Related to this work, and the ARC Discovery research project that supports it, we are now also calling for expressions of interest in a three-year PhD scholarship on mis- and disinformation in social media, which will commence in early 2021. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested in the scholarship:

PhD Scholarship: ARC Discovery project on Mis- and Disinformation in Social Media (PhD commencing 2021)

The QUT Digital Media Research Centre is offering a three-year PhD scholarship associated with a major ARC Discovery research project on mis- and disinformation in social media. Working with DMRC research leaders Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and Dan Angus, and collaborating with Scott Wright (Monash University, Melbourne), Jenny Stromer-Galley (Syracuse University, USA), and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff University, UK), the PhD researcher will use qualitative and quantitative analytics methods to investigate the dissemination patterns and processes for mis- and disinformation.

Ideally, the PhD researcher should be equally familiar with qualitative, close reading as well as quantitative, computational research methods. They will draw on the state-of-the-art social media analytics approaches to examine the role of specific individual, institutional, and automated actors in promoting or preventing the distribution of suspected ‘fake news’ content across Australian social media networks. Building on this work, they will develop a number of the case studies of the trajectories of specific stories across the media ecosystem, drawing crucially on issue mapping methods to produce a forensic analysis of how particular stories are disseminated by a combination of fringe outlets, social media platforms and their users, and potentially also by mainstream media publications.

Interested candidates should first contact Prof. Axel Bruns (a.bruns@qut.edu.au). You will then be asked to complete the DMRC EOI form (https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/dmrc-eois-2020-annual-scholarship-round/), by 31 August. We will assess your eligibility for PhD study, and work with you to develop a formal PhD application to QUT’s scholarship applications system, by 30 October. The PhD itself will commence in early 2021. International applicants are welcome.

The DMRC is a global leader in digital humanities and social science research with a focus on communication, media, and the law. It is one of Australia’s top organisations for media and communication research, areas in which QUT has achieved the highest possible rankings in ERA, the national research quality assessment exercise. Our research programs investigate the digital transformation of media industries, the challenges of digital inclusion and governance, the growing role of AI and automation in the information environment, and the role of social media in public communication. The DMRC has access to cutting-edge research infrastructure and capabilities in computational methods for the study of communication and society. We actively engage with industry and academic partners in Australia, Europe, Asia, the US, and South America; and we are especially proud of the dynamic and supportive research training environment we provide to our many local and international graduate students.

Also involving Assoc. Prof. Dan Angus and Dr Tobias Keller, the team is currently investigating the origins and spread of major conspiracy theories associated with the COVID-19 crisis across various social media platforms. Such conspiracy theories include false stories about coronavirus as a bioweapon created either in a Wuhan lab or by researchers associated with the Gates Foundation, and about connections between coronavirus and the roll-out of 5G mobile telephony technology.

Early results from this research point to the presence of a small but sustained coordinated effort by a network of Twitter accounts that pushed the bioweapon conspiracy story; such accounts were often associated with fringe political perspectives especially in the United States. Further, the research indicates that these conspiracy theories typically spread beyond the fringes of public discussion only once they are picked up and amplified by tabloid media exploiting them as clickbait, or by celebrities from the fields of music, movies, and sports who share them with their substantial social media audiences.

The research, which will be presented in extended form in a report for the Centre for Responsible Technology and subsequent scholarly publications, points to important inflection points in the trajectory of conspiracy theories from the fringes to the mainstream, and highlights a need both for further platform intervention against coordinated inauthentic behaviour and for the development of greater digital literacies not least also amongst influential social media users.

Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:

1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?

The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean everything and nothing. For example, what does it mean to be inside an filter bubble or echo chamber? Do you need to be completely cut off from the world around you, which seems to be what those metaphors suggest? Only in such extreme cases – which are perhaps similar to being in a cult that has completely disconnected from the rest of society – can the severe negative effects that the supporters of the echo chamber or filter bubble theories imagine actually become reality, because they assume that people in echo chambers or filter bubbles no longer see any content that disagrees with their political worldviews.

Now, such complete disconnection is not entirely impossible, but very difficult to achieve and maintain. And most of the empirical evidence we have points in the opposite direction. In particular, the immense success of extremist political propaganda (including ‘fake news’, another very problematic and poorly defined term) in the US, the UK, parts of Europe, and even in Brazil itself in recent years provides a very strong argument against echo chambers and filter bubbles: if we were all locked away in our own bubbles, disconnected from each other, then such content could not have travelled as far, and could not have affected as many people, as quickly as it appears to have done. Illiberal governments wouldn’t invest significant resources in outfits like the Russian ‘Internet Research Agency’ troll farm if their influence operations were confined to existing ideological bubbles; propaganda depends crucially on the absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles if it seeks to influence more people than those who are already part of a narrow group of hyperpartisans.

