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Mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr
Abstract
Social media play a prominent role in mediating issues of public concern, not only providing the stage on which public debates play out but also shaping their topics and dynamics. Building on and extending existing approaches to both issue mapping and social media analysis, this article explores ways of accounting for popular media practices and the special case of ‘born digital’ sociocultural controversies. We present a case study of the GamerGate controversy with a particular focus on a spike in activity associated with a 2015 Law and Order: SVU episode about gender-based violence and harassment in games culture that was widely interpreted as being based on events associated with GamerGate. The case highlights the importance and challenges of accounting for the cultural dynamics of digital media within and across platforms.
... Affect and emotion are particularly salient in users' co-construction of scandals (Erzikova and McLean, 2020), as moral violations can spur affective engagement and contribute to the formation of collective identities and participatory action, yet also splinter public opinion. The formation of such publics is reinforced by algorithmic curation amplifying controversy (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016). Socio-mediated scandals are thus essentially performative and affective; they mobilize affect as a generative force (Ingraham, 2020), that is, as forms of collective, affective relations (Lünenborg and Maier, 2018). ...
... This active integration into other platforms by users allows the self-scandalizing actor to gain attention among communities they otherwise might not have been able to reach. Accordingly, the debate can move from a rather fragmented public to more homogeneous 'issue-fied' publics (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016). Connecting to the scandalous incident is then based on a shared personal interest in the issues behind the moral transgressions, here identity politics, masculinity or climate change. ...
... Self-scandalization involves no revelation of a transgression discovered by a third party. The scandalous incident is an intentional and self-provoked, highly visible, attention-seeking performance meant to involve communities as 'issue-ified' publics, boosted by algorithmic curation models (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016: 80-81) through enhanced affective engagement. Self-scandalizing processes thus exemplify how platform logics operate. ...
This article engages with self-scandalization as a calculated communicative strategy that employs morally transgressive performances on social media to elicit public, often emotion-driven responses to gain attention and fame. To conceptualize the dynamics of self-scandalization, we draw from what Diana Zulli coined ‘socio-mediated scandals’, which are co-constructed by active online users who can become forceful communicative co-drivers of a scandal. Based on netnography, we analyze the feud between influencer Andrew Tate and environmental activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter/X in December 2022. We show how Tate’s strategy of self-scandalization enticed different online communities to (un)willingly amplify and co-construct the scandalous incident. Tate did this not only to provoke with his moral transgressions but also to create an entertaining drama connecting to both popular and Internet culture. Compelling conflict, sensationalism and exaggeration, paired with moral transgressions along politicized trenches, unfold the potential to pull in large and niche communities outside of the self-scandalizer’s usual sphere of influence.
... Drawing on a broad and interdisciplinary selection of the literature that is most central to this task, it identifies a number of crucial conceptual building blocks and empirical approaches that may be combined to support a research agenda that produces genuinely new insights into how contemporary public communication is structured, and in turn structures our everyday experiences; these tools range from classic models such as the two-step flow of information (Katz, 1957), and its contemporary adaptation as a multi-step flow (e.g., Pfetsch et al., 2018), to recent contributions such as Papacharissi's description of "affective publics" (2014), and from Oldenburg & Brissett's "third places" (1982) in offline contexts to Marwick & boyd's "context collapse" in online environments (2011). Where possible, the toolkit also matches conceptual ideas, such as Habermas's "issue publics" (2006), with corresponding methodologies, such as the cross-platform "issue mapping" approach (Burgess & Matamoros-Ferná ndez, 2016). ...
... Aided substantially by API functionality (especially in the Twitter API) that particularly privileges data gathering based on keywords, hashtags, and similar in-text features, the methodological frameworks for studying such issue publics in social media have advanced rapidly over the past decade. Central here is the social media issue mapping approach (Marres, 2015;Burgess & Matamoros-Ferná ndez, 2016), which itself builds on earlier issue mapping frameworks for the broader Web (Rogers & Marres, 2000). This current iteration of issue mapping tends to begin with a focus on a single social media platform, from which researchers gather posts containing the selected key terms and phrases. ...
... Further, from a diachronic perspective, the analysis of such digital trace data may also reveal how the platform-specific issue public is influenced by and in turn influences related discussions taking place on other platforms, by showing when and how media objects from elsewhere are introduced into the on-platform debate and how the debate itself is in turn reflected in other spaces. In recent years, such approaches have been fruitfully applied to studies of major issues ranging from #gamergate (Burgess & Matamoros-Ferná ndez, 2016) through climate change (Williams et al., 2015) to COVID-19 conspiracy theories (Bruns et al., 2020) and beyond, as well as to a myriad of much smaller-scale case studies. ...
“The” public sphere is now irretrievably fractured into a multiplicity of online and offline, larger and smaller, more or less public spaces that frequently (and often serendipitously) overlap and intersect with one another. This diverse array of what have been described variously as public spheres, public spherules, platform publics, issue publics, or personal publics nonetheless serves many of the same functions that were postulated for the public sphere itself. However, while the communicative structures, functions, and dynamics of many such spaces have been studied in isolation, we still lack a more comprehensive model that connects such case studies in pursuit of an overarching perspective. This article sets out a fundamental toolkit for the development of such an empirically founded model of the contemporary spaces for public communication. It identifies the crucial conceptual building blocks and empirical approaches that may be combined to produce genuinely new insights into how the network of such spaces is structured, and in turn structures our everyday experience of public communication.
... Extensive research has looked at digital far-right actors and networks and has demonstrated the complex interplay between these publics' persuasion strategies and their competent use of the technomaterial infrastructures YouTube provides (Marwick and Lewis 2017;Lewis 2018). It can be argued that in this way YouTube also functions as a great normalizer, playing an out-sized role in the normalization of radical right conspiracies like QAnon and #GamerGate that first disseminated from more fringe corners of the internet like 4chan (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández 2016;Sylvia and Moody 2022). ...
This contribution investigates the case of “BreadTube”, a leftist counterpublic that first formed on YouTube in opposition to the dominance of right-wing voices and networks on the platform. To gain a better understanding of the inner workings of this media-based collectivity, this article analyzes an internal controversy to reconstruct the tacit assumptions of various participants about the counterpublic’s aims, values, shortcomings as well as its economic and technological prerequisites. To capture the controversy for exploration, an innovative approach was employed that adapts Clarke’s Situational Analysis as a framework to integrate both interpretative mapping and computational network analysis to properly account for the videos high level of intertextual referentiality as well as their algorithmic interrelatedness. This digitally and visually enhanced Situational Analysis framework was able to deliver a comprehensive insight into the complex and dynamic constellation of perspectives and segments BreadTube is composed of and illuminated arenas in which adverse interests overlap and conflict arises over questions of representation, legitimacy, shared history, and resource allocation.
... We then examine discourse within two popular GC forums, Ovarit and Mumsnet (specifically: Mumsnet's "Feminism: Sex & gender" board), to identify how these groups circulate disinformation, perform political mythmaking, and construct and reinscribe reactionary identities in the context of GC ideology and extremism. Specifically, we utilize a mixed-methods approach and comparative platform analysis (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016;Marwick & Caplan, 2018) to explore the discourse of both platforms and understand how the social ecologies of the GC Internet interact. By analyzing-through critical technoculture discourse analysis (Brock, 2018)-over 80k posts and comments scraped from Ovarit and Mumsnet, we characterize rhetorical patterns and informational practices endemic to each platform. ...
In 2020, the subreddit r/GenderCritical—one of the most active “gender critical” (GC) spaces on Reddit—was banned by the platform for promoting hateful, transphobic conduct. Following the closure of r/GenderCritical (and subsequent banning of dozens of high-profile, transphobic subreddits including r/ActualWomen, r/GenderCriticalSociety, and r/truelesbians), GC users—especially those in North America and Western Europe—migrated to more hidden, invite-only spaces. These included Discord servers as well as (much like alt-right alternative platforms Parler and Truth Social) platforms run by GCs themselves: Spinster.xyz, the short-lived Giggle app, subforums on Mumsnet, and Ovarit—an invite-only forum which imitates Reddit’s architecture launched by former moderators of r/GenderCritical. While we might celebrate the closure of openly hateful communities on major social platforms, a crucial side-effect of the GC dispersal is that their activity has become (following patterns in reactionary political movements online more broadly) increasingly shrouded and insular. In this project, we provide an overview of the current landscape of GC activity on social media as it exists in the post-r/GenderCritical era. We describe how users are “peaked” (the GC equivalent of “redpilled”) and pipelined from algorithmic media platforms into insular and extremist spaces such as Ovarit, Mumsnet, and Discord. We then examine discourse within two popular GC forums, Ovarit and Mumsnet (specifically: Mumsnet’s “Feminism: Sex & gender” board), to identify how these groups circulate disinformation, perform political mythmaking, and construct and reinscribe reactionary identities in the context of GC ideology and extremism.
... In addition, these novel methods of subjective approach (Salmons, 2017) range from short fiction in a descriptive study (Georgakopoulou, 2017), thorough comprehension (Stewart, 2017), strong statistics report (Latzko-Toth, Bonneau & Millete 2017), to research approaches that centreon nonverbal information such as pictures, similes, music and images (Pennington, 2017). Besides, studies have revealed that social media research creates opportunities for review in an organised and analytical manner based on contemporary societal concerns in a cost-effective approach (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016). For example, scholars, social media experts, and the research community at large commended the innovation brought by social media platforms based on opportunities and gaps to exploit (Sloan& Quan-Haase, 2017). ...
... One of the reasons is that social networks "contain a large amount of raw data that has been uploaded by users in the form of text, videos, photos, and audio" [4]. The data in question can be of significant value to researchers, as "social media play a prominent role in mediating issues of public concern, not only providing the stage on which public debates play out but also shaping their topics and dynamics" [5], which presents an opportunity to explore a range of issues. More than "3.6 billion people worldwide use social media platforms, leading to the generation of unprecedented amounts of self-reported textual data every day", thus "text data from thousands of subjects can be collected and analysed automatically while offering a less biased, unobtrusive, and more ecologically valid assessment of wellbeing" and of other tendencies, behaviours, perspectives [6]. ...
The paper presents the findings of a study that explores the potential of social media as a data-gathering tool for educational research. The objective of this study is to address the following research questions: whether various research methods can be effectively applied in social media; which methods are most suitable for utilisation in an online environment; and what are the advantages and challenges of social media as a research tool (for educational research). The principal tasks are to review and analyse existing studies focusing on extracting information from social media for conducting research; outline the advantages and challenges of applying research methods within social media; and formulate recommendations for the effective use of such data sources for research purposes in the context of the educational process. The research methods used are systematic analysis of sources and content analysis. The study is conducted in five main stages: 1) retrieving relevant sources in scholarly publication sharing platforms (ResearchGate; Academia Edu; Google Scholar); 2) primary review of the sources – sortation by period; 3) secondary review of the sources, classification of the relevant ones, and rejection of the irrelevant ones; 4) final review of the selected sources and systematization of 50 articles for further analysis; 5) content analysis of the obtained data, differentiation of the main research methods utilised in social media platforms, systematization of the advantages and disadvantages of using social mediafor conducting research, derivation of recommendations in this regard. The current paper could serve as a basis for developing further studies and establishing social media as a setting for integrating different research methods. Furthermore, the results of the present study indicate the potential of social media as a source of data for conducting research in the field of education.
... This led 'anti-GamerGaters' to, instead, argue that the hashtag was evidence of continued sexism in gaming, reframing the blogpost and the outcry that followed as an attempt to exclude women game developers (Young, 2019). From there, the discussion blew up and became increasingly hostile as expressions of concern about the politics and ethics of gaming were accompanied by threats of rape and violence (Braithwaite, 2016), just as the controversy diffused across the internet and into wider public circuits, gaining attention from representatives of the gaming industry, traditional news media and democratic institutions alike (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016;Blodgett, 2020). ...
... This led 'anti-GamerGaters' to, instead, argue that the hashtag was evidence of continued sexism in gaming, reframing the blogpost and the outcry that followed as an attempt to exclude women game developers (Young, 2019). From there, the discussion blew up and became increasingly hostile as expressions of concern about the politics and ethics of gaming were accompanied by threats of rape and violence (Braithwaite, 2016), just as the controversy diffused across the internet and into wider public circuits, gaining attention from representatives of the gaming industry, traditional news media and democratic institutions alike (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016;Blodgett, 2020). ...
... In mapping out the specific antifeminist calling out practices and their evolution in the context of the pinching gesture controversy, I build on the scholarship on crossplatform digital studies. For instance, approaching #gamergate as a "born digital" sociocultural controversy that originated in and has been substantially propagated through digital media, Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández (2016) examine the issue inventory, map the issue networks, and identify key mediators in issue publics across various digital platforms. I likewise explore the initiation and further spread of the canceling campaign against the pinching gesture through various digital platforms, including YouTube and the online community FM Korea, and identify the stakeholders involved. ...
This paper examines the antifeminist appropriation of cancel culture in South Korea, focusing on the controversy surrounding the finger-pinching motif, allegedly associated with Megalia, a now-defunct feminist online community. While cancel culture originated from marginalized groups challenging systemic injustices, it is now appropriated by dominant groups to reinforce social structures—in this case, to protect male privilege and undermine feminism. The study reveals how antifeminist canceling in the country has extended over the years beyond subcultural industries to companies, government agencies, and public institutions. Although both feminists and antifeminists engage in cancel practices, antifeminist canceling has led to the removal of numerous advertisements and the sanctioning of women and precarious workers, reflecting the fundamental gender power imbalance in South Korea. By examining social, public, and institutional responses, I argue that such institutional enforcement upholds and reproduces the antifeminist hijacking of cancel culture, further silencing marginalized communities.
