Posts tagged Twitter

New book: Tweets and the Streets - Social Media and Contemporary Activism

Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the “indignados” protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest.

Author: Paolo Gerbaudo, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.

Publisher: Pluto Press.

Read more about this book: http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745332482

MORE - Gerbaudo argues that activists’ use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a “cyberspace” detached from physical reality. Instead, social media are used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space and are turned by protest organises into means to ‘choreograph’ the assembling of individualised constituencies around “occupied” places such as Cairo’s Tahrir Square or New York’s Zuccotti Park. An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which social media brings to the contemporary protest experience.

CFP: Too many tweets make a twat - Twitter and Microblogging (UK, Apr ‘12)

This conference brings together a range of researchers doing detailed analyses of the discourse, practices, and social interactions of microblogging communities.

Twitter and Microblogging: Political, Professional and Personal Practices. Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom, April 10-12, 2013.

Full call for papers, due December 10, 2012.

Aca-article: Researching News Discussion on Twitter - New Methodologies

This paper outlines innovative approaches for large-scale quantitative research into how Twitter is used to discuss and cover the news, focussing especially on #hashtags.

Authors: Axel Bruns & Jean Burgess, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Article published in Journalism Studies.

Open access: http://bit.ly/HzQP3m

Abstract
Twitter has become a major instrument for the rapid dissemination and subsequent debate of news stories, and comprehensive methodologies for systematic research into news discussion on Twitter are beginning to emerge. This paper outlines innovative approaches for large-scale quantitative research into how Twitter is used to discuss and cover the news, focussing especially on #hashtags: brief identifiers which mark a tweet as taking part in an established discussion.

CFP: Convergence, Engagement and Power - Digital convergence and the challenge to global hegemony (Leeds, May, ‘12)

The innovation of technologies like Facebook, Twitter and blogs originates in a global hegemonic system which retains their ultimate ownership in and through existing mass media and telecommunications conglomerates. How do people, through their engagement with this technological and cultural convergence, really influence or alter political, corporate, and social power structures?

Abstracts due Feb 28, 2012.

Convergence, Engagement and Power: Digital convergence and the challenge to global hegemony. 24-25 May 2012. The 6th Annual PhD Conference at the Institute of Communication Studies University of Leeds.

From Iran to China, Cairo to Oakland, Chechnya to Tunisia, emergent technologies are playing critical roles in the emergence, sustenance, and viability of populist upheavals against autocratic and despotic authorities and institutions. Empowered by the prosthetics of advanced technical devices, the other ‘99%’ appear to have broken the monopolistic access to creating and disseminating information, ideas and political expression. As such, the authority, legitimacy, and hegemony of traditional elites seem to be challenged.

Focusing on the role of technology, these events are visibly mediated by popular social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. These incredibly popular new forms of social media permeate every aspect of everyday life, revivifying the possibility of a more democratic discourse. At the same time, the innovation of these technologies originates in a global hegemonic system which retains their ultimate ownership in and through existing mass media and telecommunications conglomerates. Amidst this hybridity, there is a multifaceted and multi-layered convergence which is influencing the ways old and new media are produced. This begs the question of how, and to what extent, people, through their engagement with this technological and cultural convergence, are really influencing or altering political, corporate, and social power structures. Optimistic expectations and pessimistic disdain are polarizing the debate. Hence, this conference poses the question; to what extent are engagements with convergent media challenging or influencing hegemonies in the digital age?

In the light of these technological, cultural, social and political events, we invite research students from any related discipline to submit their papers to the 6th Annual PhD Conference at the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. This international conference aims at fostering debate among graduate students, along with keynote addresses and practical workshops.

Submissions related (but not limited) to the following questions are warmly welcomed:

• To what extent has media convergence changed the concept or perception of political and/or economic power?
• Who now holds power?
• To what extent is information or knowledge power?
• In what ways are social structures changing?
• Is technological change facilitating social change?
• How are the current dimensions of power organised: horizontal, vertical, or rhizomatic?
• Other dimensions of power?
• Is there a relationship between convergence and culture?
• How does convergence relate to cultural identity?
• Will the next war be cultural?
• Is convergence ethnocentric/anthropocentric? Is it creating a new unseen digital divide?
• How does media convergence affect power structures?
• Bottom up versus top down: is a reassessment needed?
• When convergence occurs, who balances power?
• Has the power balance between human and technology changed?
• Who owns - or who should own - symbolic texts in new media?

Please email a 300 word abstract plus institutional affiliation and short bio to the following email address by February 28, 2011 (earlier submissions welcome!) ics-pg-conference@leeds.ac.uk

Abstracts and papers are submitted to peer-review.

Important Dates:

Abstracts Submission
28/02/2012

Author Notification of Abstracts accepted
31/03/2012

Conference Date
24-25/05/2011

Aca-article: From Hemingway to Twitterature - The Short and Shorter of It

With every status update and tweet, the millions of individuals on social-networking sites are more than staying connected - they are reading, writing, editing, distilling, and interpreting the written word more than any generation in history. In doing so, they are helping develop Fiction 2.0: a fascinating marriage of character-count restrictions and the network effect that has created a new category of short-form content and narrative experimentation. This paper explores five of these new fiction prototypes - twitterature, nanofiction, crowd-sourced narratives, infographics, and $0.00 stories - in order to better understand how the e-age will cross-pollinate foreign concepts like “install-base” with familiar ones like “readership.”

By: Michael Rudin, Published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Access the article here, open access.

Michael Rudin (@mikerudin on Twitter) is the Founder of Armed Mind, an advertising consultancy specializing in product narratives. A Hopwood Award winner, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Nanoism, The Collagist, as well as the non-profit organization Fiction Writers Review, where he lends a hand directing marketing and development.