Alternatively, if we define echo chambers and filter bubbles much more loosely, in a way that doesn’t require the people inside those bubble to be disconnected from the world of information around them, then the terms become almost useless. With such a weak definition, any community of interest would qualify as an echo chamber or filter bubble: any political party, religious group, football club, or other civic association suddenly is an echo chamber or filter bubble because it enables people with similar interests and perspectives to connect and communicate with each other. But in that case, what’s new? Such groups have always existed in society, and society evolves through the interaction and contest between them – there’s no need to create new and poorly defined metaphors like ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ to describe this.

Some proponents of these metaphors claim that our new digital and social media have made things worse, though: that they have made it easier for people to create the first, strong type of echo chamber or filter bubble, by disconnecting from the rest of the world. But although this might sound sensible, there is practically no empirical evidence for this: for example, we now know that people who receive news from social media encounter a greater variety of news sources than those who don’t, and that those people who have the strongest and most partisan political views are also among the most active consumers of mainstream media. Even suggestions that platform algorithms are actively pushing people into echo chambers or filter bubbles have been disproven: Google search results, for instance, show very little evidence of personalisation at an individual level.

Part of the reason for this is that – unlike the people who support the echo chamber and filter bubble metaphors – most ordinary people actually don’t care much at all about politics. If there is any personalisation through the algorithms of Google, Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, it will be based on many personal attributes other than our political interests. As multi-purpose platforms, these digital spaces are predominantly engines of context collapse, where our personal, professional, and political lives intersect and crash into each other and where we encounter a broad and unpredictable mixture of content from a variety of viewpoints. Overall, these platforms enable all of us to find more diverse perspectives, not less.

And this is where these metaphors don’t just become dumb, but downright dangerous: they create the impression, first, that there is a problem, and second, that the problem is caused to a significant extent by the technologies we use. This is an explicitly technologically determinist perspective, ignoring the human element and assuming that we are unable to shape these technologies to our needs. And such views then necessarily also invite technological solutions: if we assume that digital and social media have caused the current problems in society, then we must change the technologies (through technological, regulatory, and legal adjustments) to fix those problems. It’s as if a simple change to the Facebook algorithm would make fascism disappear.

In my view, by contrast, our current problems are social and societal, economic and political, and technology plays only a minor role in them. That’s not to say that they are free of blame – Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other platforms could certainly do much more to combat hate speech and abuse on their platforms, for example. But if social media and even the Internet itself suddenly disappeared tomorrow, we would still have those same problems in society, and we would be no closer to solving them. The current overly technological focus of our public debates – our tendency to blame social media for all our problems – obscures this fact, and prevents us from addressing the real issues.

2. Polarisation is a political fact, not a technological one. How do you understand political and societal polarisation today?

To me, this is the real question, and one which has not yet been researched enough. The fundamental problem is not echo chambers and filter bubbles: it is perfectly evident that the various polarised groups in society are very well aware of each other, and of each other’s ideological positions – which would be impossible if they were each locked away in their own bubbles. In fact, they monitor each other very closely: research in the US has shown that far-right fringe groups are also highly active followers of ‘liberal’ news sites like the New York Times, for example. But they no longer follow the other side in order to engage in any meaningful political dialogue, aimed at finding a consensus that both sides can live with: rather, they monitor their opponents in order to find new ways to twist their words, create believable ‘fake news’ propaganda, and attack them with such falsehoods. And yes, they use digital and social media to do so, but again this is not an inherently technological problem: if they didn’t have social media, they’d use the broadcast or print media instead, just as the fascists did in the 1920s and 1930s and as their modern-day counterparts still do today.

So, for me the key question is how we have come to this point: put simply, why do hyperpartisans do what they do? How do they become so polarised – so sure of their own worldview that they will dismiss any opposing views immediately, and will see any attempts to argue with them or to correct their views merely as a confirmation that ‘the establishment’ is out to get them? What are the (social and societal, rather than simply technological) processes by which people get drawn to these extreme political fringes, and how might they be pulled back from there? This question also has strong psychological elements, of course: how do hyperpartisans form their worldview? How do they incorporate new evidence into it? How do they interpret, and in doing so defuse, any evidence that goes against their own perspectives? We see this across so many fields today: from political argument itself to the communities of people who believe vaccinations are some kind of global mind control experiment, or to those who still deny the overwhelming scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change. How do these people maintain their views even – and this again is evidence for the fact that echo chambers and filter bubbles are mere myths – they are bombarded on a daily basis with evidence of the fact that vaccinations save lives and that the global climate is changing with catastrophic consequences?

And since you include the word ‘today’ in your question, the other critical area of investigation in all this is whether any of this is new, and whether it is different today from the way it was ten, twenty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the one hand, it seems self-evident that we do see much more evidence of polarisation today than we have in recent decades: Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, and many others have clearly sensitised us to these deep divisions in many societies around the world. But most capitalist societies have always had deep divisions between the rich and the poor; the UK has always had staunch pro- and anti-Europeans; the US has always been racist. I think we need more research, and better ways of assessing, whether any of this has actually gotten worse in recent years, or whether it has simply become more visible.