... We note that the practice mapping approach we are outlining here is distinct from other well-known 'mapping' approaches such as issue mapping (Marres, 2015;Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016) or controversy mapping (Venturini & Munk, 2021), for two reasons. First, these approaches continue to draw on conventional analysis and visualisation of interaction networks between social media accounts, while practice mapping abstracts from these direct representations of communicative networks on social media platforms by mapping instead the patterns of similarity between the communicative practices of accounts in such networks. ...
This article introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping, using vector embeddings of network actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users, as a framework for methodological advancement beyond the limitations of conventional network analysis and visualisation. In particular, the methodological framework we outline here has the potential to incorporate multiple distinct modes of interaction into a single practice map, can be further enriched with account-level attributes such as information gleaned from textual analysis, profile information, available demographic details, and other features, and can be applied even to a cross-platform analysis of communicative patterns and practices. The article presents practice mapping as an analytical framework and outlines its key methodological considerations. Given its prominence in past social media research, we draw on examples and data from the platform formerly known as Twitter in order to enable experienced scholars to translate their approaches to a practice mapping paradigm more easily, but point out how data from other platforms may be used in equivalent ways in practice mapping studies. We illustrate the utility of the approach by applying it to a dataset where the application of conventional network analysis and visualisation approaches has produced few meaningful insights.
... Marres' (2020) "situational analytics" that applies situated research (i.e. understanding a situation) to media-ecological phenomena; (5) triangulation with qualitative methods; and (6) collaborative research that includes industry and platform provider perspectives (see Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016;Marres, 2020;Rogers, 2018;Venturini, et al., 2018;on visuals: d'Andrea & Mintz, 2019;Pearce et al. 2020, Colombo, Bounegru andPuschmann, 2019). While some of these works centre on images, visuality has hitherto been of comparatively little concern for these considerations (compared to software-based methods more widely). ...
A range of scholars have criticised scholarly tendencies to focus on “easy” data such as provided by the low-hanging fruit of Twitter hashtag networks (Burgess & Bruns, 2015; Hargittai, 2020; Tromble, 2021). As a result, digital social research has been said to create a glut of studies that favour particular platforms, data forms, and networking dynamics, choices that may create ‘digital bias’ (Marres, 2017). These issues are particularly significant in visual data as the implicit nature of visuality means that platform spaces, text, and networked uses of visuals contribute to how visuals are interpreted in digital environments. In response to this issue, we present and critically reflect on new potentialities in software-based visual research on protest and politics, including: (1) rich cross-project comparisons; (2) complementing platform data with on-the-ground engagement, and (3) quali-quanti visual methods. These allow for rich data journeys through multi-modality, hybridity, comprehensive data curation, reiterative image data collection and interpretation, and the inclusion of contextual reflections in focused visual research, elements that provide meaning, texture, and context (= extra-hard data). We argue that visual digital methods consequently have the potential to provide nuanced, robust, and versatile analysis of visual data, if not necessitate these in a post-API age in which easy data access is no longer a given.
... La plataforma para la gestión de video más conocida es Youtube [19]. Esta plataforma tiene la posibilidad de subir videos, con una capacidad limitada, de forma pública, oculta o privada. ...
El objetivo de este documento es poder recopilar las tecnologías Web 2.0 relacionadas con la enseñanza superior. Estas tecnologías tienen una característica común, pues pueden ser aplicadas a la enseñanza superior. Al utilizar este tipo de nuevas tecnologías, se puede fomentar un estilo nuevo de enseñanza. Esta estará basada en la tecnología y en la igualdad e inclusión, pues las capacidades tecnologías que puede adquirir un estudiante o utilizar un instructor son independientes del género de las personas que lo utilizan. Esta evolución de la enseñanza es similar a la adaptación que están haciendo las industrias e instituciones ante la demanda de la sociedad, un ejemplo se da en las películas de animación, donde las tecnologías se han vuelto las principales herramientas de creación de contenidos y, además, una forma de transmitir valores a los infantes.
... Within youth-centric online communities like Tumblr and Reddit, expectations of decorum relaxed, fueling normalization of edgy, controversial discussion topics and aesthetics. Memes valorizing surrealism, self-deprecation and taboo violations emerged as informal linguistic currencies denote cultural fluency [6]. As viral trends centering the weird, ugly or distasteful permeated mainstream social feeds, their creators accrued disproportionate notoriety. ...
This empirical study investigates the relationship between contemporary internet-based aesthetic distortion proclivities and psychosocial outcomes among adolescents. Utilizing a mixed methods approach including surveys, semi- structured interviews, and quasi-experimental designs to explore the effects of online ugliness appreciation meme culture on teenage subjective well-being, self-concept, and developmental trajectories. The findings elucidate the mechanisms through which ironic engagement with "anti-aesthetic" online content may negatively impact adolescent mental health and identity formation. By integrating diverse methodologies spanning the qualitative- quantitative spectrum, this research aims to generate key ethnographic insights, robust statistical models, and actionable policy recommendations to mitigate potential developmental risks associated with youth participation in online ugliness appreciation cultures.
... Exemplarisch wurde die Hasskampagne gegen die Betreiberin des YouTube-Kanals "FeministFrequency" bereits genannt (Burgess und Green 2018;Burgess und Matamoros-Fernández 2016;Gray et al. 2017;Mortensen 2018). Betroffene YouTuber_innen reagieren unterschiedlich auf Angriffe: Manche schalten Kommentare und Videobewertungen ganz aus, andere löschen einzelne Hasskommentare und sperren Hater_innen, wieder andere lesen Hasskommentare vor, kommentieren diese kritisch und fordern einen angemessenen Kommunikationsstil. ...
Wie ist die weltweit führende Social-Media-Video-Plattform YouTube im Hinblick auf Geschlechtergleichberechtigung einzuschätzen? Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Videoproduktion auf YouTube männlich dominiert ist und dass die Video-Inhalte oft tradierte Geschlechterrollen vermitteln. Rezipierende greifen neben den Mainstream-Inhalten jedoch auch auf Nischen-Inhalte zurück, die vielfältigere Geschlechterbilder bieten als die herkömmlichen Massenmedien. Der Beitrag zeigt Forschungslücken auf und endet mit praktischen Handlungsempfehlungen zur Förderung von Geschlechtergleichberechtigung auf YouTube.
... Günümüzde dijital medya milyonlarca insana rahatlıkla ulaşılabilen bir iletişim alanı sunmaktadır. Örneğin; dünya çapında 2 milyardan fazla insan sosyal medyayı kullanmakta ve sadece YouTube şu anda günde yaklaşık bir milyar aktif kullanıcıya sahiptir (Burgess, Matamoros-Fernández, 2022). Bireyler içeriklere erişmek, gündemi takip etmek ve içerik paylaşmak gibi eylemler için sosyal medya platformlarını aktif olarak kullanmaktadır. ...
