NPCU PhDs presenting at iCS Conference, Leeds on 24 May

NPCU PhD students Billur Aslan and James Dennis will present at the 6th Annual PhD Conference at the Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, on 24 May. The iCS conference has quickly established a good reputation and features keynotes this year from Natalie Fenton from Goldsmiths and Stephen Coleman, on his home turf. Details of papers below.

Billur Aslan

The Power of The Internet in the Rising Protests: The Case of the Iranian Green Movement

This research aims to illuminate and evaluate assumptions about the political impacts of the Internet by taking into account the relation of online social networks and political protests. For evaluating the influence of those novel technologies, this research offers two case studies from Iran, where members of the Green Movement have organised spontaneous protests via social networks. Although in the first case study, the movement members succeeded in overcoming state barriers and spreading their movement via social networks, in the latter these social networks did not succeed in resisting state restriction. By exploring the filtrations and censorship attempts of the Iranian government, this research draws attention to the novel capacities of governments in their attempts to restrict the media. These Iran cases show that despite the existence of social networks, the Internet alone cannot bring liberty. On the contrary, governments can utilise it for monitoring their citizens or for spreading their manufactured ‘facts’. Thereby, although the current protests in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya have fortified the power of social networks on protests, claims about their transformative effects require careful and comparative scrutiny. In order to understand the real impact of the Internet, today, one should analyse diverse factors that affect the outcomes of the movements. For this reason, alongside its cases studies, this research revises the theories of social movement scholars. It offers a theoretical framework to help explain the elements that affect the emergence, mobilisation and outcome of collective actions with a particular focus on how the Internet influences these processes.

James Dennis

“It’s Better to Light a Candle Than to Fantasise About a Sun”: Exploring Slacktivism and the Utopian / Dystopian Divide 2.0

This paper offers a critique of the artificial utopian / dystopian dichotomy that has re-emerged within academic literature examining the effect of social-networking sites on political engagement, and sets out an alternative approach aiming to capture the nuance of mediated citizenship at varying scales. The prevalence of unsubstantiated generalisations, anecdotal case studies, and a lack of empirical testing is exemplified through the scholarly debate surrounding ‘Slacktivism’; that low-threshold forms of political engagement online are inauthentic, narcissistically motivated, and a distraction replacing more meaningful forms of offline mobilisation (The Substitution Thesis).

This paper proposes a number of deficiencies within this approach. Firstly, the problematic emphasis on the medium itself leads to an arbitrary distinction between online and offline, and subsequently lacks appreciation for the complexity of engagement repertoires and organisational structures. Secondly, conceptual clarity is required in regards to what encompasses participation in relation to social-networking site. Slacktivism offers a narrow perspective of what engagement entails, notably end-product, ‘revolutionary’ activism without an appreciation of the informational and discursive stimulants that form part of this process (Carpentier 2011). The utopian / dystopian dichotomy and Slacktivist approach fundamentally miss the key function of social-networking sites as a commercial and entertainment-based medium, i.e. their role as a facilitator for conversations and networking. Finally, a collection of revisions are proposed to re-frame the Slacktivist critique to construct a viable research agenda aiming to systematically examine the effect of routine social-networking usage on political engagement.

Download now: Semantic Polling: The Ethics of Online Public Opinion

Nick Anstead and Ben O'Loughlin have published LSE Policy Brief 5, 'Semantic Polling: The Ethics of Online Public Opinion'. The authors note the emergence of new forms of public opinion research based upon machine-reading of Twitter and other social media during the 2010 UK General Election. They argue that such research raises new ethical questions about the relation between parties, media and citizens. While a better understanding of what and how the public thinks might seem an intuitively good thing for democracy, it is unclear citizens realise their opinions are being monitored and reported back to them as 'public opinion' through news media coverage of elections. Traditional public opinion is regulated and subject to norms about transparency of data and reliability measures, but if public opinion is increasingly measured by private companies who guard their algorithms as intellectual property, journalists, regulators and citizens themselves have no way to check the results are valid or not simply made up.

These issues are only likely to become pressing as we look ahead to the use of semantic polling in the 2012 US Presidential Election. Anstead and O'Loughlin's paper is based on interviews with party campaign managers, pollsters, election regulators, journalists and social media marketing firms operating in the UK.

Has US political communication risen from the dead?