For example, Trump and others have arguably made it socially acceptable in the US to be politically incorrect: to be deliberately misogynist; to be openly racist; to challenge the very constitutional foundations that the US political system was built on. But perhaps the people who now publicly support all this had always already been there, and had simply lacked the courage to voice their views in public – perhaps what has happened here is that Trump and others have smashed the spiral of silence that subdued such voices by credibly promising social and societal sanctions, and have instead created a spiral of reinforcement that actively rewards the expression of extremist views and leads hyperpartisans to try and outdo each other with more and more extreme statements. Perhaps the spiral of silence now works the other way, and the people who oppose such extremism now remain silent because they fear communicative and even physical violence.

Importantly, these are also key questions for media and communication research, but this research cannot take the simplistic perspective that ‘digital and social media are to blame’ for all of this. Rather, the question is to what extent the conditions and practices in our overall, hybrid media system – encompassing print and broadcast as well as digital and social media – have enabled such changes. Yes, digital and social platforms have enabled voices on the political fringes to publish their views, without editorial oversight or censorship from anyone else. But such voices find their audience often only once they have been amplified by more established outlets: for instance, once they have been covered – even if only negatively – by mainstream media journalists, or shared on via social media by more influential accounts (including even the US president himself). It is true that in the current media landscape, the flows of information are different from what they were in the past – not simply because of the technological features of the media, but because of the way that all of us (from politicians and journalists through to ordinary users) have chosen to incorporate these features into our daily lives. The question then is whether and how this affects the dynamics of polarisation, and what levers are available to us if we want to change those dynamics.

3. How can we continue critical research in social media after the APIcalypse?

With great tenacity and ingenuity even in the face of significant adversity – because we have a societal obligation to do so. I’ve said throughout my answers here that we cannot simplistically blame social media for the problems our societies are now facing: the social media technologies have not caused any of this. But the ways in which we, all of us, use social media – alongside other, older media forms – clearly play a role in how information travels and how polarisation takes place, and so it remains critically important to investigate the social media practices of ordinary citizens, of hyperpartisan activists, of fringe and mainstream politicians, of emerging and established journalists, of social bots and disinformation campaigns. And of course even beyond politics and polarisation, there are also many other important reasons to study social media.

The problem now is that over the past few years, many of the leading social media platforms have made it considerably more difficult for researchers even to access public and aggregate data about social media activities – a move I have described, in deliberately hyperbolic language, as the ‘APIcalypse’. Ostensibly, such changes were introduced to protect user data from unauthorised exploitation, but a convenient consequence of these access restrictions has been that independent, critical, public-interest research into social media practices has become a great deal more difficult even while the commercial partnerships between platforms and major corporations have remained largely unaffected. This limits our ability to provide an impartial assessment of social media practices and to hold the providers themselves to account for the effects of any changes they might make to their platforms, and increasingly forces scholars who seek to work with platform data into direct partnership arrangements that operate under conditions favouring the platform providers.

This requires several parallel responses from the scholarly community. Of course we must explore the new partnership models offered by the platforms, but we should treat these with a considerable degree of scepticism and cannot solely rely on such limited data philanthropy; in particular, the platforms are especially unlikely to provide data access in contexts where scholarly research might be highly critical of their actions. We must therefore also investigate other avenues for data gathering: this includes data donations from users of these platforms (modelled for instance on ProPublica’s browser plugin that captures the political ads encountered by Facebook users) or data scraping from the Websites of the platforms as an alternative to API-based data access, for example.

Platforms may seek to shut down such alternative modes of data gathering (as Facebook sought to do with the ProPublica browser plugin), or change their Terms of Service to explicitly forbid such practices – and this should lead scholars to consider whether the benefits of their research outweigh the platform’s interests. Terms of Service are often written to the maximum benefit of the platform, and may not be legally sound under applicable national legislation; the same legislation may also provide ‘fair use’ or ‘academic freedom’ exceptions that justify the deliberate breach of Terms of Service restrictions in specific contexts. As scholars, we must remember that we have a responsibility to the users of the platform, and to society as such, as well as to the platform providers. We must balance these responsibilities, by taking care that the user data we gather remain appropriately protected as we pursue questions of societal importance, and we should minimise the impact of our research on the legitimate commercial interests of the platform unless there is a pressing need to reveal malpractice in order to safeguard society. To do so can be a very difficult balancing act, of course.

Finally, we must also maintain our pressure on the platforms to provide scholarly researchers with better interfaces for data access, well beyond limited data philanthropy schemes that exclude key areas of investigation. Indeed, we must enlist others – funding bodies, policymakers, civil society institutions, and the general public itself – in bringing that pressure to bear: it is only in the face of such collective action, coordinated around the world, that these large and powerful corporations are likely to adjust their data access policies for scholarly research. And it will be important to confirm that they act on any promises of change they might make: too often have the end results they delivered not lived up to the grand rhetoric with which they were announced.

In spite of all of this, however, I want to end on a note of optimism: there still remains a crucial role for research that investigates social media practices, in themselves and especially also in the context of the wider, hybrid media system of older and newer media, and we must not and will not give up on this work. In the face of widespread hyperpartisanship and polarisation, this research is now more important than ever – and the adversities we are now confronted with are also a significant source of innovation in research methods and frameworks.

Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.

But these metaphors are built on very flimsy foundations, and it’s high time that we examined the actual evidence for their existence with a critical eye. That’s what my book Are Filter Bubbles Real? sets out to do. There are several recent studies that claim to have identified filter bubbles and echo chambers in search results and social media discussions, yet there are just as many that find no evidence or report contradictory results, so what’s really going on here? Is the impact of these phenomena on public opinion really as significant as common sense seems to suggest?

As it turns out, neither concept is particularly well-defined, and even the authors who first introduced these metaphors to media and communication studies rarely ventured far beyond anecdote and supposition. In the book, I introduce more rigorous definitions, and re-evaluate some of the key research findings of recent studies against these new criteria – and as it turns out, most claims about echo chambers and filter bubbles and their negative impacts on society are significantly overblown. These concepts are very suggestive metaphors, but ultimately they’re myths.

This shouldn’t actually surprise us. Imagine how difficult it would be to completely encapsulate yourself in an echo chamber or filter bubble, in order to receive only information that fits your existing worldview – not just on a single Facebook group or Twitter hashtag, not just on a single social media platform, but in every aspect of your life. To do so is not impossible, strictly speaking – cult members do it. But it requires a level of effort that few ordinary people are likely to commit to.

And in fact, it turns out that those whom we most expect to be caught in filter bubbles – hyperpartisans on the political fringes – are also most actively engaged with the mainstream media, even if they read them from a critical, oppositional perspective. The filter bubble and echo chamber myths have kept us from seeing this more clearly; they’ve sought to blame technology for problems that are, unfortunately, all too human – the unwillingness of polarised political groups in society to engage with one another in order to develop mutual understanding and consensus.

It’s high time we cut through those myths and shifted our focus to the cognitive processes and ideological mindsets that produce such polarisation – and I hope that the critical re-appraisal presented in Are Filter Bubbles Real? can contribute to that shift.

Axel Bruns is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author and editor of several books, including Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere and Twitter and Society. His latest book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, is now available from Polity.

That’s why archaeological finds of items as mundane as the cuneiform tablets of ancient Uruk, recording the inventories of its food stores, or the pot shards of Deir el-Medina, providing medical prescriptions for the workers of Egypt, are so valuable – they offer direct glimpses of how ordinary people lived and worked during those times.

But even in much more recent, much better-documented times, historians have still had to go to great lengths to gather the documentary evidence required to fully understand historical events and actors. From the US Civil War to the Holocaust and beyond, they have initiated projects to collect the letters written by ordinary people during extraordinary times – and of course they also draw on print, radio, and TV journalism, if those records are still available.

Beyond Journalism’s Draft of History

Indeed, journalism has long been described as “a first rough draft of history”: collectively, what they report on represents journalists’ first take not only on what their readers, listeners and viewers need to know now, but also on what is relevant to record for the future.

But in a complex world, such judgments are rarely straightforward. The reality of anthropogenic climate change has taken years, even decades to sink in – and some people, including some journalists, still choose to live in denial. The domino effect leading from unsound lending practices in the US mortgage market to the election of the Syriza government in Greece would have been difficult to foresee, and so the early stages of the crisis received less coverage than in hindsight they should have. And the various impacts of these developments on the lives of millions around the world cannot be documented by journalists alone.

Neither, these days, do they need to be. The past decade has seen an unprecedented shift towards what Manuel Castells has described as “mass self-communication” via social media. Hundreds of millions of users around the world are publicly or semi-publicly recording what matters to them, from (apparently) mundane activities to major world events.

News of earthquakes in Nepal and terror attacks in Paris now breaks on Twitter even before journalists have arrived at the scene, and some events – such as the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan – were even covered purely by accident, as bystanders remarked on the unusual military activity in the area. Elsewhere, the immense social media response to events from the British royal wedding to the death of Prince serves as a better reflection of public sentiment than any obituary ever could.

In their ability to instantly gather and coordinate the collective public response to current events, then, social media don’t just write history. They represent something much more immediate: social media are a first draft of the present, as my colleague Katrin Weller and I argue in a paper for the Web Science conference in Hannover in May 2016. But like all drafts, theirs is fragile and easily lost – a loss which, we believe, would impact significantly on future historians’ ability to understand the story of humanity in the early twenty-first century.