Günümüzde iletişim teknolojilerindeki gelişmeler diğer alanlarda olduğu gibi medya alanında da köklü değişiklikleri beraberinde getirmiştir. İletişim teknolojileri haberciliğin yanında yayıncılığın da dijital olarak izleyicilere aktarılmasına olanak sağlamıştır. Bu dijital yayıncılıkta birisi olan spor yayıncılığı da çevrimiçin platformlarda yer alarak geleneksel spor yayıncılığının önüne geçmektedir. Dijital spor kanalları giderek popüler hale gelerek yaygınlaşmaktadırlar. Çalışmada dijital spor kanallarından yapılan yayınların izleyicilerin kanaatlerinin yönünü belirlemede ki etkisi incelemektir. Bu bağlamda çalışma kapsamında Türkiye'de en çok izlenen dijital spor kanalı olan VOLE’ye gelen yorumların yönünü belirlemektir. Bunun için “VOLE” dijital spor kanalında yer alan en popüler beş video alınmış ve her videodan 300 yorum içerik analiz yöntemiyle analiz edilmiştir. Çalışamadan elde edilen sonuçlar genel anlamda vidolara pozitif yorumların geldiği sırasıyla negatif ve nötr yorumların takip ettiği görülmüştür. Ayrıca yorumların, yayıncıların konu ile ilgili genel tutum ve görüşleri ile örtüştüğü görülmüştür. Araştırma sonuçları yorumcuların izleyicilerin kanaatlerinin yönünü belirlemede rolü olduğu söylenebilir.
... The NPC meme also offers a 'collective avatar' for participating in subcultures and for practicing politics in ways that draw on the logics and structures of gaming. Numerous scholars have identified the 2014 #GamerGate movement as marking both a politicisation of gaming culture and a gamification of politics (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández, 2016;Massanari, 2017;Salter, 2018;Sinders, 2021). United by their antipathy to 'social justice warriors', disgruntled gamers developed methods of 'gaming' digital platforms that would later be deployed by the alt-right and other reactionary subcultures. ...
The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drones whose behaviour is dictated by their programming. By 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. By the autumn of 2018, these spaces were awash with NPC memes accusing liberals and leftists of uncritically accepting progressive doxa and parroting left-wing catchphrases. In mid-October, with midterm elections looming in the US, Twitter banned over 1000 NPC roleplay accounts created by supporters of Donald Trump, citing concerns over disinformation. This event was much discussed both within right-wing subcultural spaces and by mainstream media outlets, serving as an occasion to reassess the political effects of digital media in general and reactionary memes in particular. Here we use a combination of computational analysis and theoretically informed close reading to trace the NPC meme's trajectory and explore its role in entrenching affectively charged political and (sub)cultural faultlines. We show how mainstream attention at once amplified the meme and attenuated its affective resonance in the subcultural spaces where it originated. We also contend that while the NPC meme has served as a vehicle for antidemocratic bigotry, it may yet harbour critical potential, providing a vocabulary for theorising the cultural and political impacts of communicative capitalism.
... veys and configures particular types of messages(Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández 2016;Madsen 2013;Marres 2015); how to handle facts, values, and incommensurable positions in knowledge controversies(Birkbak 2013;Venturini 2010); and how to use data visualizations exploratively to pose new questions(Munk and Jensen 2014;Munk, Madsen, and Jacomy 2019;Venturini, Ricci, et al. 2015). ...
How ten making & doing projects expand STS scholarship through a focus on knowledge expression and knowledge travel in addition to knowledge production.
Making & doing projects expand STS scholarship to include the trajectories of STS knowledge flow beyond the boundaries of the field by actively interweaving knowledge expression and travel with knowledge production. In this edited volume, contributors from around the world present and critically assess ten empirical making & doing projects. They recount how their projects advance STS, and describe how they themselves learn from their interlocutors and the settings in which they do and share their STS work. A coda explains how the infrastructures of STS scholarship are broadening to include practices of making & doing.
The contributors examine and reflect upon their dilemmas, frustrations, and failures, especially when these generate new practices that might not have occurred had their work not taken the form of making and doing scholarship. While each project raises a distinct set of scholarly issues, all of the projects include practices that express STS knowledge through “STS sensibilities” and attach those sensibilities to practices in empirical fields. The projects include one each in Argentina, Taiwan, Canada, and Denmark; two in the US; one in Austria, the UK, and multiple countries in Africa and Asia; one in the US and Latin America; one in the Netherlands and Australia; and one in an international network that includes members from Europe, the Americas, and Australia.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Contributors
Gary Lee Downey and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak; Yi-Ping Lin and Hsin-Hsing Chen; Dawn Nafus, Michael Guggenheim, Judith Kröll, and Bernd Kräftner (with Alexander Martos); Hernán Thomas, Lucas Becerra, and Paula Juárez; Torben Elgaard Jensen, Andreas Birkbak, Anders Koed Madsen, and Anders Kristian Munk; Max Liboiron, Emily Simmonds, Edward Allen, Emily Wells, Jess Melvin, Alex Zahara, and Charles Mather; Jessica Mesman and Katherine Carroll; Nicholas Shapiro
... Media and communications are shaped by the dominance of social media technologies-the digital platforms, services, and apps that combine content sharing, public communication, and interpersonal connection [1]. Social media platforms play an important role in mediating issues of public concern, public debates, and shaping their topics and dynamics [2]. Modern public relations strategies have evolved with improvements in social media technologies [3]. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to adapt to Internet-based technology. With the many obstacles that occur in the economic field, the affected people in Indonesia refuse to give up on the situation. Indonesian MSMEs have survived, and even grown, during the COVID-19 period. They carry out various public relations (PR) activities with their target consumers on social media. This research conducted an in-depth review of the various strategies and tactics of social media public relations activities used for the resilience of Indonesian MSMEs. This research uses the qualitative method, with data collected by interviews with well-established MSME owners. In the business landscape, the consequences of the pandemic may be particularly negative to micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) because they often have insufficient financial and human resources to tackle the issues presented by COVID-19. MSMEs could embrace mass cooperation through social media for knowledge development and innovation to acquire resiliency. The unique and various social media strategies are described, which can be a guide for any MSME that wants to engage more with their stakeholders on social media.
This article introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping , using vector embeddings of network actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users, as a framework for methodological advancement beyond the limitations of conventional network analysis and visualization. In particular, the methodological framework we outline here has the potential to incorporate multiple distinct modes of interaction into a single practice map; can be further enriched with account-level attributes such as information gleaned from textual analysis, profile information, available demographic details, and other features; and can be applied even to a cross-platform analysis of communicative patterns and practices. The article presents practice mapping as an analytical framework and outlines its key methodological considerations. Given its prominence in past social media research, we draw on examples and data from the platform formerly known as Twitter to enable experienced scholars to translate their approaches to a practice mapping paradigm more easily, but point out how data from other platforms may be used in equivalent ways in practice mapping studies. We illustrate the utility of the approach by applying it to a dataset where the application of conventional network analysis and visualization approaches has produced few meaningful insights.