The 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego this week was a good opportunity to test the state of US political communication. Studies of political communication in previous ISAs have been marked by an obsession with analyzing media content then extrapolating about how politics or IR works. The latest content analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post is presented as if this is a bellweather for public discourse. Comparing US elite press to the Guardian or even Le Monde is seen as a radical step, allowing for claims about “international” public discourse. Heavily conditioned by the quants-orientation of US political science, the focus is on mastering datasets. This will get you into the house journal. Students are encouraged to avoid looking at the effects of political communication – what difference did that elegant sample of New York Times editorials actually make to anything? - because it is “too complex” or involves talking to psychologists or sociologists. Just study texts – don’t talk to producers or consumers of political communication. Aim low, do normal science. Questions of power recede, as does the relevance and vitality of the whole enterprise.

This is a caricature, to an extent. Research in the US on information infrastructure, governance and political economy is lively and gets to the heart of explaining both how communication operates and the structures that condition it. At ISA this year it was encouraging to see the strides being made here. Amelia Arsenault explained how US firms and diplomats have locked-in South Africa’s media-political power relations by supplying both the regulatory model and technology, and created a productive contrast with J.P.Singh’s theorization of power diffusion. Craig Hayden’s work on digital diplomacy is reaching towards an explanation both ecological and historical that gets at motives, institutional pressures, contingency and everything else lying beyond texts.

Nevertheless, the normal science was still there. As one colleague said, now you don’t have to sample the New York Times to be a grown up political scientist; you sample twitter instead. Single-medium studies remain. There was a lot of counting. Nobody dared ask the So What? question. But more importantly, political communication cannot be a normal science today because all of its concepts have been exploded by the transformed media ecology. As my colleague Andrew Hoskins repeated so often at ISA he’s stopped coming, we do not live in the 1970s when there was a discrete set of news outlets and a public consuming them in predictable patterns. That era let us measure ‘exposure’ to media and allowed for simple models of ‘frames’ moving from politician through media to publics and up again. But how can you discern exposure to something environmental? How can you analyse the frames in all the thousands of media sources you consume everyday, how those frames interact, and the compound effect on political understandings? It is a dead end.

Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean of the Anneberg School Pennsylvania, acknowledged this in 2009. He said, ‘we cannot gauge the positive or negative consequences of the new information environment on citizens’ attitudes and actions without first being able to accurately gauge what information (in the broadest sense of the word) people encounter’. And we can’t, even with Big Data tools, because some of this information is offline. Todd Gitlin wrote in 2003, ‘In some ways the very ubiquity of the mass media removes media as a whole system from the scope of positivist social analysis; for how may we “measure” the “impact” of a social force [i.e. mass media] which is omnipresent within social life and which has a great deal to do with constituting it?’

This is why European political communication turned to studies of mediatization and mediality in the 2000s. Mediatization asks how the logics of each medium (re its visuality, temporality, interactivity, controllability) penetrate political institutions and decision-making – indeed it comes from US theories of media logics in the 1970s that were pushed aside. The Scandinavians are good at this. Mediality is the equivalent of IR’s recent practice turn: can we discern the effects of everyday media exchanges and practices – how we use media rather than what is said? The Germans are good at this. And some US political communications experts are revisiting classic theories to see how they operate today: Lance Bennett’s work on the Logic of Connective Action springs to mind. These are more promising avenues since they let us re-conceptualise how media, power and politics work at a time of flux.  

These are broad strokes. Unimaginative content analysis is done in Europe and fascinating work on mediatization and mediality is being done by some US scholars. ISA this year seems to reflect a slight shift to the latter. Hopefully Arsenault, Hayden and Bennett’s work will gain traction and US political communication will rediscover its scope and ambition.  

Ben O'Loughlin, San Diego, 4 April.

Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis, 27 April 2012

The NPCU is supporting the launch of a special conference and networking event on social media analysis entitled Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis on Friday 27 April 2012 in central London. It is designed for everyone interested in the potential of social media data to stimulate data-driven discovery and decision-making in this hyper-connected digital era. 

For a limited time, until Monday 13 April, a special admission price for University affiliates of GBP 37 will be available. Please email lampofo@zero1events.com for the discount code. More information about the event including the programme can be found by visiting www.zero1events.com

The event will feature short, energetic talks from experts from the fields of psychology, political and security intelligence, gamification, big data and brand insight amongst others. 

