publications – QUT Social Media Research Group

A Round-Up of New Publications from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre

Axel Bruns — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 23:20:36 +0000

A substantial number of new social media research publications from the Digital Media Research Centre have recently shown up on QUT’s ePrints repository. Here’s an overview:

Tanya Notley, Michael Dezuanni, Hua Flora Zhong, and Saffron Howden. (2017) News and Australia’s Children: How Young People Access, Perceive and Are Affected by the News. Sydney: Western Sydney University, Queensland University of Technology, and Crinkling News.

This report finds that young Australians consume a lot of news regularly and they get this news from many different sources. Engaging with news stories makes young people feel happy, motivated and knowledgeable. However, many young Australians do not trust news media organisations and perceive they are biased. Most believe news media organisations don’t understand young people’s lives and more than one third say the news does not cover the issues that matter to them. While social media is popular for getting news, only one third of young people are confident about spotting fake news online while more than half never or rarely try to work if news stories they encounter online are true or not.

Molly Dragiewicz, Jean Burgess, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez, Michael Salter, Nic Suzor, Delanie Woodlock, and Bridget Harris. (2018) Technology Facilitated Coercive Control: Domestic Violence and the Competing Roles of Digital Media Platforms. Feminist Media Studies, in Press.

This article describes domestic violence as a key context of online misogyny, foregrounding the role of digital media in mediating, coordinating, and regulating it; and proposing an agenda for future research. We propose the term “technology facilitated coercive control” (TFCC) to encompass the technological and relational aspects of patterns of abuse against intimate partners.

Bernhard Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Òscar Coromina. (2018) From Ranking Algorithms to ‘Ranking Cultures’: Investigating the Modulation of Visibility in YouTube Search Results. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24(1), pp. 50-68.

Algorithms, as constitutive elements of online platforms, are increasingly shaping everyday sociability. Developing suitable empirical approaches to render them accountable and to study their social power has become a prominent scholarly concern. This article proposes an approach to examine what an algorithm does, not only to move closer to understanding how it works, but also to investigate broader forms of agency involved. To do this, we examine YouTube’s search results ranking over time in the context of seven sociocultural issues.

Nic Suzor, Sarah Myers West, Nathalie Maréchal, and Sarah Roberts. (2017) Making Methodological Progress in Studying Content Regulation. All Things in Moderation, UCLA, 6-7 Dec. 2017.

Scholars face serious difficulties in gaining access to examine the practices of content moderation within commercial platforms. Much remains shrouded in secrecy. In this panel, we consider the opportunities for methodological innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration to help progress future research.

Nic Suzor, Sarah Myers West, Tarleton Gillespie, and Jillian York. (2017) Guiding Principles for the Future of Content Moderation. All Things in Moderation, UCLA, 6-7 Dec. 2017.

With increasing attention to the labor, criteria, and implications of content moderation, come opportunities for real change in the ways that platforms are governed. In light of this pressure and the opportunities it implies, this roundtable considers options for the future of content moderation. The question is not just how the moderation apparatus should change, but what principles should guide these changes.

Jiajie Lu. (2017) The Global Expansion of China-Based Social Media Platforms and Its Dynamics in the Australian Context. In Mike Kent, Kate Ellis, and Jian Xu (eds.), Chinese Social Media: Social, Cultural, and Political Implications. London: Routledge, pp. 191-205.

In recent years, the China-based social media platforms have become a widely adopted communication measure of the Chinese diaspora in Australia. This chapter explores the adoption of major China-based social media platforms such as QQ and WeChat amongst the Chinese diaspora in Australia and its dynamics.

Elija Cassidy and Wilfred Yang. (2018) Gay Men’s Digital Cultures beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE Use in the Gay Chinese Diaspora of Australia. Information, Communication & Society 21(6): 851-865.

Recent research on gay men’s digital cultures has focused predominantly on Western, English-language-based sites and populations. This article presents research in progress on the social chat application LINE and its use amongst the Chinese diaspora of gay men in Australia.

Axel Bruns and Gunn Enli. (2018) The Norwegian Twittersphere: Structure and Dynamics. Nordicom Review 30 Jan. 2018, pp. 1-20.

This article takes a new approach to the comprehensive study of an entire national Twittersphere. It provides new insights into the historical development of the Norwegian Twittersphere, its current network structure and the presence of diverse interests and issues amongst the nearly one million accounts within this community.