Despite the growing significance of the Chinese digital diaspora, large-scale empirical research on its communication patterns on digital platforms remains scarce. This study presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of Jianzhong Quan (简中圈), a key Chinese digital diasporic community on X (formerly Twitter). By examining its temporal and thematic patterns as well as group composition, this research provides valuable insights into how diasporic communities engage in political discussions while navigating contrasting media systems and technopolitical landscapes. Given that X has been officially blocked in Mainland China since 2009, this platform offers a unique space for diaspora members to negotiate visibility, identity, and influence. Analyzing over 2.2 million tweets from January 2014 to December 2023, this study employs a mixed-methods approach, integrating qualitative analysis and network analysis techniques. The findings illuminate the composition of diaspora subgroups, their primary concerns, and the dynamics of intergroup connections and fragmentations. Beyond offering empirical evidence on diasporic discourse, this study also makes a theoretical contribution by proposing the concept of the Chinese digital diaspora.
This article presents a minor history of the beneficial community-created bots that once flourished on Twitter, showcasing their important but overlooked role in enhancing platform cultures, accessibility, and user experience. We present a typology of Twitter’s community-created bots, positioning them as marginal but active characters, tracing how and why they were crafted and co-evolved with, and in connection to, platform changes. The article offers a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse and association of bots with nefarious actors, showcasing the value of bot-making practices as forms of community-led innovation that have enriched social spaces through automation. In the context of current trends towards platform enclosure, the article argues for the continued importance of user innovation cultures in an AI-infused and potentially decentralised internet, proposing that we should not forget, overlook, or undermine the potential of creative, purposeful and community-initiated automation in fostering accessible, sociable, and joyful communication environments.
This paper identifies the visibility practices of Japanese Twitter users supporting Ukraine during Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. Studies of digital visibility often suggest that moral goals and ideals are not attainable in such practices, as they clash with conditions of visibility configured by social media. This has led scholars to suggest that moral paradoxes, or the need to reconcile conflicting considerations, are the main characteristic of visibility on social media platforms. In this study, through an innovative mixed-methods approach for analysing visibility practices, I also outline several moral paradoxes underlying practices through which Japanese Twitter users enhance or decrease the visibility of actors associated with Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, by adopting the conceptual approach of ‘ethics as practice’ which emphasises the moral considerations of practitioners when faced with a moral conundrum, I argue that users driven by the moral call to support Ukraine recognise the limitations of Twitter’s regime of visibility. Their grappling with the identified paradoxes as they engage in visibility practices is what gives moral value to these practices.
Artificial intelligence has become an issue in public policy. Multiple documents issued by public sector actors link artificial intelligence to a wide range of issues, problems or goals and propose corresponding measures and interventions. While there has been substantial research on national and supranational artificial intelligence strategies and regulations, this article is interested in unpacking the processes and priorities of artificial intelligence policy in the making. Conceptually, this article takes a controversy studies lens onto artificial intelligence policy, and complements this with concepts and insights from policy studies. Empirically, we investigate the emergence of German artificial intelligence policy based on content analyses of policy documents and expert interviews. The findings reveal a late, but then powerful institutionalisation of artificial intelligence policy in German federal politics. Artificial intelligence policy in Germany focuses on funding research and supporting industry actors in networked configurations, much more than addressing societal concerns on inequality, discrimination or political economy. With regard to controversies, we observe that German policy is evading controversies by normalising artificial intelligence both with regard to taking artificial intelligence integration in all sectors of society for granted, as well as by accommodating artificial intelligence issues into the routines and institutions of German policy.
Following the release of large language models in the late 2010s, the backers of this new type of artificial intelligence (AI) publicly affirmed that the technology is controversial and harmful to society. This situation sets contemporary AI apart from 20th-century controversies about technnoscience, such as nuclear power and genetically modified (GM) foods, and disrupts established assumptions concerning public controversies as occasions for technological democracy. In particular, it challenges the idea that such controversies enable inclusion and collective processes of problem definition (‘problematisation’) across societal domains. In this paper, we show how social research can contribute to addressing this challenge of AI controversies by adopting a distinctive methodology of controversy analysis: controversy elicitation. This approach actively selects, qualifies and evaluates controversies in terms of their capacity to problematise AI across the science and non-science binary. We describe our implementation of this approach in a participatory study of recent AI controversies, conducted through consultation with UK experts in AI and society. Combining an online questionnaire, social media analysis and a participatory workshop, our study suggests that civil society actors have developed distinctive strategies of problematisation that counter the strategic affirmation of AI’s controversiality by its proponents and which centre on the public mobilisation of AI-related incidents: demonstrations of bias, accidents and walkouts. Crucially, this emphasis on ‘AI frictions’ does not result in the fragmentation of AI controversies, but rather enables the articulation of AI as a ‘super-controversy’: the explication of connections between technical propositions, situated troubles and structural problems in society (discrimination, inequalities and corporate power).
The live character of suddenly breaking global media events along with the massive volume of digital traces they produce pose considerable challenges for research in the current communication environment. In this methodological article, we use the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks as an empirical context for methodological reflection. We suggest a new type of ethnographic investigation of events—a digital team ethnography augmented by computational methods for studying media events. We show how “fieldwork” and the related “field” are constructed as part of the empirical workflow and present a four-phase model to structure the research process: (1) research readiness, (2) mobilization of fieldwork, (3) exploring the computationally organized ethnographic field, and (4) deep dives that enable thick description on social media. We conclude with a reflection on the benefits and limitations of the proposed methodological approach for the study of global media events.
In August 2019, a mass shooter in the United States posted a violent manifesto to the anonymous forum 8chan prior to his attack. This was the third such incident that year and afterwards hosting and security services conceded to calls to drop 8chan as a client, pushing 8chan to the margins of the accessible internet. This article examines the deplatforming of 8chan as a public relations crisis, contributing to understanding ‘governance by shock’ (Ananny and Gillespie 2016) by examining who is shocked and their power to turn shock into online regulation. Online platforms and media attention created opportunities to study how the deplatforming was justified, drawing on the theoretical framework of economies of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) and controversy mapping methods. The examination finds: (1) that this case of deplatforming indicates the openness of infrastructure-as-a-service companies to external challenges over content, rather than hegemonic control. (2) That regulatory gaps, including the broadness of U.S. free speech laws, made these companies, rather than legal processes, the relevant authority. (3) That framing responsibility as following the law – as Cloudflare attempted to do – misunderstands the importance of normative principles, voluntary measures, and contestation in governing online content, underselling the value of policy-making at other levels. The success of the campaign to deplatform 8chan affirms the significance of PR crises in the regulation of online content, rewarding deplatforming as a political tactic for civil society groups and online networks pushing for governance in regulatory gaps. However, the significance of normative enforcement in this case underlines the difficulties of this semi-voluntary style of governance. While normative opposition to violence contributed to 8chan’s deplatforming, other normative oppositions contribute to deplatforming vulnerable users, as in the moral panics that drive the deplatforming of sexual content ( Tiidenberg 2021 ) and feed suspicion over the ideological application of deplatforming. The ambivalence of PR crises as a strategy for influencing platform governance underlines the need for clarity in policy-making at multiple levels.
