Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.
The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.
Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of …
The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.
In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …
The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Gabriela Zago, who shifts our focus to the prevalence of ‘fake news’ in Brazilian politics; she is looking especially at the use of Twitter in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Twitter is an important social medium in Brazil, and especially features many social influencers including politicians, journalists, and celebrities.
The impeachment process showed considerable political polarisation between the left and the right in Brazil; while many on the left supported the President, the right actively supported impeachment. Crucial to the debate on social media were superparticipants: highly active users who may be …
The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:
Impressively, the Monday keynote at ICA 2018 is by Elihu Katz, whose considerable impact on communication research does of course reach back to the 1950s. He begins by noting the important role that Paul Lazarsfeld played in restoring interpersonal communication to the study of communication, a development which is crucial to the study of social networks today.
Lazarsfeld became interested in radio in the 1930s, and was also intrigued by the psychology of decision-making; he combined this in his studies of voters in Ohio over an extended period of time. This enabled him to identify voters who changed their minds …
Together with some of my colleagues from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, I’ve just released a new, detailed analysis of the structure of the Australian Twittersphere. Covering some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts, the 167 million follower/followee connections between them, and the 118 million tweets posted by these accounts during the first quarter of 2017, the new article with Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, published in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:
