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From the excitement of a thoroughly inspiring AoIR 2012 conference, I've now made my way to Istanbul for this year's European Communications Conference, ECREA 2012. We open the conference with a keynote on e-democracy by Donatella dells Porta, considering the types of democracy which new social movements are envisaging.

Donatella begins by highlighting questions over the traditional role of parties – the have been seen as distancing MPs from the electorate, which are no longer strictly necessary in an era of more direct communication between voters and politicians. Political activists at the beginning of the current millennium have also …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sheetal Agarwal, whose focus is also on Occupy-related Twitter networks. Is Occupy a networked organisation, and if so, what kind of networked organisation? How might its organisational features be assessed? There are plenty of theories about organisation, from organisational sociology to political economy, which have been applied to the study of communication networks, international relations, and digital media. Such theories variously see organisations as bounded or unbounded, intentional or emergent, membership-driven and/or issue-focussed.

Common to organisations are strategies for resource allocation, responsiveness to external environments and flows, and capabilities for long-term …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sharon Strover, who begins by noting a racist YouTube video which complained about Asian students in the UCLA library and rapidly generated a substantial number of response videos; this can be seen as a form of civic engagement which must be distinguished from political participation.

Online spaces generally aren't very good at sustaining Habermasian qualities of political discourse – reciprocal, open, equal and rational discussion – but rather enable the formation of ephemeral groups which actualise interaction through content production and consumption in networks of information flows. This does not usually …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

Fairly violent clearouts of the campsite took place across the timeframe of the Occupy Oakland campaign, since October 2011. The local movement has gained a particular reputation within the overall Occupy movement.

Tim and …

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with a paper by my colleague Tim Highfield that Stephen Harrington and I contributed to as well – he's focussing on Australian politics on Twitter. (Slides and audio to follow.) Here are the slides and audio; my notes on the presentation are below.

Australian politics has been online for some time, in various forms – political blogs played a role in discussion around the 2007 federal election, for example, but the people blogging were mainly interested citizens following …

Finally, we move on to Andra Siibak in this AoIR 2012 panel. She highlights the potential of creative research methods for the study of social media: here, participants are asked to create something symbolic or metaphorical to represent their responses to research questions, and to reflect on these creations. Andra has used this to examine the online identity construction strategies of tweens in Estonia and Sweden.

The kids were asked to draw an imaginary character at ages 10 and 12-14, discussing inter alia what kinds of social media platforms this character may use; later, they were also asked to create …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 panel is Niels Brügger, who steps back from online social networks to present some more general observations about network analysis. His specific interest is in Web historiography – how can network analysis be applied to archival Web material, then?

Software-supported network analysis builds on hyperlinks on the Web – not on the wider context of Web content production. But hyperlinks always have a meaning; they are made for a reason, and constitute a performative entity which enables movement from one document to another. Web archives complicate such meaning as they cannot normally constitute …

The next speaker on this AoIR 2012 panel is Frauke Zeller, who continues the focus on mixed-methods approaches to online social network analysis. This methodological paradigm is still quite new, and there is considerable uncertainty about best practices in research; network analysis alone cannot be enough.

Frauke specifically highlights the multimodality of social network content, which complicates analysis, and notes issues with the availability and verifiability of content as well. Further, are social networks a tool for research, or an object of study?

Facebook research themes include the questions of who is using Facebook, what users do on Facebook …

The final session at AoIR 2012 this evening is a panel on online social network analysis. Jakob Linaa Jensen starts us off by reflecting on the methods for studying online social networks, and notes the importance of both tracking social media use in practice and asking users about their uses. Jakob also draws a distinction between social media and social networks, where social media are spaces where users can create profiles and share content, and social networks are a smaller subset which is focussed centrally on the user and their networking activities, less on content.

Online social networks are also …

The final speaker in this panel at AoIR 2012 is Delia Dumitrica, whose interest is in how citizens conceptualise the use of social media in political communication. Her premise is that this can be understood as an attempt to discursively articulate wider issues of trust in politicians. Articulations mobilise people, and tell us something about what we expect of politics; young people, for example, long for democracy and want to be heard – they are far from disengaged (but misplaced faith in the role of technology in communication with politics can also disappoint).

Inn the recent Calgary mayoral campaign, candidate …