What follows from this is an acute need to address the preservation of social media content. This is complicated by the considerable volume and rapid growth of such archives, and the inherently proprietary nature of the leading social media platforms: both create substantial technical and organisational challenges for any large-scale archiving project.

Current Archiving Projects

Perhaps the most widely known social media archiving project commenced when in 2010, Twitter ‘gifted’ a continuous archive of all public tweets since its launch in 2006 to the US Library of Congress. Beyond the initial fanfare, which generated some much-needed positive PR for Twitter, not much more progress appears to have been made, though. A 2013 update on the Library’s blog made positive noises about the development of the archive, but by 2015 researchers still hadn’t been granted access. Washington insiders Politico called the Library’s Twitter archiving project “a huge #FAIL”, blaming the Library’s poor understanding of emerging technologies.

Closer to home, the Australian Research Council has funded the TrISMA project (which I lead), which has built the infrastructure to track the public posting activities of the nearly three million Australian Twitter accounts identified so far, and the public debates unfolding on Australian Facebook pages. To date, it has captured more than one billion tweets posted by Australians. Led by Queensland University of Technology and supported by a consortium of Australian universities, the project also collaborates with the National Library of Australia, which will eventually house an archive of the full collection, and preserve it for future use.

Such projects must necessarily be speculative in their approach to archiving social media’s first draft of the present. The future remains largely unpredictable, and we cannot foresee which part of the social media record future historians may be interested in. Where will the next Curie or Einstein, the next Björk or Bowie, the next Obama or Malala come from? We don’t know, but we’ll want to preserve their own social media activities, as well as the public response to them.

The best solution is therefore to capture all that we can, as comprehensively as we can, and to let those future historians make their own choices from the available record. Some might argue that platforms like Facebook and Twitter themselves already do so: that their proprietary archives are necessarily the most comprehensive, and that no additional archiving efforts are required. But because they are proprietary, these archives are largely closed even to publicly funded, public-interest research – and their longer-term survival is inherently tied to the fortunes of the companies that own them. As past cases from GeoCities to MySpace have shown, even Facebook and Twitter may not be around forever.

The great journalism scholar Herbert Gans once wrote that, as they choose what information makes it into their first draft of history, “the news may be too important to leave to the journalists alone”. The same is true for social media: its first draft of the present is too important to leave to social media platforms to preserve. It’s high time to address the task of building comprehensive archives of our public communication through social media, in order to document our present for the benefit of future generations.

A couple of presentations considered social media from a systemic perspective – here are Ben Light and Elija Cassidy on the practices of disconnection using social media:

And here’s our ‘very big data’ perspective on Twitter as a global social network:

Wilfred Wang explored Weibo, and highlighted the fact that even in centralised China regional differences still matter immensely in social media:

Jacinta Buchbach explored the implications of social media use for employers and employees:

Jean Burgess, Elija Cassidy, and Ben Light discussed the social media components of the Movember phenomenon:

While Ben Light tackled the elephant – er, the cat – in the room:

Finally, in a panel of the uses of social media for second-screen engagement with television, Darryl Woodford et al. introduced Telemetrics as a new set of methodologies and metrics for evaluating audience engagement:

And continued the discussion by considering the impact of existing follower/followee structures in the Australian Twittersphere for such engagement with TV content:

So much for 2014 – see you next year in Phoenix for IR16 (the call for papers has been released already)!

Given this popularity, and a significant overlap between the target market for Big Brother viewers and the social media platforms, it will be interesting to observe the extent to which social media activity (and perhaps, eventually, sentiment) acts as a predictor for votes on the show. In this blog, following the first round of nominations, first eviction and the first round of single nominations, we are going to look to the data from the last 2.5 weeks to try to test whether social media activity acts as a predictor of public votes.

So far, at least, it has been a mixed bag, but let’s start with the positive; the public vote for the ‘Perfect Pair’ dance competition, in which the winners were awarded $30,000, was held between the final two pairs – Lawson and Aisha & Dion and Jason. The public then voted for the pair with the best dance through JumpIn, but did they actually just vote for their favourite pair? If we use social media activity as a barometer, it seems that could be the case. Our data showed a tight race, which Lawson & Aisha just pipped, and indeed the public vote came back 51.8% in favour of Lawson & Aisha. Perhaps, if they had been up against, say, Travis and Cat – who were hardly mentioned this week – they would have won by even more:

Lawson also tells an interesting story in the overall polling; as seen in the chart below which highlights the running total for all housemates; largely anonymous until the dance-off and his decision to give Aisha the lions share of the prize money ($20,000) was rewarded in the social media volume.