Rachel Hews. (2017) High-Profile Criminal Trials, Social Media Conversations and Media Regulation in Australia. Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program 2017, Oxford, 3-14 July 2017.

Rachel Hews. (2017) Social Media and Juries: Using Network Mapping to Understand How Prejudicial Conversations about Criminal Trials Flow in Social Networks. Privacy, Politics and Law: In Conversation with Professor Paul De Hert, University of Melbourne, 2 Oct. 2017.

The rapid growth of public conversations on social media platforms is placing significant pressure on the legal principle of a right to a fair trial by an impartial jury. In order to better understand the potential for these conversations to influence jurors and affect fairness in criminal trials, it is important to understand how potentially prejudicial information flows in social networks. We use social network analysis and mapping to better understand the content and shape of the Twitter discourse around the high-profile murder trials of Gerard Baden-Clay and Gable Tostee.

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. (2018) Approaches and Methods for the Study of Social Media in Political Communication. Aurora: Revista de Arte, Mídia e Política, 10(30), pp. 146-159.

Emerging from a collaboration with researchers at PUC São Paulo, this is one contribution to a special issue of Aurora (in Portuguese and English) on the use of social media analytics in researching Brazilian politics.

A New Map of the Australian Twittersphere

admin — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 05:43:00 +0000

Researchers from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have 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, a new article by Axel Bruns, Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, released in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network

Twitter is now a key platform for public communication between a diverse range of participants, but the overall shape of the communication network it provides remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed overview of the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere and identifies the thematic drivers of the key clusters within the network. We identify some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts and map the follower/followee connections between the 255,000 most connected accounts; we utilize community detection algorithms to identify the major clusters within this network and examine their account populations to identify their constitutive themes; we examine account creation dates and reconstruct a timeline for the Twitter adoption process among different communities; and we examine lifetime and recent tweeting patterns to determine the historically and currently most active clusters in the network. In combination, this offers the first rigorous and comprehensive study of the network structure of an entire national Twittersphere.

A summary of some of the study’s key findings was published in The Conversation in May 2017. Meanwhile, a paper by Axel Bruns at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2017 built on this new Twittersphere map to test for the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles in Australian Twitter – and found little evidence to support the thesis:

Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence

The success of political movements that appear to be immune to any factual evidence that contradicts their claims – from the Brexiteers to the ‘alt-right’, neo-fascist groups supporting Donald Trump – has reinvigorated claims that social media spaces constitute so-called ‘filter bubbles’ or ‘echo chambers’. But while such claims may appear intuitively true to politicians and journalists – who have themselves been accused of living in filter bubbles –, the evidence that ordinary users experience their everyday social media environments as echo chambers is far more limited.

For instance, a 2016 Pew Center study has shown that only 23% of U.S. users on Facebook and 17% on Twitter now say with confidence that most of their contacts’ views are similar to their own. 20% have changed their minds about a political or social issue because of interactions on social media. Similarly, large-scale studies of follower and interaction networks on Twitter show that national Twitterspheres are often thoroughly interconnected and facilitate the flow of information across boundaries of personal ideology and interest, except for a few especially hardcore partisan communities.

Building on new, comprehensive data from a project that maps and tracks interactions between 4 million accounts in the Australian Twittersphere, this paper explores in detail the evidence for the existence of echo chambers in that country. It thereby moves the present debate beyond a merely anecdotal footing, and offers a more reliable assessment of the ‘echo chamber’ threat.

New Book: Twitter and Society

Axel Bruns — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 06:11:12 +0000

We’re delighted to announce the launch of the first book to emerge from the QUT Social Media Research Group, in collaboration with the Junior Researchers Group “Science an the Internet” at the University of Düsseldorf. Twitter and Society, edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, was launched at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Denver on 26 October 2013. The book is now available in paperback and hardcover from Amazon and the Peter Lang Website, and an eBook version will also become available shortly.

Twitter and Society is a 450-page anthology of the very best of current Twitter research, providing a comprehensive overview of research methods, concepts, challenges, and applications. It features some 31 chapters, with a number of key contributions from members of the Social Media Research Group itself, a foreword by the University of Amsterdam’s Richard Rogers – and we’re particularly proud to have been able to use the painting Die Zwitschermaschine (The Twittering Machine) by Paul Klee as the book cover. Many, many thanks to our 45 contributors for their fabulous contributions. A full list of chapters is below – and you can also follow further updates about the book at @twitsocbook!

