IR13 Saturday highlights: Jedward, Peppa Pig, Occupy, Occupy, more Occupy, Twitter, Twitter, and more Twitter
October 22, 2012 § Leave a Comment
(Kitten gifs are allowed for blog posts on Internet studies conferences. Because kittens.)
On Saturday there were four sessions, each of which had up to four papers in them. Even though I skipped the third session to drink coffee and debrief, it was a lot to digest. Happily there was a good mix of papers relevant to my research and papers not-at-all-relevant but interesting enough to help me push through the exhaustion. (My apologies to any presenters who were unnerved by my glazed appearance in your session. It’s not you, it’s jetlag!)
There were quite a few papers looking at various aspects of Occupy, many of them doing large-scale Twitter analysis. Zizi Papacharissi elaborated on her plenary, talking about the rhythms of Occupy: broadcasting and listening practices on #ows. She spoke briefly about the affect of the Twitter stream, which is an idea that makes sense to me on an intuitive level: if I understand it correctly, this is the idea that the stream itself (rather than individual tweets or accounts) has a certain texture and rhythm. This is something I’ve had a sense of when following or participating in high-volume Twitter streams; analysing it seems tricky, but focusing on the emergence of tagging networks and other emerging structures seems to yield some useful results. For example, the Occupy movement’s openness seems to mean that #ows tags are often associated with those of more right-wing movements, particularly the Tea Party.
There were also quite a few papers on Occupy from the Washington University Social Media Lab (and, having a quick look around their site, it looks like they’re doing a heap of stuff I want to look into further). A couple of papers used Gnip Powertrack and Radian6 to analyse content from Twitter and/or YouTube, showing that much of the content shared around Occupy is from professional sources (although there’s more movement-produced material than for other movements, like the campaign around Proposition 8 in California). The presenters emphasises the importance of the surrounding environment in shaping media use: the context shaping Prop 8 (in 2008) is very different from that around Occupy. (A number of the talks at IR13 made this point, which I think is an important one: protest ecologies matter.) There was also some useful discussion of the ways in which protesters use hashtags to sort through the vast volume of material associated with #ows.
The final session for the day included another WU SoMe Occupy paper: Kevin Driscoll‘s work on how activists understand and make choices around different platforms. Some of his findings were quite different from what we’ve found (which is not surprising given the diversity of the Occupy movement) so I’m looking forward to looking into this more. And just in case that isn’t enough Occupy, I’m hoping to find some of the Occupy papers that I ended up missing because of clashes, including #Occupy the City (another paper out of the UW SoMe Lab) and The Occupy Movement Online: Same Label, Different Projects, from Tomi Oladepo and Dennis Nguyen. The latter is one of the few papers that looked at the Occupy movement beyond the West.
This paper actually made me regret not watching Eurovision this year
The next session I went to looked at ‘fans and Twitter’. While it’s great seeing what other researchers who are in my area (more or less) are doing, I like interspersing these with talks where I’m learning something entirely new, or making new connections. I particularly enjoyed Rachel Magee et al’s paper on fans’ Twitter use around The Hunger Games, and #Eurovision: Twitter as a Technology of Fandom, from Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and my colleague Tim Highfield.
There are some useful parallels between studying fan cultures and social movements which I’m beginning to consider. In both cases, there’s a significant difference in the framework of the research between those working inside communities and those looking in from the outside. I’m curious to see whether there’s much writing looking more directly at this connection and the ways in which fan studies and social movement research might interact. There are also issues of ethics and representation: Rachel Magee anonymised all data as part of the university ethics requirement, which meant that she was not able to quote any tweets directly or even mention the characters which participants were acting as on Twitter, which is in sharp contrast to the approach I’ve taken.
Peppa Pig is the future
The final session included a couple of papers that relate to my work on the digital liberties movement: Mauger‘s on the Pirate Bay in Denmark and Burcu Bakioglu‘s on Anonymous’s war on the anti-piracy campaigners. Tama Leaver also gave a talk on global media distribution and the tyranny of digital distance which expanded on his pre-conference presentation. I learned less about Peppa Pig than I was hoping to, but the argument was interesting enough to overcome this gap in the literature.