Below is a running total of Twitter mentions for the pairs since launch night, however we will focus on the last week’s long-winded and highly debated eviction process for the time being. Nominees made up 5 of the six most talked about housemates on the night before the eviction process began, and the ones not being talked about were being carried by their partner based on the pairs table:

We can of course ask some other interesting questions from these charts: where were Skye and Lisa when they were ‘saved’? Were Jake and Gemma losers in the public vote due to anonymity, or hatred? What caused David and Sandra to be saved, when they were virtually anonymous through the first week, and only talked about subsequently in regard to David’s chauvinistic comments. Was it better for David to be hated, rather than not talked about at all? Related to this, there is the question of screen time and popularity inside the house, allowing us to address what went wrong for Gemma this week, given her achieved intent to secure airtime?

Up for eviction this week were Skye & Lisa, Jake & Gemma, Travis & Cat and David & Sandra. Ever since the Katie & Priya first week fiasco, Skye & Lisa have been by far the most talked about pair of the season and consequently were saved on Monday night as per our prediction based on the previous graph, with Skye & Lisa the most popular pair on the 22nd September. Interesting here, however, is that Gemma & Jake were the pair with the second most social media activity, and the most popular during the nomination period, indicating that the sentiment will also be a significant factor in creating further predictions.

While we have our own tool monitoring Big Brother discussion (http://bigbrother.thehypometer.com), Channel 9 (Mi9/JumpIn) have also launched a counter, the “Big Brother Radar”, which captures tweets and Facebook statuses by those who seek, deliberately, to be noticed by the radar using official C9 hashtags (e.g. #BBAUGemma). Our tool, by contrast, attempts to measure the underlying volume of discussion (and, by possible inference, interest) in the competitors as a whole, on social media.

Going forward, we hypothesise that those housemates who the public have no interest in will be those who struggle in a ‘vote to save’ format. That said, it’s probably not advisable to bet based on this information. It may be that the Radar format serves as a better prediction of those likely to be evicted (i.e. the effort to post with the correct hashtag is correlated to the effort to vote), it may be that sentiment proves highly significant, or indeed it may be that social media is not a good barometer of the BB voting public. Whichever of these proves to be the case however, the data is sure to be interesting.

Finally, it is worth noting that one of the problems of a lack of live feed – which we have ranted about previously – and indeed this year any live updates at all is that it allows producers to largely control the message; hence, social media reaction largely follows the amount of airtime given to contestants and the plot lines developed, much like a soap. By contrast in the USA, with 4 live camera views running 24 hours a day, users are able to create and share their own storylines about the housemates — generating ‘hype’ for the show which we do not see here. In Australian Big Brother we are told what to think, and we’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader how that reflects on wider society. Finally, we’ll leave you with a running total of the housemates mentions to date, where Skye continues to lead the way:

Overview

From the beginning of my academic career up to now I have been investigating the way digital media is changing the face of cultural participation and public communication.

A decade ago when I started, in that early heyday of the ‘web 2.0’ and ‘participatory culture’, we looked to blogs, to image-sharing, to community-based digital storytelling workshops as ways that everyday creativity might find its audiences, and that ordinary people might find each other in ways that had not been possible on such a widespread and visible scale before.

I theorised that everyday, personal uses of digital media might be the key to participation in interest, issue and identity based publics.

My theoretical and ethical orientation was grounded in cultural studies, especially its approach to everyday and popular culture; and therefore my cultural citizenship definitions emphasised everyday, personal, even mundane practices of creativity like storytelling, photosharing, scrapbooking, graffiti, skateboarding, cooking or gardening – practices I collectively called ‘vernacular creativity’ – and the way these may serve to connect individuals and communities in the service of broader civic goals.

Coming from this distinctive disciplinary background, I can draw out some complementary and competing meanings of creative citizenship with respect to digital and social media specifically.

1. Creative and collaborative approaches to solving civic challenges, using digital and social media; that is, creative ways of being citizenly – using digital media to organise and promote the community garden; the development of crowdsourced crisis maps on the fly
2. Creativity that, through its enactment, visibility and connectedness in digital media contexts, enables certain modes of civic engagement as an often unintended consequence; that is, the civic benefits of creative participation – getting involved in an international community gardening association formed as a result of gardening and locavore food bloggers finding each other online
3. Citizenship understood as the rights and responsibilities toward creative communities of which one is a member (e.g. a good citizen of the music scene; a good ‘netizen’ – or, being a citizen of digital media – what would that look like?)

Bearing in mind that creative citizenship, like all modes of group identification, can work to exclude as well as include; and that trolls and bullies can be fairly creative in their uses of digital media too.

The Web 2.0 Moment

The Web 2.0 ‘moment’ of the early to mid 2000s was a key period of optimism for creative citizenship and digital media understood in these ways. The Web 2.0 moment saw the rise of automated blogging software like Blogger and Movable Type, the widespread take-up of these tools, and the broader idea of Web 2.0 services focused on providing platforms for user-created content and connectivity – the barriers to participation in digital culture were now much lower, but participation was still very far from population-wide. This was a moment of artisinal, DIY creative citizenship, but still really the domain of the digerati not the masses.