Foreword: Debanalising Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study
Richard Rogers

Twitter and Society: An Introduction
Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, & Cornelius Puschmann

Part I: Concepts and Methods

CONCEPTS

1 Twitter and the Rise of Personal Publics
Jan-Hinrik Schmidt

2 Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter
Axel Bruns & Hallvard Moe

3 Structure of Twitter: Social and Technical
Alexander Halavais

4 The Politics of Twitter Data
Cornelius Puschmann & Jean Burgess

METHODS

5 Data Collection on Twitter
Devin Gaffney & Cornelius Puschmann

6 Metrics for Understanding Communication on Twitter
Axel Bruns & Stefan Stieglitz

7 Sentiment Analysis and Time Series with Twitter
Mike Thelwall

8 Computer-Assisted Content Analysis of Twitter Data
Jessica Einspänner, Mark Dang-Anh, & Caja Thimm

9 Ethnographic and Qualitative Research on Twitter
Alice E. Marwick

10 Legal Questions of Twitter Research
Michael Beurskens

Part II: Perspectives and Practices

PERSPECTIVES

11 From #FollowFriday to YOLO: Exploring the Cultural Salience of Twitter Memes
Alex Leavitt

12 Twitter and Geographical Location
Rowan Wilken

13 Privacy on Twitter, Twitter on Privacy
Michael Zimmer & Nicholas Proferes

14 Automated Twitter Accounts
Miranda Mowbray

15 Information Retrieval for Twitter Data
Ke Tao, Claudia Hauff, Fabian Abel, & Geert-Jan Houben

16 Documenting Contemporary Society by Preserving Relevant Information from Twitter
Thomas Risse, Wim Peters, Pierre Senellart, & Diana Maynard

PRACTICES

Popular Culture

17 The Perils and Pleasures of Tweeting with Fans
Nancy Baym

18 Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media
Stephen Harrington

19 Following the Yellow Jersey: Tweeting the Tour de France
Tim Highfield

20 Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets
Axel Bruns, Katrin Weller, & Stephen Harrington

Brand Communication

21 Public Enterprise-Related Communication and Its Impact on Social Media Issue Management
Stefan Stieglitz & Nina Krüger

22 Twitter, Brands, and User Engagement
Tanya Nitins & Jean Burgess

Politics and Activism

23 Political Discourses on Twitter: Networking Topics, Objects, and People
Axel Maireder & Julian Ausserhofer

24 Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia
Anders Olof Larsson & Hallvard Moe

25 The Gift of the Gab: Retweet Cartels and Gift Economies on Twitter
Johannes Paßmann, Thomas Boeschoten, & Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Journalism

26 The Use of Twitter by Professional Journalists: Results of a Newsroom Survey in Germany
Christoph Neuberger, Hanna Jo vom Hofe, & Christian Nuernbergk

27 Twitter as an Ambient News Network
Alfred Hermida

Crisis Communication

28 Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters
Axel Bruns & Jean Burgess

29 Twitpic-ing the Riots: Analysing Images Shared on Twitter during the 2011 U.K. Riots
Farida Vis, Simon Faulkner, Katy Parry, Yana Manyukhina, & Lisa Evans

Twitter in Academia

30 Twitter in Scholarly Communication
Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, & Isabella Peters

31 How Useful Is Twitter for Learning in Massive Communities? An Analysis of Two MOOCs
Timo van Treeck & Martin Ebner

Epilogue: Why Study Twitter?
Cornelius Puschmann, Axel Bruns, Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, and Jean Burgess

What we’re reading: September edition

Jean Burgess — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:47:42 +0000

As promised, if somewhat belatedly, here’s our monthly Reading Group update for September.

Our shared featured reading was this new piece by Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell:

van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.

I chose it because I was intrigued by and very much admired the effort to look backward to media scholarship from the broadcast era and to think through what, if any, of that work can be translated into the context of social media. In this case, the authors first elaborate and then experimentally apply the idea of ‘media logic’ to social media platforms, cultures, and industries. We had a lively discussion about this and if we weren’t 100% sure of how well the experiment works, I think it provoked a lot of ideas about how we might try to approach the social media environment in more holistic and systematic ways. This whole exercise inspired me to re-read Raymond Williams’s great book Television, which is notable for the way it successfully combined political economy, cultural analysis and materialism in an attempt to grapple with the then-new medium of TV, way back in the day.