This text concerns conflict between users of 4chan and Tumblr, two groups said to have formed a vanguard to the ‘online culture wars’ of the last decade. Specifically, I focus on a 2014 clash known as the ‘Tumblr-4chan raids’. Predating the more infamous Gamergate controversy, I see this event as a useful alternative microcosm to study polarisation among online subcultures in the mid-2010s. Drawing from subculture studies, I first theorise cross-site clashes as puncturing a sense of ‘subcultural territoriality’ whereby an online platform is appropriated as a secluded refuge. Through a quali-quantitative archival study, I find that the raids were initiated and exacerbated by trolling 4channers rather than a clash between equal sides. I ultimately argue that the feud partially arose out of 4channers’ reactionary ‘media ideologies’ on the Internet, wherein sensitivity, empathy, and care were seen as incongruous with ideas on the online as brutal and unforgiving. Next to better-known political clashes between feminists and anti-feminists, the paper thus highlights the polarising role of media ideologies at the onset of the ‘online culture wars’ in the mid-2010s.
The relevance of #MeToo for raising awareness of the everyday nature of sexualized violence against women is uncontested. The hashtag creates a space for solidarity, but also became a symbol for polarization and antifeminist backlash. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical research that analyzes the course and structure of the debate in social media in a long-term perspective. Using the concept of performative publics, this paper presents first results of a dynamic network analysis based on German-language Twitter data from October 2017 to December 2021. The instrument enables to depict different phases of participation intensity, community structures as well as changing power relations within the network. The focus of our analysis is on the polarized structure between feminist and right-wing communities, and the position of two communities dominated by media accounts. Despite tremendous fluctuations, #MeToo is a continuously used Twitter hashtag that follows the "multi-spike pattern". Our results show some structural constancy concerning the emerging communities. However, participation and interaction vary enormously not only between different time periods, but also within and between communities. With this data analysis we discuss the potential of computational methods for feminist media studies.
Die Relevanz von #MeToo zur Sensibilisierung für alltägliche sexualisierte Gewalt gegen Frauen, als Forum der Solidarität, aber auch als Anschauungsgegenstand für Polarisierung und antifeministisches Backlash ist unbestritten. Zugleich mangelt es an empirischen Forschungsarbeiten, die Verlauf und Struktur der Debatte in sozialen Medien in Langzeitperspektive analysieren. Vor dem Hintergrund des Konzepts der performativen Öffentlichkeiten präsentiert der Beitrag erste Ergebnisse einer dynamischen Netzwerkanalyse des deutschsprachigen Twitter-Diskurses von Oktober 2017 bis Dezember 2021. Das Instrument macht es möglich, verschiedene Phasen der Beteiligungsintensität, Community-Strukturen sowie wechselnde Kräfteverhältnisse im Netzwerk darzustellen. Der Fokus unserer Analyse liegt zum einen auf der polarisierten Struktur zwischen feministischen sowie rechtspopulistischen und -extremen Communities. Zum anderen betrachten wir die Rolle institutionalisierter Medien, die sich in zwei Communities strukturieren. Ungeachtet enormer Schwankungen erweist sich #MeToo als kontinuierlich genutztes Hashtag, das dem "multi-spike pattern" folgt. Bei der Verteilung in Communities zeigt sich eine relative Strukturkonstanz. Doch Beteiligung und Interaktion variieren nicht nur phasenspezifisch enorm, sondern auch innerhalb und zwischen den Communities. Wir diskutieren mit der vorgelegten Datenanalyse die Potenziale von computational methods für die feministische Kommunikationsforschung
In this article, we examine how Twitter users discuss intersections of the Black American and Palestinian experience in 2021 through the lens of intersectionality. We explore two questions; how is intersectionality discussed and performed by Twitter users in relation to the Palestinian and Black experience against the backdrop of this particular crisis in Gaza? And how do users engage with the language of intersectionality to either reify, contradict, or complicate the intersection of the Palestinian and Black experiences on the platform? We find that intersectionality is mediated by elite users via branded communication, as well as invoked to highlight or deny the intersections of the Black and Palestinian experience by the most peripheral users on the platform.
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced policing of journalists and users during GamerGate and the rise of ‘authenticity’ as a key resource for journalists and other platformed creators in the present. We draw on digital games, journalism and critical media studies to analyse the work of ‘authenticity’. We argue that platform affordances such as identity verification badges are fundamentally implicated in the work of users to appear ‘real’, even as the visibility requisite for realness brings uneven risks for marginalised cultural workers.
This article recounts and reflects on our experience of interacting with Facebook’s data infrastructure during some pivotal months of change in early 2018. We show how the technical affordances of the Application Programming Interface (API) have critical consequences for the practice of digital controversy mapping and hence argue for the necessity of engaging with changes to these affordances: a consequential data moment for digital STS. The tools that controversy mappers have developed over the past 20 years have focused predominantly on the construction and curation of issue-specific datasets. This is partly justified in the theoretical positions underpinning actor-network theoretical controversy analysis, but it is also technically more convenient than demo- or geographical delimitations. Through the example of mapping the Danish HPV debate, we demonstrate the necessity of being able to challenge the issue-specific approach, and we show how this involves direct engagement with the API. We thus provide an inside perspective from a research practice that relies heavily on data from digital platforms and discuss how the closure of public access to API endpoints severely limits this kind of critical engagement.
Most studies analyzing political traffic on Social Networks focus on a single platform, while campaigns and reactions to political events produce interactions across different social media. Ignoring such cross-platform traffic may lead to analytical errors, missing important interactions across social media that e.g. explain the cause of trending or viral discussions. This work links Twitter and YouTube social networks using cross-postings of video URLs on Twitter to discover the main tendencies and preferences of the electorate, distinguish users and communities’ favouritism towards an ideology or candidate, study the sentiment towards candidates and political events, and measure political homophily. This study shows that Twitter communities correlate with YouTube comment communities: that is, Twitter users belonging to the same community in the Retweet graph tend to post YouTube video links with comments from YouTube users belonging to the same community in the YouTube Comment graph. Specifically, we identify Twitter and YouTube communities, we measure their similarity and differences and show the interactions and the correlation between the largest communities on YouTube and Twitter. To achieve that, we have gather a dataset of approximately 20M tweets and the comments of 29K YouTube videos; we present the volume, the sentiment, and the communities formed in YouTube and Twitter graphs, and publish a representative sample of the dataset, as allowed by the corresponding Twitter policy restrictions.
