The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.
On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of …
The next ICA speaker is Aljawhara Almutarie, whose focus is on citizen journalism via Twitter in Saudi Arabia. Twitter has become an important space for such citizen journalism in the country, in part in response to the economic crisis in the country that followed the 2014 collapse in oil prices.
Aljawhara interviewed both professional and citizen journalists for this study, and on the citizen journalism side these are largely focussing on hyper local matters. For them, Twitter serves as a kind of unofficial ‘Saudi Parliament’, where citizens are able to discuss current issues and make their voices heard. This has …
Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past …
Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:
What are the major challenges in Internet research?
The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Catherine Maggs, whose focus is on WikiLeaks. When it first emerged to mainstream media attention, the site was a spectacle, collaborating with some mainstream media at first but also already receiving substantial criticism from many established media organisations for its conduct.
WikiLeaks can be understood with reference to Manuel Castells's concept of counterpower; it challenged the journalistic status quo, in part also because of the question of whether what it did could be considered as a journalistic practice at all, while by now founder Julian Assange's personal troubles have …
The final keynote speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Linda Steiner, who begins by introducing us to feminist standpoint epistemology: bodies of knowledge are socially situated and embodied, and this both limits and enables what one can know.
From this perspective, it is clear that there is a thin procedural view of objectivity at the basis of journalism – and this is a problem. This is simultaneously also a reason that Donald Trump and other critics of the mainstream media are able to attack the press as 'fake news' when it does not live up to a narrow standard …