And here in no particular order is the full list of what the Social Media Research Group members have been reading over the past month. It’s a bumper crop!

Simon, P. (2013). Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data. Wiley. com. Amazon link |
QUT library ebook full text
Zuckerman, E. (2013). Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (1 edition.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Barney, K. (2010). Gendering Aboriginalism A Performative Gaze on Indigenous Australian Women. Cultural Studies Review , 212-239.
Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J., & Stohl, C. (2005). Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory , 365-388.
Chadwick, A. (2007). Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity. Political Communication , 283-301.
Flanagin, A. J., Stohl, C., & Bimber, B. (2007). Modeling the Structure of Collective Action. Communication Monographs , 29-54.
Van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
Volviv, Z., & Erjavec, K. (2012). Commercial and sexualized nationalism on Serbian reality tv. International Journal of Cultual Studies , 1-18.
Meeder, B., Karrer, B., Sayedi, A., Ravi, R., Borgs, C., & Chayes, J. (2011). We Know Who You Followed Last Summer: Inferring Social Link Creation Times in Twitter. In WWW ’11: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on the World Wide Web. New York: ACM. 517-526. doi:10.1145/1963405.1963479.
Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Polity.
Mergel, Ines (01/04/2013). Social media adoption and resulting tactics in the U.S. Federal Government. Government information quarterly , 30 (2), 123-130.
Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740624X13000063
Siegel, E. (2013). Predictive Analytics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.
Given, J., & Radywyl, N. (2013). Questions & Answers & Tweets. Communication, Politics & Culture, 46, 1-21.https://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=t8dzoos720ck1
Qualman, E. (2013). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (2nd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley & Sons.
Booth, P. (2010). Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Mejias, Ulises A. (2010). The limits of networks as models for organizing the social. New Media & Society, 12(4), 603-617.
Beer, D., & Burrows, R. (2013). Popular culture, digital archives and the new social life of data. Theory, Culture & Society. 30(4), 47-71 http://tcs.sagepub.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/30/4/47
Gillespie, T. (2013). The relevance of algorithms. Media Technologies, forthcoming. http://6.asset.soup.io/asset/3911/8870_2ed3.pdf
Langlois, G., & Elmer, G. (2013). The Research Politics of Social Media Platforms. Culture Machine, 14. https://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/505/531
Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012). ‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’–a digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads. The British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 590-615. https://www.tommasoventurini.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/TheWhole.pdf
McCosker, A. (2013). Trolling as provocation: YouTube’s agonistic publics. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1354856513501413. http://con.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/09/11/1354856513501413.abstract
Rogers, R. Debanalizing Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study. https://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_debanalizingTwitter_websci13.pdf
Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796-812.
http://pus.sagepub.com/content/21/7/796.short
Venturini, T., & Latour, B. (2010). The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-quantitative Methods. Proceedings of Future En Seine, 30-15. https://www.tommasoventurini.it/web/uploads/tommaso_venturini/TheSocialFabric.pdf
Yaneva, A., & Heaphy, L. (2012). Urban controversies and the making of the social. Architectural Research Quarterly, 16(01), 29-36. http://journals.cambridge.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/action/search?searchType=CITEADVANCE&journals=ARQ&volume=16&issue=01&page=29&author=Yaneva&year=2012

And the featured reading for October’s meeting, chosen by Theresa Sauter, is:

Ruppert, E., Law, J., & Savage, M. (2013). Reassembling Social Science Methods: the challenge of digital devices. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4) 22–46. doi: 10.1177/0263276413484941.

Moving Politics Online: How Australian Mainstream Media Portray Social Media as Political Tools

Axel Bruns — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:08:00 +0000

(by Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns – crossposted from Mapping Online Publics)

Difficult as it may be to believe, we’re still almost three months out from the likely date of the next Australian federal election; campaigning during this time will become even more frenzied than it has been to date. A sea of speculation, controversy, and crisis surrounds the polls, and an increasing subset of the political battle is being fought online, through party Websites and social media. This is beginning to affect the balance of power in the overall media ecology: while mainstream media have historically played an important role in political campaigning and in shaping public opinions, online and social media now contribute new communicative ingredients to the public sphere.

While much attention has already been paid to the way that social media users critique and criticise the mainstream media, the opposite is less true. Conventional print and broadcast media have been instrumental in raising awareness about the political uses of social media platforms, and in doing so reflect contemporary views; so, what is the portrayal of social media in the media?