Distinguished speakers include:

Kevin Anderson – The Guardian, Al-Jazeera

Pippa Norris – Ministry of Defence

Professor Martin Everett – University of Manchester

David Stillwell – University of Cambridge

Nathalie Nihai – The Web Psychologist

Alfred Rolington – Former CEO Jane’s Information Group, Oxford Analytica

Ben O'Loughlin and Nick Anstead - NPCU and LSE

For more information, please visit www.zero1events.com and Twitter @zero1events

Olympics@NPCU - Call for papers

Call for Papers - Olympics and the ‘isms’

Deadline 23 March 2012

Royal Holloway University of London, 20 July 2012

In summer 2012, London will host the XXX Olympic and XIV Paralympic Games.  As part of the Olympic Village, Royal Holloway provides a stimulating environment for a multidisciplinary dialogue that explores the tensions and contradictions within and between modern Olympic ideals and traditional ideologies (‘isms’). By seeking to sustain certain narratives and ideologies that precede the 21st century, the Olympics seemingly stands as an anomaly in our post/alter-modern times.

Following the Olympic idea of combining “a healthy body and a healthy mind”, we would like to invite contributions from athletes and academics to explore and problematise the framing of Olympics in the following binary logics:

  • Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
    • What impact do the Games have on ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘national’ narratives and identities?
  • Commercialism and Idealism
    • How does the commercialisation of the Games bear upon the political and ethical ideals underpinning our conceptions of sport generally and the Olympics in particular?
  • Amateurism and Professionalism
    • Is there a contradiction between the Olympic ideal of athletic amateurism and trends towards professionalism? How does this impact beyond the Games?

These are the ‘isms’ we are interested in, but we welcome additional ideas and contributions.

The morning session will follow a traditional conference format with speakers giving presentations followed by questions. The afternoon will be devoted to an interactive discourse analysis workshop in which we invite all participants to analyse selected Olympic-related texts, PR materials and media coverage. The results of this analysis will contribute towards a paper evaluating the discourse surrounding the Games. This, together with a selection of papers from the morning session, will be put forward for publication in a special issue of a journal.

If you are interested in taking part at this conference, please contact us with a 300 word abstract at olympismconference@gmail.com  by 23rd March 2012.

O’Loughlin at GCHQ - Cyber Security: Lacunae of Strategy

On 31 January 2012 a workshop will be held at King’s College London for GCHQ on the theme, ‘Cyber Security: Lacunae of Strategy’. The UK’s cyber security strategy seems to build upon ideas evident in Foreign Secretary William Hague’s recent speeches. In November 2011 he stated:

Our vision is for the UK in 2015 to derive huge economic and social value from a vibrant, resilient and secure cyberspace, where our actions, guided by our core values of liberty, fairness, transparency and the rule of law, enhance prosperity, national security and a strong society.

(UK Cyber Security Strategy: Protecting and Promoting the UK in a Digital World)

This suggests the trade-offs any national cybersecurity strategy faces, not least how security policy should not impinge upon democracy, liberty or other ‘core values’. Meanwhile there is a lack of conceptual clarity, with cyber war, crime and security often being used interchangeably, and a recurring difficulty among policymakers of how to conceive of ‘cyberspace’ given its social and technical character.

Ben O’Loughlin and Andrew Hoskins will talk about how strategy can be organized and communicated in these conditions, conditions they have theorized as ‘diffused war’. Other speakers include Thomas Rid, Richard Clayton and Tim Jordan.

Strategic Narratives working paper published

The working paper 'Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations' is available to download here. It is authored by Alister Miskimmon, Ben O'Loughlin and Laura Roselle, and is based on the International Studies Association (ISA) South keynote delivered by Miskimmon and O'Loughlin at Elon University, US, in October 2011.

This is a paper aimed at both scholars and policymakers. Comments to the authors are very welcome. They plan to publish the first book on Strategic Narratives in late 2012.

Andrew Chadwick: Newly-Published Article in "Connecting Democracy"

My 2009 journal article, “Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance,” which originally appeared in I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 5 (1), pp. 9-41, has now been reprinted in Stephen Coleman’s and Peter Shane’s excellent new edited volume, Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication (MIT Press). My chapter has been revised very slightly, but it is essentially the same as the 2009 version.

Connecting Democracy is the culmination of a three-year project in which I participated: the International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking. This was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and it was steered superbly by Peter and Stephen through our several meetings—in March 2007 at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, in November 2007 at the University of Leeds, in March 2008 at The Ohio State University, in November 2008 at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., and in April 2009 at Sciences Po in Paris, France.

Links:

MIT site, with more information and sample chapters.

U.S. Amazon.

U.K. Amazon.

The full citation for the reprinted article is: Andrew Chadwick (2012) “Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance” in Coleman, S. and Shane, P (eds) Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 45–75.