Este artículo revisa las principales aportaciones de la perspectiva tecnosocial feminista frente a la violencia sexual y de género en entornos digitales (a lo que denominamos “misoginia online”). Para ello se realiza una revisión de las contribuciones producidas en el ámbito de las ciencias sociales, referidas a la misoginia onlineoccidental, principalmente las publicadas en lengua inglesa y española,con el fin de ofrecer una panorámica de las posturas actuales y sus estudios más representativos. Además, ponemos especial atención en el modo que la perspectiva tecnosocial feminista y su concepto de “disposición tecnosexual” (affordance tecnosexual) encuentran correspondencia con el análisis crítico de los entornos digitales. Ilustramos esta relación con ejemplos que muestran cómo el diseño de estos entornos puede predisponer a reificar determinadas relaciones de género y poder, entendidascomo parte de un contexto más amplio de discriminación estructural y sistemática contra las mujeres.
This study aims to discover how Gen Z discusses the COVID-19 vaccine through social media discussion, participation, and ideas in a virtual public space. Recently, online media coverage has been massive, especially regarding the COVID-19 vaccine produced in Indonesia or purchased by the Indonesian government from foreign countries. Another thing that was also discussed was the priority of the vaccine recipients, which ministers in Indonesia presented with different approaches. Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture, Muhadjir Effendy, emphasized that lecturers and teachers are prioritized to receive vaccines. Previously, the coordinating minister for the Economy, Airlangga Hartarto, said medical personnel was prioritized. The Chief Executive of COVID-19 Handling and National Economic Recovery Committee (KPCPEN), Erick Thohir, also stated that health workers were a priority. Meanwhile, the Minister of Health, Terawan, noted that the priority for vaccine recipients is medic, paramedic, public services, TNI/Polri, and all educators. This variety of information and news is understood differently by the Indonesian people, including among Gen Z. Using the virtual public sphere, where freedom of expression in a democratic manner is the key to the emancipatory communication process. This research method uses extensive data analysis to collect conversations about the COVID-19 vaccine on social media, especially on Twitter, from 1-31 March 2021. The results show that although Generation Z is actively involved in the COVID-19 Vaccine discussion, they are not The Prominent Key Opinion Leader (KOL), who is the key player in communicating this issue via Twitter.
Background : Over 450 million people worldwide have a rare disease. Yet despite healthcare policy rhetoric placing an onus on inclusive public engagement, rare disease publics are often engaged as data sources or product/service consumers. Meanwhile, various rare disease actors congregate around ‘Rare Disease Day’ each year – a global event with various online and offline talks, workshops, and sessions. In 2021, ~4.3 million tweets marked Twitter as a locus of exchange for the event.
Methods : To examine public discourse around the event, the paper draws on social network and qualitative analyses of 40,366 Twitter tweets/retweets about rare disease day 2021 posted between 10-Feb-2021 and 10-Mar-2021, analysing them through a controversy theory lens. After identifying particularly influential Twitter users and groups, the paper examines their textual and visual communication strategies.
Results : It funds three distinct orientations to rare disease discourse on Twitter (mission, awareness, and actor). In doing so, the paper locates a gap in direct engagement between medical authority and patients.
Conclusions : It suggests that each orientation towards the discourse around rare disease day 2021 might be used by policymakers and researchers to engage with rare disease publics on social media in a more inclusive way as a pathway to better healthcare provision.
Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe is a seminal guide to mapping social and political issues with digital methods. The issue at stake concerns the imminent crisis of an ageing Europe and its impact on the contemporary welfare state. The book brings together three leading approaches to issue mapping: Bruno Latour's social cartography, Ulrich Beck's risk cartography and Jeremy Crampton's critical neo-cartography. These modes of inquiry are put into practice with digital methods for mapping the ageing agenda, including debates surrounding so-called 'old age', cultural philosophies of ageing, itinerant care workers, not to mention European anti-ageing cuisine. Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe addresses an urgent social issue with new media research tools.
This article considers how the social-news and community site Reddit.com has become a hub for anti-feminist activism. Examining two recent cases of what are defined as “toxic technocultures” (#Gamergate and The Fappening), this work describes how Reddit’s design, algorithm, and platform politics implicitly support these kinds of cultures. In particular, this piece focuses on the ways in which Reddit’s karma point system, aggregation of material across subreddits, ease of subreddit and user account creation, governance structure, and policies around offensive content serve to provide fertile ground for anti-feminist and misogynistic activism. The ways in which these events and communities reflect certain problematic aspects of geek masculinity are also considered. This research is informed by the results of a long-term participant-observation and ethnographic study into Reddit’s culture and community and is grounded in actor-network theory.
This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approach developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. We propose that this approach can help to address an important methodological problem in social media research, namely, the tension between social media as resource for social research and as an empirical object in its own right. Initially developed for analyzing interactions between science, technology, and society, controversy analysis has in recent decades been implemented digitally to study public debates and issues dynamics online. A key feature of controversy analysis as a digital method, we argue, is that it enables a symmetrical approach to the study of media-technological dynamics and issue dynamics. It allows us to pay equal attention to the ways in which a digital platform like Twitter mediates public issues, and to how controversies mediate “social media” as an object of public attention. To sketch the contours of such a symmetrical approach, the article discusses examples from a recent social media research project in which we mapped issues of “privacy” and “surveillance” in the wake of the National Security Agency (NSA) data leak by Edward Snowden in June 2013. Through a discussion of social media research practice, we then outline a symmetrical approach to analyzing controversy with social media. We conclude that the digital implementation of such an approach requires further exchanges between social media researchers and controversy analysts.
Algorithms (particularly those embedded in search engines, social media platforms, recommendation systems, and information databases) play an increasingly important role in selecting what information is considered most relevant to us, a crucial feature of our participation in public life. As we have embraced computational tools as our primary media of expression, we are subjecting human discourse and knowledge to the procedural logics that undergird computation. What we need is an interrogation of algorithms as a key feature of our information ecosystem, and of the cultural forms emerging in their shadows, with a close attention to where and in what ways the introduction of algorithms into human knowledge practices may have political ramifications. This essay is a conceptual map to do just that. It proposes a sociological analysis that does not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements, but suggests how to unpack the warm human and institutional choices that lie behind them, to see how algorithms are called into being by, enlisted as part of, and negotiated around collective efforts to know and be known.
People create, consume, and share content online in increasingly complex ways, often including multiple news, entertainment, and social media platforms. This article explores methods for tracing political media content across overlapping communication infrastructures. Using the 2011 Occupy Movement protests and 2013 consumer boycotts as cases, we illustrate methods for creating integrated datasets of political event-related social media content by (1) using fixed URLs to link posts across platforms (URL-based integration) and (2) using semiautomated text clustering to identify similar posts across social networking services (thematic integration). These approaches help to reveal biases in the way that we characterize political communication practices that may occur when we focus on a single platform in isolation.