This question lies at the core of Social Media in the Media, a new report released by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) in collaboration with the University of Oslo. In the report, we investigate how the political uses of social media are portrayed in the Australian mainstream media, in order to understand the perceptions that help shape how politicians, citizens and journalists employ new media tools to support their political objectives. Through a longitudinal comparative analysis we identify significant changes in how social media have been reported on since 2008. Overall, we are able to trace the gradual adoption and acceptance of social media as political tools, by politicians themselves as well as by journalists and everyday citizens.

Users

For the study, we sampled Australian mainstream media articles about social media in politics from the years 2008, 2010, and 2012. Over this time, politicians’ uses of social media were covered most prominently in the mainstream media; citizen uses came a close second overall. Journalists’ uses of social media in political reporting were considered far less often, even in spite of the considerable changes to journalistic practice that have occurred with the advent of real-time social media such as Twitter.

Politicians

Commentary on politicians’ uses of social media changed considerably from 2008 to 2012. Early articles commonly reported on politicians’ “incorrect” or “inefficient” use of social media, and suggested that they were mainly using these tools in order to demonstrate their ability to move with the times. But by 2010, and certainly by 2012, social media use was described as more integrated into the day-to-day practices of politicians. Social media had become normalised: they were no longer new. Similarly, articles that discussed the attitudes of politicians towards social media portrayed more negative attitudes in 2008 (viewing social media are “useless”, or even as detrimental to political debate). Considerably more positive perceptions emerged in 2010 and 2012. This suggests that politicians (and the journalists covering them) were beginning to see the benefits in using social media as political tools.

Citizens

Members of the public were predominantly portrayed as using social media to campaign, fight for their rights, and support particular causes. News articles construct social media use by citizens as a means of demanding and achieving change and improvement in the public policy issues that affect them. Articles also suggested that citizens use social media to an important extent to support, criticise or gossip about politicians. Interestingly, such uses increased substantially in 2012; this may reflect a broader change in Australian political discourse (towards more emotive and inflammatory language, and strong public responses to it), with prominent pro- and anti-Gillard/Abbott groups emerging on social media platforms. It remains to be seen whether this remains an isolated episode, or whether it indicates a lasting shift in the reported political uses of social media.

Journalists

By contrast, the use of social media by journalists was much less reported on than uses by politicians and members of the public. We noted an overall increase in articles covering the use of social media by journalists; we also identified a shift across the years in how social media are portrayed as tools for political journalism: in 2008, articles demonstrated the potential of social media as tools for political news reporting, yet indicated that this potential was not being realised. By 2010, articles suggested that journalists had begun to use social media, if not yet in the most effective ways. Articles from 2012, finally, conveyed more successful engagement by journalists with social media; journalists also increasingly used social media as sources or supporting evidence in their reporting, for example by citing politicians’ social media statements and conversations. On average, some 26 percent of the articles we examined across 2008, 2010 and 2012 cited politicians’ statements on Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms.

Social and Traditional Media: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts

New, social media have traditionally been perceived as a threat to the established news industry; in Australia, this manifested especially in the ‘blog wars’ of the mid to late 2000s. However, our study reveals a significant decrease in the number of articles that focus on a comparison of social and traditional media from 2008 to 2012. Instead, journalistic coverage of social media in politics has shifted to a portrayal of social and traditional media as sitting comfortably alongside one another. By 2008, a perception of social media as useful additional media had already become dominant, in fact; in subsequent years, coverage focussed increasingly on the growing integration of social media into political practice, engagement, and reporting. Combined with the overall decrease in articles that compared social and traditional media, this shows that social media in politics have become normalised – the debate is no longer over whether, but how they may be used.

The role of the media in setting political agendas and impacting on public opinion has long been noted. As social media become increasingly integrated into the modern political landscape, then, we need to consider the contribution they make to setting political agendas. Analysing their portrayal as political tools by traditional media can provide important insights into the emergence of what Yochai Benkler has termed ‘hybrid media ecologies’. In light of the coming federal election we plan to continue our examination of how social media are conceptualised and used by politicians, citizens and journalists, comparing especially the election years 2010 and 2013.

Already, our study shows a political media ecology in considerable flux, and points to significant changes to the professional practices of politicians, journalists, and other stakeholders in the political process in Australia. As politicians, citizens and journalists come to terms with using social media, we need to turn our focus to the impact of these tools, and to develop new methods for analysing and understanding them.

