In this paper I use four case studies to illustrate potential uses of Twitter for political activists. The paper was drafted in early 2008 and written in the autumn of the same year. So unfortunately I didn’t address Twitter’s Iran-moment. Still, although some of the examples in the paper may seem dated I hope the lessons drawn from the case studies are still relevant. Judge for yourself.

The paper runs at around 3900 words. If that is a bit daunting have a look at this presentation. This should contain the main idea of the paper. The complete text can be found here.

This paper laid the groundwork for the DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism. It also contains other ideas like the use of Twitter as an information distribution tool or as a communication backchannel which also found their way in other papers.

Andreas Jungherr (2008) ‘Twittering Activists: the Uses of Twitter for Political Activism’. Paper presented at “Social Web: Towards Networked Protest Politics?” Organized by the SFB Changing Protest and Media Cultures SFB/FK 615 Media Upheavals University of Siegen, Germany on 7-8 November.

For a short glance at the argument have a look at the presentation. The full paper can be found here.

Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Digital channels, the change in community structures and its consequences for social participation’. Paper presented at the ISEA 2009: International Symposium for the Electronic Arts, University of Ulster, Belfast, UK on 23 August – 1 September 2009.

In his inaugural lecture “The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods” Richard Rogers who holds the Chair of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam proposes a shift in internet research:

“The issue no longer is how much of society and culture is online, but rather how to diagnose cultural change and societal conditions using the Internet.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 8

For Rogers too much of research focuses on the differences between on- and offline culture. He sees the reason for this in the methods with which researchers from the humanities and the social sciences approach the internet. Rogers’ critiques the use of surveys, interviews and other approaches that proved succesfull in offline research. He collects these methods under the term virtual methods. To him the exclusive use of these virtual methods leads to an unnessary concentration of research on just a few topics and would even mislead in the quest to advance our understanding the internet.

“The argument advanced here is that virtual methods and user studies in the social sciences and the humanities have shifted the attention away from the data of the medium, and the opportunities for study of far more than online culture.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 6

To remedy this situation Rogers advances the notion of methods based on online groundedness. Instead of imposing research approaches from differenct context on internet research he proposes a research approach that uses the epistemology of the internet as methodological basis. Rogers calls these methods digital methods:

“For the third era of Internet research, the digital methods program introduces the term online groundedness, in an effor t to conceptualize research which follows the medium, captures its dynamics, and makes grounded claims about cultural and societal change. Indeed, the broader theoretical goal of digital methods is to rethink the relationship between the Web and the ground.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 8

Rogers suggests that through the use of digital methods we will be able to use the internet as a data source that informs on social processes offline that until now remained hidden.

“The conceptual point of departure for the research program is the recognition that the Internet is not only an object of study, but also a source. Knowledge claims may be made on the basis of data collected and analyzed by devices such as search engines. [...] It thereby challenges existing methods of data collection [...], and reopens the discussion of the Web as anticipatory medium, far closer to the ground than one might expect.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 8

Rogers then moves on and discusses a group of epistemological elements of the interent that can serve as basis for research using digital methods. These elements are The Link, The Website, The Search Engines & the Spheres, The Webs, Social Networking Sites & Post-demographics, and Wikipedia & Networked Content. For each element he discusses recent research and further research possibilities.

Rogers’ text is a welcome addition to the developing debate about computational social science. While the manifesto Computational Social Science by the luminaries of the field David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann, Tony Jebara, Gary King, Michael Macy, Deb Roy, and Marshall Van Alstyne opens up a promising research field there are also real dangers lurking. Be it data driven web sience, digital methods, analysis of social networks, or computational social science, these field are blessed by an ever increasing amount of data. While the best research in these fields does not forget theory, the more data we get the louder the voices become that proclaim the end of theory: All theory has become obsolete. The truth is in the data all apparent to mighty algorithms. For an example of such an argument see Chris Anderson’s unfortunate essay The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Rogers’ text offers a welcome example how to combine theory and data.

Rogers’ text is also a timely reminder that there is more to a science of the web than just the analysis of opportunity data sets. The richness of data collected on Twitter or Facebook can serve as basis for original research (for an example of an analysis based on data sets collected on Twitter see for example Drew Conway’ s post “SNA in R Talk, Updated with [Better] Video “; for research based on Facebook data sets see “How to split up the US” by Pete Warden). In the short term analyses like these can provide original and valuable insights. Still, if this research is not conducted in a larger research context we risk losing sight of the bigger picture.

But Roger’s text does not only offer interesting perspectives to researchers coming from a data perspective. “The End of the Virtual” also offers an interesting advancement to researchers coming from the humanties or the social sciences. Rogers directs their focus away from shiny “new” phenomena on the web towards the data structure behind these phenomena. This might curb the enthusiasm of some research but at the same time advance our knowlegde about the web at large and the conditions of social action online.

The End of the Virtual can be found either in bookform here or a pre-print of the lecture as pdf on Richard Rogers’ website.

Disclaimer: Richard Rogers sent me a free copy of his “The End of the Virtual”.

