The next session at "Compromised Data" is the last I'm going to be able to liveblog, as I'll have to go to the airport this afternoon to head to my next destination on this trip (apologies to the presenters in the final session, whose papers I'll miss). We start with Gavin Adamson, whose interest is in the circulation of mental health news on Twitter. Generally, the journalistic coverage of mental illness in Canada and elsewhere is poor: mental illness is covered mainly in the context of (as a reason for) crime and violence; there are few good news …
When this site goes quiet, it’s usually because work is exceptionally busy. My apologies for the long silence since the launch of our major collection A Companion to New Media Dynamics – a range of projects, variously relating to the uses of social media in crisis communication, of Twitter in a number of national elections, of social media as a second-screen backchannel to televised events, and of ‘big data’ in researching online issue publics, have kept me occupied for the past eight months or so.
Social-Media-Plattformen wie Facebook und insbesondere Twitter stellen eine große Menge öffentlicher Nutzer- und Nutzungsdaten zur weiteren Verwertung durch Markt- und Hochschulforschung bereit. Diese ‚Big Data‘ unterstützen eine in dieser Form bislang noch nicht möglich gewesene, breit aufgebaute Untersuchung aktueller Kommunikationsprozesse, die den Begriff der Öffentlichkeit bis auf die „persönlichen Öffentlichkeiten“ (Schmidt, 2009), die um einzelne Social-Media-Accounts herum entstehen, ausweiten kann. Dieser Vortrag stellt erste Ergebnisse eines solchen Forschungsansatzes am Beispiel der Nutzung von Twitter in Australien dar, wo (für etwa 22 Mio. Einwohner) um die 2-2½ Mio. Twitter-Accounts existieren. Ein besonderes Interesse gilt dabei der politischen sowie der Krisenkommunikation.
As we’re hurtling down the last few hours towards 2013, it seems like a good idea to take stock of what was an incredibly busy 2012. Here, then, is a round-up of all (I think) of my publications and presentations for the year, organised into loose thematic categories. In all, and with my various collaborators from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and beyond, I seem to have generated some 4 book chapters, 12 journal articles, 22 conference presentations and one major report – and that’s not counting various articles in The Guardian, The Conversation …
The final paper in this ECREA 2012 session is by Rosa van Santen, whose interest is in when journalists consider politicians' statements as newsworthy. In particular, this focusses on the parliamentary questions of MPs in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, and examines the content of the question (criticism, attribution of competence or incompetence, causal attribution), the actors involved (government or opposition, ministers or minor parliamentarians), and the preceding media coverage leading up to the question. Does critical questioning of government actors lead to more media attention, for example?
At the macro level, are there differences between the countries? In some …
The next presentation at ECREA 2012 is by Sarah van Leuven, whose interest is in the impact of journalistic cost-cutting on the coverage of the Arab Spring. Does this lead to a greater amount of networked journalism, drawing especially also on social media? An analysis of Twitter interaction in the context of the Arab Spring certainly shows an intermingling of various English- and Arab-language voices, but how does this translate to journalistic coverage?
Sarah examined the Belgian media coverage of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, focussing especially on early protests. It appears that the more journalists represent …
The third speaker in this ECREA 2012 session (I'm afraid Blogsy swallowed my notes on John Downey's very interesting presentation on the BBC's coverage of the Arab Spring – sorry) is Ingrid Dahlen Rogstad, whose interest is in the role of Twitter in political agenda-setting in Norway. Can new mediaspheres challenge the dominance of conventional media gatekeeping practices? This is also a question about how new media and mainstream mediaspheres overlap, of course.
Ingrid engaged in a manual coding of mainstream and online media news as well as of the 1,500 most retweeted tweets during a specific time period; she …
The next session at ECREA 2012 begins at a more reasonable time, and is on news representations of foreign affairs. Melanie Magin begins by presenting on the mass media representation of the Arab Spring as a 'social media revolution'. This is an overstatement, of course, driven by the mass media's focus on social media in their coverage.
Such coverage in turn also feeds back to the protesters themselves, becoming a self-fulfilling fiction. The myth is aided by the fact that few people outside the region had direct access to the protests, enabling the perpetuation of the myth. As such myths …
The final paper in this ECREA 2012 session is by Teresa Naab, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the use of media for managing the impression that others have of us. People engage with the news conspicuously in order to appear to others in a certain way – but does this actually work? People also perceive other, obvious characteristics about each other, and from this extrapolate (partly stereotypic) impressions; can conspicuous display of media use affect such impressions, then?
Impressions are not formed only based on preset, unchangeable characteristics; smaller aspects may be able to influence them. Teresa's study …