This report is part of a joint research project on The Impact of Social Media on Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns with scholars from the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen, Uppsala University, and California State University. It investigates the interaction and inter-media agenda-setting between social media and mainstream media in different cultural and political settings, in order to develop cross-national comparisons. (Cover image by whatleydude on Flickr.)

Introducing the Companion to New Media Dynamics

Axel Bruns — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:15:46 +0000

I’m delighted to announce the completion of another major project we’ve been involved in: Blackwell has just published A Companion to New Media Dynamics, edited by John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns. The title of this substantial volume may seem a little strange at first – why not just “… to New Media”? –, but with this collection we aimed specifically to highlight new media as a set of dynamic, evolving, and sometimes elusive practices rather than a static, easily defined thing.

The volume brings together contributions from a long list of researchers in the field, and combines international research leaders with key emerging scholars who will drive the next generation of new media and Internet research. But don’t take my word for it – take Toby Miller’s: “We are fortunate indeed to have this tour d’horizon of young and middle-aged media across Europe, North America, and Asia. It features an array of established and emergent writers whose clear prose and thorough research mark out their work.”

Here’s a complete list of chapters:

Part 1 – Approaches and Antecedents

1. Media Studies and New Media Studies (Sean Cubitt)

2. Media Dynamics and the Lessons of History: The ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ as Restoration Topos (Thomas Pettitt)

3. Literature and Culture in the Age of the New Media: Dynamics of Evolution and Change (Peter Swirski)

4. The Future of Digital Humanities Is a Matter of Words (Willard McCarty)

5. The End of Audiences? Theoretical Echoes of Reception amidst the Uncertainties of Use (Sonia Livingstone and Ranjana Das)

6. The Economics of New Media (John Quiggin)

7. The Emergence of Next Generation Internet Users (William H. Dutton and Grant Blank)

8. National Web Studies: Mapping Iran Online (Richard Rogers, Esther Weltevrede, Sabine Niederer and Erik Borra)

Part 2 – Dynamics of Change

Agency

9. In the Habitus of the New: Structure, Agency and the Social Media Habitus (Zizi Papacharissi and Emily Easton)

10. Long Live Wikipedia? Sustainable Volunteerism and the Future of Crowdsourced Knowledge (Andrew Lih)

Mobility

11. Changing Media with Mobiles (Gerard Goggin)

12. Make Room for the Wii: Game Consoles and the Construction of Space (Ben Aslinger)

Enterprise

13. Improvers, Entertainers, Shockers and Makers (Charles Leadbeater)

14. The Dynamics of Digital Multisided Media Markets: How Media Organisations Learn from the IT Industries How to Engage with an Active Audience (Patrik Wikström)

Search

15. Search and Networked Attention (Alexander Halavais)

16. Against Search – Towards a New Computational Logic of Media Accessibility (Pelle Snickars)

Network

17. Evolutionary Dynamics of the Mobile Web (Indrek Ibrus)

18. Pseudonyms and the Rise of the Real Name Web (Bernie Hogan)

Surveillance

19. New Media and Changing Perceptions of Surveillance (Anders Albrechtslund)

20. Lessons of the Leak: WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and the Changing Landscape of Media and Politics (Christoph Bieber)

Part 3 – Forms, Platforms and Practices

Culture and Identity

21. Cybersexuality and Online Culture (Feona Attwood)

22. Viral Video and Spoof Culture (Jean Burgess and Henry Li)

23. Identity (Alice Marwick )

24. Networked Identity (Jan Schmidt)

25. Identity (Terri Senft)

Politics, Participation, Citizenship

26. The Internet and the Opening Up of Political Space (Stephen Coleman)

27. The Internet as a Platform for Civil Disobedience (Cherian George)

28. Parody, Performativity, and Play: The Reinvigoration of Citizenship through Political Satire (Jeffrey P. Jones)

29. The Politics of Platforms (Tarleton Gillespie)

30. From Homepages to Network Profiles: Balancing Personal and Social Identity (Axel Bruns)

Knowledge: Self-organised, Networked

31. The New Media Toolkit (Mark Pesce)

32. Materiality, Description and Comparison as Tools for Cultural Difference Analysis (Basile Zimmermann)

33. Learning from Network Dysfunctionality: Accidents, Enterprise and Small Worlds of Infection (Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson)

New Generations

34. Young People Online (Lelia Green and Danielle Brady)

35. Beyond Generations and New Media (Kate Crawford and Penelope Robinson)