Social Media

The final session at AoIR 2012 this evening is a panel on online social network analysis. Jakob Linaa Jensen starts us off by reflecting on the methods for studying online social networks, and notes the importance of both tracking social media use in practice and asking users about their uses.

The final speaker in this panel at AoIR 2012 is Delia Dumitrica, whose interest is in how citizens conceptualise the use of social media in political communication. Her premise is that this can be understood as an attempt to discursively articulate wider issues of trust in politicians.

The second presenter in this session at AoIR 2012 is Sander Schwartz, who shifts our attention to the use of social media during the 2011 Danish election. His project drew on a panel of 6,000 volunteers whose Internet use was monitored, as well as on a survey of some 2,000 respondents from this group. The panel was representative of the wider Danish population; the survey group was self-selecting.

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.

The final paper in this session at AoIR 2012 is by Elycia Taylor, whose focus is on the reaction to the 2012 Grammy win by Chris Brown, who had assaulted his partner, the singer Rihanna, following the 2009 Grammys. Brown had become a persona non grata at the time, but has made a recent comeback, and many of his new fans appear to be prepared to overlook this violent history. There are also rumours about Brown and Rihanna working together again.

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Jenny Korn, whose focus is on the #FuckProp8 hashtag which emerged around the Californian referendum to ban gay marriage, known as Proposition 8. The success of this referendum was a surprise to many Californians themselves, and resulted in a substantial amount of pushback, in the form of the hashtag (and its alternative #rejectprop8).

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Emilie Lucchesi, whose focus is on a controversy around southern US style TV chef Paula Deen. Deen announced in January that she had diabetes, and will be a spokesperson for a diabetic drug. Even while she knew about her condition she continued to cook very butter-heavy cuisine, however. (More than 100 million Americans now have diabetes or are prediabetic.)

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with Catherine Knight Steele, whose focus is on the online expression of grief following the death of Whitney Houston. Many of the messages being posted following her death seemed more like the support offered to family members than a public expression of fandom. The same was not true in the same way following the death of Michael Jackson, when many more critical responses were aired.

The final presenters in this AoIR 2012 session are Camila Monteiro, Raquel Recuero, and Adriana Amaral, who begin by noting the demographics of Twitter in Brazil: there are some 33 million Brazilian Twitter users, most of whom are adolescents. Their interest in this paper is especially in fandom and anti-fandom around the pop band Restart, and in the social capital which such activities create and maintain.

Next up at AoIR 2012 it's Tim Highfield and me again, presenting a paper co-authored with our colleague Stephen Harrington. Here are the slides; audio to follow. and audio.

#Eurovision: Twitter as a Technology of Fandom from Axel Bruns