Social Media

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’m attending is on digital publics, and starts with Maria Grub and Antonia Wurm, focussing on Twitch as a platform for political discussion in Germany. Twitch, of course, is usually known as a gaming platform which enables people to livestream their gaming sessions while viewers communicate in real-time through a live chat. This can also be monetised, with streamers making money and gaining access to early game releases.

However, users also encounter political content on the platform, at least incidentally; this seems to especially favour right-wing content, and …

And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.

In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.

The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Hossein Derakhshan, whose focus is on AI and algorithm studies. He begins by noting an ontological crisis in media studies: the field has looked at the production of, audiences for, and texts of media, but the rise of algorithmic platforms in particular has meant that the media texts, in particular, have now been destabilised – users of media no longer necessarily encounter the same texts in the same forms, formats, and combinations.

Instagram posts and stories, TikTok feeds, Spotify playlists, Meta ads, AI chats are …

The next speaker at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, reflecting on the relationship between audiences and media productions. Audiences experience such media productions as atmospheres: media reconfigure the organisation of space, and this affects the actions of those present; our engagement in such atmospheric spaces relies on our tuning into such atmosphere.

The concept of atmosphere is a common concept in ordinary language; we perceive the quality of the atmospheres in various social settings all the time, even though it is inherently ephemeral and intangible. How do media stage an atmosphere, then, and how do audiences perceive these …

The next speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Hendrik Heuer, whose focus is on co-creating social media. This responds to the current substantial transformation of the social media environment, which prompts the question of what we might want social media platforms to look like in ten years or so. There have been longitudinal shifts from public to private, and creation to consumption, over the past years; this is driven in past by changing social media ecologies, by different use practices, different economic conditions, and other factors.

What content types, interaction paradigms, and user …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Stef Aupers, focussing on online conspiracy theories. These are not individual, but collectively shared, discussed, and shaped on social media. Existing research often focusses on platforms conspiracism, emphasising the role of technological features and platform affordances; what is much less frequently examined are the active and collective meaning-making practices through which groups of conspiracy theorists construct their online social identities.

This represents a participatory conspiracy culture which enables the social construction of identity; it performs boundary work through which conspiracist communities define and policy the …

The second presentation in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is by Ruth Garland, with a focus on disinformation and the people. How, in particular, can governments communicate effectively in an age of disinformation? What if governments themselves embrace the tools of disinformation for branding and propaganda via their social media channels?

Ruth’s focus here is especially on former UK Chancellor and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s personal branding strategies via official government social media accounts; this contradicts past conventions of impartiality, and takes place in an environment of increasingly partisan media outlets in the UK and …

For the first paper session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen I am in a session on disinformation and conspiracies, which starts with Marilia Gehrke and Eedan Amit-Danhi, whose focus is on gendered disinformation. Gendered disinformation includes manipulated images, using image editing and increasingly also generative AI; this often references sexuality and personal identity.

Much of the scholarship to date has tended to focus on gender or disinformation, but not on both together; it also tends to focus on intentionality, even though the harm that gendered disinformation produces does not depend on whether this content was shared with …