But there was still a strong sense that the rules and roles of culture were changing. The academic field of research around participatory culture was marked by debates for and against the cultural and social value of user-created content. There were some early concerns raised about free labour in the context of proprietary platforms, but the market in user data, the algorithmic turn were largely yet to come, or at least they hardly registered for most of these critics.

The Social Media Moment
Fast forward to the end of that first decade of the 20th century, and I think we arrive at a different kind of moment, structured by a different set of relationships between the tech industry, the user, and culture – one that I have been calling the platform paradigm.

Indeed, returning to my third model, that of being a citizen of digital media, we might even think of platforms as in some ways analogous to city states – Mark Zuckerberg was infamously called the Sultan of Facebookistan in the media at one stage – but perhaps that’s stretching civic metaphors too far.

A crucial element of this work I have been doing is trying to understand the ‘digital’ elements of social media platforms as material elements, and understanding platforms as co-created. Unevenly and undemocratically co-created, but co-created nonetheless. it is through the interactions between all this ‘stuff’ that platforms are constituted, and that they do things; all these elements are co-influential in what each platform is and can be used for.

I do not think it hyberbolic to say that a very great deal of social life at the micro and macro level has become entangled with digital media – cf Mark Deuze’s book Media Life.

This moment is one characterized by the new ubiquity, legitimisation and normalisation of social media. Even in contexts where the penetration of digital devices is still growing, these dominant platforms will be inextricably part of the digital media ecology for new users – through the Facebook phone, the embedding of Google services into Android phones, and so on.

And the global shift to mobile media greatly extends the meaning of ‘ubiquity’ into our workplaces, our homes, schools, our pockets, and with the rise of wearables, the datafication of even our bodies.

And with the new ubiquity comes the new legitimacy – social media is part of the communicative infrastructure of global society now. And at key points social media has quite visibly been legitimated by government and community uses for practical purposes in undeniably serious situations like the 2011 Queensland Floods. Research has aided this legitimation process by doing large-scale data driven research only made possible by access to the Twitter API, which is really intended for commercial third-party development; and access to such data is a highly controversial and politicised issue right now.

The mainstreaming of social media platforms like Twitter has made possible communities of interest like agchat oz. Weekly Twitter Q&A sessions use the #agchatoz hashtag to capture discussions of interest to the self-identifying agricultural community, ranging from personal issues such as succession planning and rural mental health, to work matters including sustainable farming methods and how to manage natural disasters, as well as more public concerns such as animal welfare and live export. Most discussions solicit a range of perspectives from producers, consumers, scientists, journalists and other professionals; sometimes discussions connect to other issues and their hashtags (like #banliveexport for the issue of animal welfare in the meat industry), thereby causing a collision of constituencies. …not to mention #felfies (short for farm selfies) – which are perhaps an instance of what Lance Bennett calls personalised inclusive collectivity – where the #felfie meme is doing network-building work as well as self-representation for global rural citizens.

And social media has its own popular cultures that support practices of what John Hartley has called silly citizenship – memes, viral culture of the web (Shifman), which are a vital part of political discourse today – where by political I mean both Big P and small p politics (e.g. gender and sexuality issues). The David Cameron on the phone to Barack Obama meme-fest is a great example of this – it is silly and funny but also enacts a strong critique of the contemporary mediatization of politics and the dominance of superficial PR over political communication.

Competing Futures

But despite or even simultaneously with all this flourishing of activity, the affordances of the dominant platforms we associate with social media have changed in complex ways that at least according to some critics, do support mass take-up in the service of business interests, but may not support user creativity and innovation as they once did. (Always bearing in mind the counter-example of the Kodak camera, which created a mass market via the enclosure and automation of key aspects of the photographic process, but at the same time opened up access to photographic production to the masses).

I do think there have been some significant shifts in the way that users and their agency are being repositioned as these platforms grow and mature and seek profit ever more urgently as the venture capital runs out – and here I use the shorthand ‘the self and the world’ to think about the axes along which this repositioning occurs.

and as these platforms evolve and the technical means to advertise and market to us become ever more sophisticated, our experiences of them are ever more heavily mediated by the corporate interests of these platforms – even when the corporate interest is to serve us content we perceive as ‘relevant’, keeping us coming back for more.

How then do the politics of platforms, data ownership and access, the algorithmic turn, filter bubble, advertising-driven etc affect the creative citizen?
e.g. FB newsfeed algorithm might mean that organisations increasingly need to pay to get messages through such channels; and there are pretty serious consequence for global citizenship of the tendency of these platforms to encourage us to associate with and consume the content of people who we like and who are like us, as this visualization by Gilad Lotan of hashtag co-occurrence in Instagram images associated with the Gaza conflict shows.

