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.
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.
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.
leftover words 