(Crossposted from the Polity blog.) Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as …
Continue reading “Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: Debunking the Myths”
Taking a break from all the politics, Brenda Moon and I have examined everything that goes on in the Australian Twittersphere on a given day. We found that older, more sociable uses of Twitter persist in spite of everything. Our article is out now in The Conversation and Nordicom Review. The research was made possible by the TrISMA LIEF project, funded by the …
Continue reading “One Day in the Life of a National Twittersphere”
At Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, where we’re based, we’re currently advertising two new positions relating to our research: a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (two years full-time) and a PhD researcher (including a three-year stipend). Both of these are associated with Axel Bruns’s ARC Future Fellowship project Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian …
Continue reading “Postdoc and PhD Positions Available: Social Media and the Public Sphere”
(by Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns) Difficult as it may be to believe, we’re still almost three months out from the likely date of the next Australian federal election; campaigning during this time will become even more frenzied than it has been to date. A sea of speculation, controversy, and crisis surrounds the polls, and …
I’ve just returned home from the Social Media in Times of Crisis conference at the State Library of Queensland, which we organised together with our ARC Linkage partners at the Eidos Institute, and I’m pleased to report that it was a very stimulating and successful event – at one point, the associated hashtag #SMTC13 even …
Continue reading “Researching Social Media in Times of Crisis”
In previous posts I outlined the details of a preliminary study we conducted on how social media are used as political tools and how this activity is portrayed in traditional media outlets. I provide an overview of the study and insights into the way in which newspaper articles compare and contrast new and traditional media …
In a previous post I introduced work we have been doing here at the CCI to contribute to an understanding of the way in which social media are portrayed as political tools in traditional media outlets. In this post I provided a broad overview of a preliminary qualitative study of 56 articles from Australian newspapers …
Continue reading “Social Media in the Media II: User Groups”
One of the research projects some of us here at the CCI are currently involved in, in cooperation with researchers from California State University, Uppsala University, and the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, aims to apply a cross-media and cross-national approach to exploring The Impact of Social Media on Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns. As part …
Continue reading “Social Media in the Media I: Comparing Social and Traditional Media”
Our research into the use of social media for crisis communication, which produced last year’s report on the use of Twitter during the 2011 Queensland floods and a variety of other outputs (on the Christchurch earthquakes, Hurricane Sandy, and other events), continues at pace, even if there haven’t been a great many updates about it …
Continue reading “Social Media in Times of Crisis 2013: Register Now!”
My recent trip to a number of European conferences and other research events also provided an opportunity to present some of our ongoing work on the use of social media in crisis communication – as our ARC Linkage project with the Queensland Department of Community Safety and the Eidos Institute begins in earnest, this will …
Continue reading “Twitter and Crisis Communication from #qldfloods to #sandy”