Provocations: the Digital Creative Citizen

I conclude with some suggestions about how digitally native strategies and tactics for engaging in social media platforms might become part of the apparatus of community-based creative citizenship initiatives as well:

1. Exploit social media logics with playful and ‘silly’ citizenship
2. Adopt adaptive, multi-platform strategies & avoid delegating everything to one or two platforms
3. Develop critical engagement with platforms and their cultures as part of digital creative citizenship

In August, users and journalists began to question Facebook’s news feed after noticing a scarcity of links and posts about the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

Facebook also announced changes to the news feed to decrease the visibility of clickbait-style headlines. These are headlines that attempt to lure visitors to a webpage with intriguing but uninformative previews, and Facebook made up a typical example.

Facebook says it will be tracking the amount of time that users spend on a website after clicking such a link, and penalising the publishers of links that don’t keep reader attention.

In June, Facebook faced criticism after the publication of research findings based on an “emotional contagion” experiment that manipulated the news feed of almost 700,000 users. It raised some ethical concern among both Facebook users and observers.

Given how little we understand of Facebook’s internal affairs and the machinations of the news feed’s filter algorithms, the growing public concern around Facebook’s operations is understandable.

Why do the algorithms matter?

As users, our readiness to trust Facebook as a hub for social, professional and familial interactions, as well as a source for following and discussing news, has afforded the company a privileged position as an intermediary in our social and political lives.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s announcement that Twitter decided to censor user-uploaded images of American journalist James Foley’s execution is a timely reminder of the many roles of social networking platforms.

These platforms and their operators do not simply present data and human interaction in a neutral way — they also make editorial judgements about the kinds of data and interaction they want to facilitate.

This should lead us to question the ways in which Facebook’s roles as an intermediary of our information and social connections allows their operators to potentially influence their users.

Why does Facebook need algorithms to sort the news?

One of the most common responses to criticism of the news feed is the suggestion that Facebook does away with sorting entirely, and simply show everything chronologically — just like Twitter.

Showing everything can make the news feed seem a bit more like a news firehose. Facebook engineers estimate that the average user’s news feed would show around 1,500 new posts each day.

The “firehose model” is not without its own issues. By showing all posts as they happen, Twitter’s approach can tend to favour the users who post most often, and that can let the noisiest users drown out other worthy voices.

This concern may be an influence on Twitter’s recent changes to show tweets favourited by other followers in a user’s timeline, and its apparent readiness to experiment with algorithmic changes to their users’ timelines.

Algorithmic filtering may well be helpful given the amount of information we deal with on a day-to-day basis but the unexplained “black box” nature of most algorithmic systems can be headache too.

Changes to Facebook’s algorithms can dramatically affect the traffic some websites receive, much to the chagrin of their publishers. Publishers who have registered with Facebook receive some basic metrics as to the number of users who have seen their post. Individual users receive even less feedback as to how widely (if at all) their posts have been seen.

These algorithms are ostensibly created by the developers of Facebook and Twitter in service of creating a better experience for their users (both individuals and corporate).

But social platforms have a vested interest in keeping users engaged with their service. We must recognise that these interests can shape the development of the platform and its functions.

A social network’s filtering may be biased against showing content that engineers have deemed controversial or potentially upsetting to help users enjoy the the network. These filters could stop you from seeing a post that would have upset you but they might also limit the visibility of a cry for help from someone in need.

Are there antidotes to algorithms?

If users are concerned by the choices that a social media platform seems to be making, they can demand a greater degree of transparency. That being said, these systems can be complex. According to Facebook, more than 100,000 different variables are factored into the news feed algorithms.

Another option might be to regulate: subject sufficiently large technology companies and their social algorithms to regular independent auditing, similar to the regulations for algorithmic financial trading.

Alternatively, users could use the platform in unintended ways or learn to subvert and scam the system to their own advantage.

Users could also lessen their usage of Facebook and seek a less-filtered stream of news and information from a variety of other sources to suit their needs.

For better or worse, algorithmic filtering will likely become a staple of our data-fuelled, internet-mediated lives, but in time we may also see services that give users more direct control over the algorithms that govern what they get to see.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Abstract:
In the context of modern western psychologised, techno-social hybrid realities, where individuals are incited constantly to work on themselves and perform their self-development in public, the use of online social networking sites (SNSs) can be conceptualised as what Foucault has described as a ‘technique of self’. This article explores examples of status updates on Facebook to reveal that writing on Facebook is a tool for self-formation with historical roots. Exploring examples of self-writing from the past, and considering some of the continuities and discontinuities between these age-old practices and their modern translations, provides a non-technologically deterministic and historically aware way of thinking about the use of new media technologies in modern societies that understands them to be more than mere tools for communication.