ECREA16-Abstract

217

Thursday, November 10

1 6 : 3 0 – 1 8 : 0 0

PP 269

Few-To-Many Communication. Public Figures’ Self-Promotion on Twitter Through “Joint Performances” in Small Networked

Constellations

P. Berglez

Jönköping University, HLK, Jönköping, Sweden

RELEVANCE & RESEARCH QUESTIONS: Twitter is often associated with digital citizenship and democratic communication, enabling “anyone to chat with

anyone”(many-to-many). Simultaneously, research is pointing at a gap between elite users and“ordinary users”with the latter becoming passive audiences

of the first. Despite the awareness about the hierarchal nature or Twitter, there is need for detailed analyses of elite power and elite visibility. Not least, it

is necessary to pay attention to how users with high status “collaborate” in their efforts to “win the audience” (Castells 2007: 241). Thus, the purpose is to

explore how members of a Twitter elite interact and perform together “before” their manifold followers/audiences, as if from a raised platform. The study

seeks to answer the following: RQ 1: What different types of“joint performances”are possible to identify and more precisely what does the interaction look

like, discursively speaking? RQ2: How could this elite “collaborative”way of establishing mass communication on Twitter be conceptualized? One-to-many

is restricted to individual performance, but is it possible to formulate an equivalent concept that instead covers “joint performances”? METHODS & DATA:

A qualitative discourse analysis of Twitter activities among six Swedish public figures who are nationally acknowledged politicians, journalists and PR

consultants. The empirical material, which was collected in February and September 2014, consists of in total 1689 items (tweets and retweets) in which

a selection has been used for the qualitative analysis (primarily tweets while the retweets have served as contextual material). RESULTS: The identification

of three discourse types; expert sessions; professional “backstage” chatting and exclusive lifestreaming. Altogether, they demonstrate how a Twitter elite

“socialize” on Twitter in a top-down manner. ADDED VALUE: Qualitative knowledge about barriers to democratic interaction on Twitter. The formulation

of a concept that complements the widely used concept of one-to-many. It is suggested that the identified“elite collaborative”tweeting represents another

form of mass communication, namely few-to-many. METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGE/PROBLEM: What happens when transferring discourse analytical tools,

originally intended for studies of traditional media, toTwitter?

KEYWORDS:Twitter,

politicians, journalists, PR consultants, mass communication, audiences,

few-to-many communication, elite, performance, digital citizenship.

PP 270

Facebook’s Global Imaginary: The Symbolic Production of the World Through Social Media

D. Dumitrica

Erasmus University, Media and Communication, Rotterdam, Netherlands

This paper discusses the symbolic production of the ‘global’ through Facebook. Methodologically, the paper rests upon autoethnography and platform

analysis. The critical examination of the researcher's own Facebook News Feed (the autoethnographic dimension) seeks to 'connect the autobiographical

and personal to the cultural, social and political” (Ellis, 2004, p. xix). This examination is supplemented by a reading of the platform’s visual interface in

terms of the categories, options and services advanced by Facebook (e.g. Gillespie, 2010). Both methods are driven by the larger goal of understanding how

the idea of the ‘global world’ is symbolically produced through our use of the platform. The analysis consists of three elements: the intersection between

the user’s socioeconomic position and her Facebook customization choices and use practices; the role of the Facebook NewsFeed algorithm; and the wider

discourses through which Facebook as a company has positioned itself as a global medium. The global imaginary produced through Facebook appears to

users as a celebration of technologically-enabled individual cosmopolitanism. Thus, the user is prompted to interpret the global dimension of her news

feed as an expression of her own cosmopolitan identity and global ties. Yet, this imaginary masks the centrality of socioeconomic class and of commercial

interests in structuring the user's own choices on Facebook. It is argued that the intersection between the user's own position and the algorithm creates

a cosmopolitan privilege: only some types of users are enabled to imagine themselves as 'cosmopolitan subjects'. The production of the global imaginary

through Facebook valorizes personal choice as the condition for the development of a cosmopolitan subject position, while simultaneously veiling the struc‑

tural constraints shaping these choices in the first place.

PP 271

Selfie Stories in Time: Connecting Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Image-Based Personal Narratives

A. Roig Telo

, G. San Cornelio

, E. Ardèvol

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Information and Communication Science Department, Barcelona, Spain

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Arts and Humanities Department, Barcelona, Spain

This presentation is a part of an ongoing research project entitled 'Selfiestories and personal data" funded by the BBVA (Spain). This two-year research

project approaches the phenomenon of the selfie as performed and part of a personal or collective narrative (Vivien and Burgess, 2013), present in social

media platforms like Instagram or Twitter. Methodologically, we do so through a double perspective: on the one side, qualitative fieldwork oriented to

specific forms of personal narratives and, on the other side, through the analysis of vast datasets coming from personal narratives related to collective

time-set experiences, using Big Data techniques. For this purpose, we are developing a data extractor based on instagram to test how these narratives can

be analyzed from this complementary perspective. Considering selfies beyond image and representation (Gómez and Thornham, 2015) and highlighting

here the social and conversational aspects of the phenomenon, in our empirical work we will focus on the contextual information. In this regard, location,

description (through plain text or hashtags, but also mentions, timeframe, its connection to a user stream or feed (Fallon, 2014), and the relation to other

narratives become essential.This perspective is essentially different to other attempts to approach the notion of the selfie through Big Data image analysis

(Manovich’s Selfie City being the prime example). In order to conduct a parallel research, both from qualitative and quantitative approaches, timeframes

constitute a common element which can allow an interrelated and enriched set of data when applied to specific case studies. In our presentation we will

draw an initial distinction of different forms of personal narratives and its relation to specific timeframes and experiences. Based on our preliminary work,

we will suggest a consideration of different kinds of image-based shared personal narratives: some more tied to the time of the everyday - like those con‑