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The second speaker in this ECREA 2016 speakers are Dennis Friess and Pablo Porten Cheé, who shift our attention to e-participation tools and platforms. They begin by noting that there is a democratic crisis which manifests itself in growing scepticism about representative policy-making. One response to this is a call for more opportunities for citizen participation, especially also through online platforms; but does such e-participation lead to more positive attitudes towards democratic processes?

This is raises the question of how this might be measured. Deliberative and participatory theories suggest that participation will affect participants positively, increasing their democratic values; such …

The final session at ECREA 2016 today begins with Lena Knaudt, whose focus is on the democratic potential of slow journalism. Examples for this kind of journalism are especially platforms like De Correspondent and Krautreporter.

There are issues in online comment spaces with discursive equality (a small minority of commenters produce the vast majority of comments); debate quality (there is significant uncivil behaviour); and moderation (participation policies and guidelines substantially influence debates). These issues, which may be at least in part a result of the comparatively ill-thought-out initial deployment of these spaces, have led a number of comment section …

The final presenter in this ECREA 2016 session is Jakob Bjur, whose interest is in the media measurement of media work. There is now plenty of work on audience measurement systems, and also a growing wave of criticism of these systems: such systems are viewed as capturing audience labour, but with very one-dimensional metrics that generate measurement currencies that are very far removed from actual audiencing practices.

These systems have generated market-wide conventions for benchmarking media performance and trading audiences between media organisations and other stakeholders (such as advertisers) – which also means that more complex audiences that cannot easily …

The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is Miriam Steiner, whose focus is on news overload amongst the well-educated elite. This is an increasingly important issue as it appears to be in the process of becoming a serious condition in contemporary society. Well-informed citizens are a fundamental precondition for a functioning democracy, but there is now a high-choice news environment that provides an immense volume of news which is at the same time also easier to ignore. This generates a widening news consumption gap, especially between populations of various levels of education, and may result in a growing polarisation between news …

The next ECREA 2016 session starts with Marc Ziegele, whose focus is on the presence of conspiracy theories and truth demands in user comments on the news. Some theorists have had high hopes for the role of user comments as a deliberative medium, increasing the diversity of viewpoints and enabling a broad discussion about the news by ordinary participants.

Comments can have a broad reach and can contribute to opinion formation, but there are also many problems: first, there is often an unnecessarily disrespectful and uncivil tone; some 20-25 per cent of comments on news Websites as well as on …

The second keynote speaker at ECREA 2016 today is Rasmus Kleis Nielsen from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He begins by noting the rise of platforms such as Google and Facebook as new digital intermediaries: these major global companies enable interactions between at least two different kinds of actors, host public information, organise access to it, and give rise to new information formats, and influence incentive structures around investment in public communication (including journalism).

News organisations are both empowered and controlled by these platforms. The platforms themselves, we should note, are usually still very young businesses; they …

There is another double-barrelled ECREA 2016 keynote session today, and it starts with Joanna Zylinska, whose interest is in technical obsolescence in media history. Media forms and devices emerge and decline again over time; Joanna is interested in a kind of shallow media geology that explores the various media pasts and futures at local, national, and global levels. This enables an exploration of the dynamics of the contemporary media ecology. In part this is also about the planned media obsolescence that is now designed into many devices.

Joanna's focus here is especially on photography, but this is also part of …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is the great Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Blockupy Frankfurt protests, directed against the inauguration of the new European Central Bank building. These protests used social media as a central means of generating engagement and activity.

The movement used a number of key hashtags (#blockupy, #destroika, #notroika) to mobilise its supporters; tweets in these hashtags largely consisted of retweets of a number of key messages. It is notable that there are a comparatively limited amount of URLs in these tweets, however, positioning these hashtags outside of common patterns.

Interestingly, the …

I'm afraid my blogging app decided to delete my notes on the next presentation at ECREA 2016, so we're moving on directly to the paper by Mireille Lalancette, whose interest is in the role of social media in Canadian politics. Québec experienced a major student strike during the first half of 2012, protesting against an increase in tuition fees but also linking with a number of other social issues.

The present research focusses on the protest repertoires used by these protesters, combining both online and offline components. Twitter serves the purpose of ambient political engagement in this context, connecting …

The second morning at ECREA 2016 starts with Laura Pérez-Altable, whose focus is on the Arab Spring in Tunisia. She begins by pointing out the double articulation of social media as a material object as well as as symbolic and discursive; this also goes for the social networks that are encoded in social media environments.

The present study focusses on Nawaat, an independent collective blog; Laura examined the site's ego-network during both the latent and visible phases of the Tunisian social movement. This combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of social network analysis and direct interviews with Tunisian activists.

The …