Seattle.
The next panel at AoIR 2011 starts with the excellent Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Twitter coverage of the Chilean mining accident and the subsequent rescue of the miners. Luca begins, though, by pointing to the underlying theory of media events – from the royal wedding (as a kind of 2.0 version, now with added social media, of the Charles & Diana a few decades ago wedding) to crisis and disaster events.

Twitter coverage of the mine rescue in Chile was coordinated through the #rescatemineros hashtag. The miners were trapped underground for some three months, following the 5 August 2010 mine collapse; the event transformed from a crisis event to a more organised media event as it gradually unfolded. How did Twitter cover this; how did messages propagate through the network; and how did Twitter interleave with the wider mediasphere?

Seattle.
The final presenter in our panel at AoIR 2011 is Anders Larsson, who shifts our focus to Sweden. Twitter was used by the national Swedish train operator during the extreme winter of 2010/11 to address the disruptions to train services. There is a strong impetus for major businesses and organisations to be on Twitter, of course; SJ (which used to be the state-owned monopoly train company in Sweden) has been online as @SJ_AB for some time now – but only on weekdays between 9:00 and 16:00 (even though their phone service is online for longer hours).

The last winter generated especially extreme amounts of snowfall; this disrupted train travel to a considerable amount, especially during the Christmas travel season. SJ didn’t use Twitter during the entire Christmas holiday, however (given that much of the crisis happened outside regular business hours?).

Seattle.
My own paper (with Jean), on the Twitter response to the second Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 through the #eqnz hashtag, was next at AoIR 2011. Here are the slides – audio soon, hopefully now also added.

Seattle.
The next speaker in our AoIR 2011 panel is Frances Shaw, who focusses our attention on the December/January 2010 Queensland floods crisis; the peak period in southeast Queensland followed 9 January 2010. The floods washed down from Toowoomba through the Lockyer Valley (were a significant number of lives were lost) and into Ipswich and Brisbane. On Twitter, discussion of the floods was coordinated through the #qldfloods hashtag, and the Queensland Police Service Media Unit account @QPSMedia emerged as a leading actor.

Frances worked through the #qldfloods dataset as well as through tweets sent by and directed at the @QPSMedia account, manually coding a subset of these tweets according to a set scheme: informational tweets; media sharing; help and fundraising; direct experience; and reactions and discussion. Over the entire #qldfloods dataset, discussion and reactions, information, and help and fundraising were especially prominent, tweets to and from @QPSMedia focussed especially on information.

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 is our own, fabulous panel on crisis communication. We begin with an overview paper by my CCI colleagues Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford, who introduce the idea of acute events. Kate begins by outlining the idea of media ecologies involving a wide range of different media platforms, and their specific performance during acute events (such as crises, but also a range of similar events).

Jean follows on by defining acute events as significant real-world events which are associated with intense bursts in media activity – from political elections to royal weddings, from celebrity deaths to natural disasters. We can identify acute events on the basis of their timeline: a sharp peak of high volume and identity (whether locally or globally); highly mediated, involving multiple actors and interests; on Twitter, coordinated around specific #hashtags; and producing controversies and other adjunctive conversations associated more broadly with the topic.

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.

Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.

Seattle.
The next AoIR 2011 speaker is Aristea Fotopoulou, whose interest is in digital networks. She focusses on the Feminism conference in London in 2009, using both ethnographic and Webcrawling methods. The conference is connected with the wider London Feminist Network, which not least engages with recent political changes in the UK. The network reframes views on violence against women, prostitution and pornography, but Aristea’s ethnographic work was able to trace a range of different versions of feminist identity.

Older divisions are reinvoked in networked conditions, and an imaginary perspective of feminism as a movement is evoked in the process; a continuing anxiety about catching up with digital technologies underpins some of these activities, too. In digital environments, doing network politics is being remediated through these imaginaries.