One of the benefits/downsides of the very lively #IR13 Twitter backchannel is that the already-difficult choice between sessions is made harder by people tweeting about excellent talks happening at the same time as the excellent talk you’re attending. Among the many other gems that I’m sure future browsing through the program will turn, I missed Joseph Reagle’s Infocide in Open Content Communities, what seems to have been an important roundtable on the politics of algorithms, Holly Kruse’s paper on pneumatic tubes (there seems to be more about this here), and Helen Keegan‘s This is Not a Module: Learning Through an Alternative Reality Game, Running the game seems to have been a nerve-wracking experience (since it involved elaborate pranking), but ultimately awesome. I can only hope to give students such an interesting experience.
IR13 Friday Session: Protest and Online Activism
October 21, 2012 § Leave a Comment
There have been more talks here on activism than it’s been physically possible for me to attend without splitting into two. Friday afternoon’s session on protest and online activism began with a look at ‘Protest and Internet humour memes in UK universities’ from Gordon Fletcher, which was pleasantly LOL-heavy (even if I was missing the appropriate background for many of them). Fletcher argues that while this is politics of a sort (“politics, but not as we know it”), it’s not necessarily particularly effective politics: it’s not going to start any revolutions.
Next Dan Mercea (co-authoring with Paul Nixon) looked at the use of Twitter and Facebook in attempts to recruit participants to the Occupy movement in the Netherlands. Whereas most participants in our research on Occupy Oakland saw Twitter as the primary online platform for communicating about the movement (even if this was often problematic), participants in Netherlands Occupy sites relied far more on Facebook. Mercea and Nixon also found that both Facebook and Twitter played a role in helping participants to initially learn about the Occupy movement, but wasn’t actively used to try to recruit participants. Participants’ use of both Facebook and Twitter also tended to taper off over time, and lost importance as a source of information or engagement with Occupy.
GWEI’s site is eye-bleedingly bright, and the background flashes constantly. You have been warned.
The talks which followed were a little less relevant to my own research (and, sadly, my note-taking seems to drop off significantly towards the end of the day, especially at conferences that involve international travel): Constance Elizabeth Kampf looked at ‘The past, present and future of online activism towards business’, drawing on some great case studies. I particularly liked the Google Will Eat Itself project, which claims it will use revenue generated from Google ads to buy Google shares, and eventually turn Google into a public trust. (GWEI currently owns 819 shares, totalling USD 405.413,19, meaning it will be 202.345.117 years until GWEI fully owns Google.) Zeena Feldman‘s ‘Beyond freedom and oppression’ looked at practices of resistance to the commodification of the Couchsurfing website, as users tried to continue their engagement without fully capitulating to the site’s shift to for-profit status.
IR13 Plenaries: identity, humanity, affective news, and the department of shameless studies
October 19, 2012 § 2 Comments
Upcoming: #oo activism
September 13, 2012 § 3 Comments
In October, Dr. Tim Highfield and I will be presenting some of our Occupy Oakland research at the Internet Research 13.0 Conference. We’ve started putting together the paper over the last few weeks (which means that my Tumblr is currently full of useful quotations I’ve found along the way), and have been enjoying the process tremendously. In coming weeks I’ll be sending drafts to interviewees who said they were interested in seeing the project develop to get their feedback, and hopefully within a few months Tim and I will have the full article to share. The abstract for the presentation (co-written with Tim) is here:
#oo activism: Uses of Twitter within the Occupy Oakland movement
Social media have become crucial tools for political activists and protest movements, providing another channel for promoting messages and garnering support. Twitter, in particular, has been identified as a noteworthy medium for protests in countries including Iran and Egypt to receive global attention (Gaffney, 2010; Lotan, Ananny, Gaffney, & boyd, 2011). The Occupy movement, originating with protests in, and the physical occupation of, Wall Street and inspiring similar demonstrations in other U.S. cities and around the world, has been intrinsically linked with social media through location-specific hashtags: #ows for Occupy Wall Street, #occupysf for San Francisco, and so on. While the individual protests have a specific geographical focus – highlighted by the physical occupation of parks, buildings, and other urban areas – Twitter provides a means for these different movements to be linked and promoted through tweets containing multiple hashtags. It also serves as a channel for tactical communications during actions and as a space in which movement debates take place.
