Jack Linchuan Qiu, whose begins by highlighting the contributions Asian communication and Internet researchers and practitioners have made to their fields, from very early research publications to Korea. citizen journalism site OhmyNews, Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, and most recently the incomplete "umbrella revolution" in Hong Kong.

But Asia is also the industrial base of the global digital revolution, and in this it remains part of the global south. Here, classic 19th century-style industrial struggles take place using 21st-century communication technologies. The problems around Apple iPhone manufacturer Foxconn represent just the tip of …

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Jessa Lingel and Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the resistance of incarcerated populations to surveillance processes. How does protest against surveillance work for prisoners?

Jessa begins by highlighting the Foucauldian idea of askesis: a deliberative exercise of the self which also helps shape the norms of community around the practitioner. The way one person does things can thus shape the practices of those around them, and this applies to prison populations as well – hunger strikes are an obvious example of this, and they are especially effective here as state authorities are …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Mathieu O'Neil, whose focus is on the use of social network analysis in exploring online publics. Social network analysis treats the diffusion of information online as a form of contagion. It draws distinctions between leaders and followers in the social network, and the network properties of these accounts affect how information is disseminated across the network; there are certain threshold levels for information diffusion and the emergence of information cascades.

What different categories of actors exist in social networks, then? What is the impact of social status or structural positions, and what cultural …

The next session at AoIR 2015 starts with Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, whose focus is on the use of social media in the 2013 upper house election in Japan. Online campaigning has been studied for some time already, with considerable focus on the impact of technological innovation; such research has found that online practices often mirrored offline practices. Online political marketing in particular has been an extension of traditional offline marketing techniques, and the use of social media for campaign involvement has also been explored recently.

Post-war electoral reforms in Japan set up multimember electoral districts where members of the same party …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on news diffusion across social media platforms. The Internet has become a main source of news, of course, and social media platforms play an increasingly important role in this. Social media are now not just a source of news content, but also act as a multiplier promoting the sharing of news; and of course they also enable follow-up communication about the news.

The various social media platforms available also enable a kind of cross-pollination between different platforms, and this needs to be researched in greater detail …

The next speaker in this morning session at AoIR 2015 is Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose focus is on the social sharing of news. The landscape of news is changing, of course, and the question is whether the nature of news itself is changing. To some extent, our practices remain, and only our devices have changed – but at the same time, recent changes have also afforded us greater access to the production of news, as well as to new modes and a greater diversity in consuming news.

Perhaps the most important change is to how the news is being shared …

The first presenters on this second day at AoIR 2015 are Bernhard Rieder and Carolin Gerlitz, whose interest is in using data from Twitter's 'spritzer' firehose! which delivers a random 1% or all current tweets. How can this be used to identify individual types of activity in relation of the wider platform ecology? In particular, for the purposes of this paper, what light does it shed on the use of different devices for tweeting?

The project collected some 32 million tweets from the spritzer firehose over the course of one week, and key tools for tweeting were especially iPhone …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is my QUT colleague Wilfred Wang, whose focus is on the Chinese platform Weibo. His interest is in geography online – how do we understand local geography through our online activities?

Weibo is a Chinese microblogging platform, launched by Sina in 2009 and now featuring some 280 million accounts. Like Twitter, it works with 140-character messages, but given that these use Chinese characters they enable substantially longer texts. Weibo also incorporates more extended functionality than Twitter.

Geography continues to matter even online, of course, as the Chinese focus of …

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in social television practices in Italy, around political talkshow Servizio Pubblico and reality TV contest X-Factor. What moments of these broadcasts trigger audience engagement? What similarities or differences are there in communication styles?

Fabio's project gathered relevant tweets from the shows' hashtags, and generated a number of key volumetric statistics on user activity; X-Factor audiences were considerably more active. They then algorithmically identified the major peaks in each of the shows' episodes, and explored the key dynamics for each peak.

Key drivers of audience engagement identified were surprise …