The next AoIR 2013 plenary starts with Tarleton Gillespie, whose interest is in the politics of platforms. His initial thought was that users would be unaware of the issues related to platform politics, because of the seductive apparent openness and permissiveness of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But this is no longer true - there has been a shift from complaints about policies by aggrieved users towards a subversive use of platform rules as a way to highlight their problematic nature, by increasingly politicised users.

In 2010, for example, Apple purged some 5,000 apps from its App Store for …

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.

Now, I’m about to head off to Denver for the annual Association of Internet Researchers …