In this paper, we undertake a preliminary study of Twitter’s use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We analyse a dataset of public tweets published between 29 January and 15 February 2012 containing the #oo hashtag to identify the ways in which social media are employed within the movement, from promoting events to broadcasting live from marches and meetings. This timeframe is particularly noteworthy because it covers the aftermath of the Move In Day action, an attempt to take over a disused building and turn it into a social centre. The failure of this action in the face of police repression led to intense debate within the movement about strategies and tactics, as well as between participants and observers in Oakland and elsewhere. There were also a number of follow-up actions organised, including solidarity actions for the 409 people arrested at Move In Day. Much of this debate and organising took place on Twitter and was tagged with the #oo hashtag. While this is not the only hashtag used for this specific movement (#occupyoakland is also featured in tweets), #oo’s length makes it a popular choice for protesters faced with only 140 characters with which to write their tweets.
Our analysis of the content of #oo tweets examines how Twitter is used within the movement; as, variably, a means of organisation, communication, broadcasting, or debate, for example. As part of this study, we evaluate how Twitter activity corresponds with events such as rallies, arrests, and meetings, and determine the presence of any sub-groups of Twitter users within the movement focused on particular activities, such as livestreaming and the controversial weekly anti-police rallies. Using methods developed specifically for processing Twitter datasets (Bruns, 2011), we also examine the hashtags, @replies and mentions, and retweets included in the gathered tweets to identify any links with other #occupy movements and movements around the world (including those in Egypt and Syria), and the relationship between Occupy Oakland and local institutions and places. This step allows us to study the connections between a geographically-focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities.
This preliminary study forms part of a wider project exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained. In addition to movement-specific data collected from sites such as Twitter, the project also draws on ethnographic research through interviews with activists, and participant observation of the movements’ activities. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross-checking trends in the online data with observations and activists’ own reported use of Twitter.
References
Bruns, A. (2011). How Long Is a Tweet? Mapping Dynamic Conversation Networks on Twitter Using Gawk and Gephi. Information, Communication & Society, (January 2012), 1-29. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2011.635214
Gaffney, D. (2010). # iranElection : Quantifying Online Activism. Paper presented at WebSci10. 26 April 2010, Raleigh, NC. Retrieved from http://journal.webscience.org/295
Lotan, G., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., & boyd, d. (2011). The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1375-1405.
How to be useful: Twitter activist edition
February 3, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Having talked a bit about my reasons for discomfort with the way we in the West have been following “Twitter revolutions”, I wanted to give a few ideas about how to use Twitter to engage usefully with struggles in other parts of the world. I’ve been thinking about this primarily in regards to the Egyptian protests, but I think most of these suggestions could also be useful if you’re thinking about natural disasters or other international events.
Know your audience
Think about who follows you on Twitter, and the ways in which you might be able to connect with them usefully.
- If you know people who are on the ground during a protest or a dangerous situation, retweeting information about police movements and roadblocks can be useful. If most of your followers live outside the area of unrest, this might not be a particularly effective way of showing support.
- If most of your Twitter followers are likely to already agree with your perspective, think about giving them ways to turn their ideas into action. This might mean sharing information about which ministers to lobby (boomerang politics is one way to try to pressure other governments into changing their policies), organisations to donate to, upcoming vigils or protests, or providing meaningful support in other ways.
- If most of your Twitter followers are unlikely to have heard about what’s happening, or have a perspective you disagree with, try to pass on information that will engage and convince them. This can be a tricky balancing act, as most people prefer not to feel like they’re being preached to. Humour, personal stories, and good infographics can help.
Be careful what you throw into the stream
Be aware that people in the midst of the situation may be relying on a hashtag for up-to-date information.
- Be cautious and critical about what you retweet. During the 2009 protests in Iran, there’s some evidence that the government and/or government sympathisers were using Twitter to send out false information (cf. this list on Twitspam and Morris’ brief post on Twitter psyops). As well as actively malicious information, rumours can be passed quickly on Twitter: try to confirm stories before you pass them on, particularly if they may have important consequences.
- If you can, try to work out who is using relevant hashtags and for what. If activists have asked that you keep a certain hashtag clear for on-the-ground information, respect their request.
Don’t compromise activists’ safety
Twitter has shown a commendable willingness to support activists, delaying maintenance during the 2009 Iranian protests and refusing to hand over information on its users during the US government investigation of Wikileaks. However, there are still ways in which Twitter can be a threat to activists’ safety.
- If you know Twitter activists’ real names, Facebook accounts, or other details, don’t use them. (You knew this already, though, right?)
- Be careful what you share: during the Iranian protests, sharing proxy IP addresses for protesters’ use meant the security forces could find them and shut them down.
Do you have more ideas? Feel free to share them in the comments. There are lots of people out there who are looking for ways to help, they just need to know how.