The interplay of theory and observation: a proposition for structured research on human behavior on the web

The paper makes for a nice change of pace since it’s neither concerned with Twitter nor with agent-based modeling. Instead we used the chance of the first Web Science conference to try our hands in a bit of computational social science methodology. Be it only to escape the claim of our dear friends from the theory department we would only be a group of empiricistic heathens. Have a look at the paper at the online proceedings of the WebSci’09: Society On-Line and judge if we succeeded.

For the gist of the paper have a look at the presentation:

In this paper we build on the work we presented in Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels: New Influence on Public Opinion’. In contrast to the earlier work in this paper we focused on the potential agent-based modeling holds for the social sciences in general.

Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Twittering Dissent: Social Web Data Streams as Basis for Agent Based Models of Opinion Dynamics’, in: Martin Welker, Holger Geißler, Lars Kaczmirek, Olaf Wenzel (eds.), 11th General Online Research Conference, GOR 09: Proceedings, Vienna, p. 81.

Modeling Small Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels

In this poster we used the big Lacy/Zuckerberg dustup at the SXSW 2008 to gain some deeper understanding in the dynamics of communication via Twitter. To this end agent based modeling proved to be a very promising research tool.

The Lacy/Zuckerberg session gave a first glimpse on the negative effects of a communication backchannel running wild. Since then other incidents proved the relevance of more research into that phenomenon.

For a closer look at our poster check out the pdf on the publication page for Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels on this blog.

In November Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß and Jörn Lamla published the book “Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt” to which I contributed a chapter on the political uses of Twitter. And the first reviews are in:

Jochen Zenthöfer for politik-digital.de: Wer archiviert eigentlich Twitter?

Christian Jung at Homo Politicus: Nachindustrielle Politik

[Update: 2010/01/11]
Stefan Anderssohn at socialnet: Rezension vom 07.01.2010 zu: Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß u.a. (Hrsg.): Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt. Campus Verlag (Frankfurt) 2009.

[Update: 2010/03/13]
Online Affairs: Politisches Gezwitscher – Wie und Warum Politiker Twitter Nutzen

My chapter is called “Twitterende Politiker: Zwischem buntem Rauschen und Bürgernähe 2.0″. In that chapter I describe how German politicians use Twitter-Feeds. I also attempt to form preliminary usage-categories. SInce the chapter has been written in April of 2009 some of the examples seem a bit dated. Still it seems the categories hold up quite nicely to the test of time. I’m very much looking forward to early 2010 when Pascal Jürgens and I will quantitavely test these categories on a large data-set. So as always, the best is yet to come.

The topic of the conference was the influence which different forms and uses of Social Media have on the practice of political activists. The papers covered an extensive range of theoretical and practical approaches to this question. A comprehensive account of the presentations can be found on netzpolitik (day 1, day 2).

The talk I enjoyed most was given by Richard Rogers. In his talk Rogers examined methodological questions regarding the research practices in online spaces. Rogers emphasized the necessity to develop research designs that take the nature of online interactions into account. A simple adoption of offline research practices would possibly lead to a distortion between research and reality. A short account of Rogers’ talk can be found on irevolution.

In the afternoon of the first conference day I shared a panel with Myra von Ondarza who talked about “The Euroblogosphere: Advent of a Social Movement or Source for Expert Information”, Christina Neumeyer and Celina Raffl who presented their research on “Facebook for Protest? Assessing the Potential of Social Software for Political Activism Exemplified on the FARC Countermovement” and Azi Lev-On who held a presentation on “Social Movements and the Web 2.0 Phenomenon: Conceptual Links”. An account of these presentations can be found on irevolution.

During this panel I presented the paper “Twittering Activists: The Uses of Twitter for Political Activism“.

In this paper I argue that Twitter has quite unintentionally become an useful tool for political activists. What started out as a hedonistic tool for self-expression has developed into a tool which influences public opinion and helps with the organization of small groups. In this paper I use four examples of the effects of Twitter usage during late 2007 and early 2008 to illustrate this point.

The examples are the reactions in the Twitterverse to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Twittering during the Sarah Lacy Mark Zuckerberg interview at the 2008 SXSW, the use of Twitter during the San Diego wildfires in October 2007 and the get-out-of-jail Twittering by James Karl Buck. In my eyes these examples clearly show four different types of possibilities for political activists:

1. Twittering facilitates the fast distribution of information to a local or global community of interest.

2. The use of Twitter-Feeds can be a powerful open backchannel to actively monitor and comment on current events.

3. The use of Twitter can be an efficient way to organize and coordinate small groups for collective action and protests.

4. The use of Twitter can establish a remote presence for a group of activists.

This Wordle word cloud should give you a short impression of the paper.

The conference was a very pleasant experience. The talks were interesting and provided many new perspectives for further reading and research. And the really interesting conversations happened, as always, during the coffee breaks and lunches. I want to thank the organizing team Sigrid Baringhorst, Veronika Kneip, Annegret März and Johanna Niesyto for the invitation to the conference and for their organizing efforts and skills.