This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital
method, in the study of science, technology and society (STS) and beyond, and
outlines a distinctive approach to addressing a key challenge: the problem of digital
bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of
controversy in online settings, and this risks to undermine the substantive focus of
controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a
shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The paper begins
by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the
development of controversy analysis as a digital method: demarcationist, discursive
and empiricist. While each of these frameworks has been adopted in STS, I argue that
the last one offers the best opportunities to further develop its distinctive approach to
controversy analysis and address the problem of digital bias: this last framework
allows us to digitally implement the “move beyond impartiality” in the study of
knowledge, technology and society. To clarify how, I distinguish between two
opposing solutions to the problem of digital bias in controversy analysis: a
precautionary approach that seeks to render controversy independent from digital
platforms, and an affirmative approach, which deploys specifically digital formats
such as hyperlinks and hashtags to map controversies. Endorsing the latter approach, I
argue that it needs to be developed further in order to secure the substantive focus of
digital controversy analysis. We must broaden the scope of digital controversy
analysis and examine not just controversies, but a broader range of issue formations,
including public relations campaigns and activist mobilizations. I explore the practical
implementation of this approach by discussing a pilot study in which we analyzed
issues of Internet governance with the social media platform Twitter.
This paper presents findings from a study of Instagram use and funerary practices that analysed photographs shared on public profiles tagged with ‘#funeral’. We found that the majority of images uploaded with the hashtag #funeral often communicated a person's emotional circumstances and affective context, and allowed them to reposition their funeral experience amongst wider networks of acquaintances, friends, and family. We argue that photo-sharing through Instagram echoes broader shifts in commemorative and memorialization practices, moving away from formal and institutionalized rituals to informal and personalized, vernacular practices. Finally, we consider how Instagram's ‘platform vernacular’ unfolds in relation to traditions and contexts of death, mourning, and memorialization. This research contributes to a broader understanding of how platform vernaculars are shaped through the logics of architecture and use. This research also directly contributes to the understanding of death and digital media by examining how social media is being mobilized in relation to death, the differences that different media platforms make, and the ways social media are increasingly entwined with the places, events, and rituals of mourning.
With the description of the 2012 election as the ‘most tweeted’ political event in US history in mind, considering the relative media invisibility of the so-called ‘third-party’ presidential candidates in the US election process, and utilizing the understanding of retweeting as conversational practice, the purpose of this paper is to examine the use of Twitter by the four main ‘third-party’ US presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election in order to better understand (1) the volume of tweets produced by the candidates; (2) the level of interaction by followers in the form of retweeting candidate/party tweets; and, (3), the subject and content of the tweets most retweeted by followers of the respective parties. The ultimate goal of the paper is to generate a broader picture of how Twitter was utilized by minority party candidates, as well as identifying the issues which led followers (and their respective followers) to engage in the ‘conversational’ act of retweeting.
In a previous article in this journal, I introduced Bruno Latour's cartography of controversies and I discussed half of it, namely how to observe techno-scientific controversies. In this article I will concentrate on the remaining half: how to represent the complexity of social debates in a legible form. In my previous paper, we learnt how to explore the richness of collective existence through Actor-Network Theory. In this one, I will discuss how to render such complexity through an original visualization device: the controversy-website. Capitalizing on the potential of digital technologies, the controversy-website has been developed as a multilayered toolkit to trace and aggregate information on public debates.
New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here "landscapes" a debate by displaying key "webby" relationships between organizations. "Debate-scaping" plots two organizational positionings—the organizations' inter-hyperlinking as well as their discursive affinities. The underlying claim is that hyperlinking and discursive maps provide a semblance of given socio-epistemic networks on the web. The climate change debate on the web in November 1998 serves as a test case. Three findings are reported. First, distinctive .com, .gov and .org linking styles were found. Second, organizations take care in making hyperlinks, leading to the premise that the hyperlinks (and the "missing links") reveal which issue and debate framings organizations acknowledge, and find acceptable and unacceptable. Finally, it was learned that organizations take substantive positions and address other organizations' positions. Thus, we found the makings of a "debate" that may be mapped. Scenarios of use to support new public participation techniques and experiments are discussed by way of conclusion.
Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about "technical democracy." They show how "hybrid forums"—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded.The authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom. They discuss the implications for political decision making in general, and they describe a "dialogic" democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.
Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.
Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about "technical democracy." They show how "hybrid forums"—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded. The authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom. They discuss the implications for political decision making in general, and they describe a "dialogic" democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.
This paper describes Netvizz, a data collection and extraction application that allows researchers to export data in standard file formats from different sections of the Facebook social networking service. Friendship networks, groups, and pages can thus be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with regards to demographical, post-demographical, and relational characteristics. The paper provides an overview over analytical directions opened up by the data made available, discusses platform specific aspects of data extraction via the official Application Programming Interface, and briefly engages the difficult ethical considerations attached to this type of research.
Public Culture 14.1 (2002) 49-90
This essay has a public. If you are reading (or hearing) this, you are part of its public. So first let me say: Welcome. Of course, you might stop reading (or leave the room), and someone else might start (or enter). Would the public of this essay therefore be different? Would it ever be possible to know anything about the public to which, I hope, you still belong?
What is a public? It is a curiously obscure question, considering that few things have been more important in the development of modernity. Publics have become an essential fact of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are. Several senses of the noun public tend to be intermixed in usage. People do not always distinguish between the public and a public, although in some contexts this difference can matter a great deal.
The public is a kind of social totality. Its most common sense is that of the people in general. It might be the people organized as the nation, the commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community. It might be very general, as in Christendom or humanity. But in each case the public, as a people, is thought to include everyone within the field in question. This sense of totality is brought out in speaking of the public, even though to speak of a national public implies that others exist; there must be as many publics as polities, but whenever one is addressed as the public, the others are assumed not to matter.
A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is. A crowd at a sports event, a concert, or a riot might be a bit blurrier around the edges, but still knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action.
I will return to both of these senses, but what I mainly want to clarify in this essay is a third sense of public: the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation -- like the public of this essay. (Nice to have you with us, still.) The distinctions among these three senses are not always sharp and are not simply the difference between oral and written contexts. When an essay is read aloud as a lecture at a university, for example, the concrete audience of hearers understands itself as standing in for a more indefinite audience of readers. And often, when a form of discourse is not addressing an institutional or subcultural audience, such as members of a profession, its audience can understand itself not just as a public but as the public. In such cases, different senses of audience and circulation are in play at once. Examples like this suggest that it is worth understanding the distinctions better, if only because the transpositions among them can have important social effects.
The idea of a public, as distinct from both the public and any bounded audience, has become part of the common repertoire of modern culture. Everyone intuitively understands how it works. On reflection, however, its rules can seem rather odd. I would like to bring some of our intuitive understanding into the open in order to speculate about the history of the form and the role it plays in constructing our social world.
1. A public is self-organized.
A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed.
A kind of chicken-and-egg circularity confronts us in the idea of a public. Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how...
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