During the workshop I will present my position paper Twitter in Politics: Lessons learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009 in a short Ignite Talk. Although I have a narrative in mind which could fill the presentation I want to give the old unknown unknown a chance. Therefore I want to ask you which are the points you would be interested in hearing in an Ignite Talk about a paper called “Twitter in Politics: Lessons learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009?”
Die CDU Onlinekampagne für die Landtagswahl 2010 in Nordrhein-Westfalen: Ein Zwischenstand
Eine Präsentation gehalten während des Politcamp 2010 in Berlin am 21. März 2010.
Während des Politcamp 2010 in Berlin präsentierte ich am 21. März den aktuellen Zwischenstand der CDU Onlinekampagne zur Landtagswahl in Nordrhein-Westfalen am 9. Mai 2010. Dies ist eine ausformulierte und leicht erweiterte Version meiner Präsentation.
Disclaimer: Ich berate die Onlinekampagne der CDU Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Nach den guten Erfahrungen mit Onlineunterstützerteams im Hessenwahlkampf wird auch in NRW der Großteil der Onlineaktivitäten von einem freiwilligen Unterstützerteam organisiert. Die Lektionen des hessischen webcamp09 sind die Basis für das NRW Onlineunterstützerteam NRW für Rüttgers.
Die dort gesammelten Videos sind fast ausschließlich von Freiwilligen produziert. Eine Ausnahme stellt die Vorstellung des Freiwilligen-Teams dar.
Bisher lassen sich die Videos überwiegend drei Themengruppen zuordnen. Die für deutsche Onlinekampagnen wahrscheinlich am innovativsten Videos sind regelmäßige direkte Videobotschaften des Generalsekretärs der CDU Nordrhein-Westfalens Andreas Krautscheid.
In diesen Videobotschaften stellte er sich seinen Unterstützern vor,
reagierte spontan auf tagesaktuelle Entwicklungen,
oder rief zu thematischen Aktionen auf.
Ein anderes viel genutztes Format ist die Vox Populi. In diesen von Freiwilligen konzipierten, gedrehten und geschnittenen Videos werden Menschen aus Nordrhein-Westfalen auf der Straße zu ihrer Meinung zu tagesaktuellen Themen gefragt.
Zusätzlich begleiten wir mit Videos klassische politische Veranstaltungen.
Zusätzlich zu diesem von dem Untersützerteam NRW für Rüttgers genutzten YouTube Kanal gibt es einen YouTube Kanal der CDU Nordrhein-Westfalen auf dem von CDU NRW-TV produzierte Videos präsentiert werden.
Wurde noch in der Kampagne zur Bundestagswahl 2009 von der CDU große Aufmerksamkeit auf die Erstellung und den Betrieb der teAM 2009 Online-Community gelegt, so werden viele dieser Funktionen in der Onlinekampagne zur Landtagswahl 2010 in Nordrhein-Westfalen durch die Nutzung von Facebook sicher gestellt.
Zentrum unserer Aktivitäten auf Facebook ist das von uns betriebene Facebook Fanprofil für Jürgen Rüttgers, das mit der Unterstützerseite NRW für Rüttgers verknüft ist.
Zusätzlich hierzu ist die CDU Nordrhein Westfalen auch mit einem weiteren Fanprofil auf Facebook vertreten:
Ein weiterer Unterschied zur Bundeskampagne liegt in unserer Nutzung der VZ-Netzwerke. Während die Bundeskampagne noch grosse Energie auf Aktionen um das Edelprofil der Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel verwendete, so betreiben wir zwar ein Edelprofil für Jürgen Rüttgers, fokusieren unsere Aktivitäten jedoch auf Facebook.
Zusätzlich hierzu nutzt die Kampagne auch Twitter mit dem Account @NRWRuettgers:
Auf diesem Account twittern die Unterstützer Ulrich Gelsen #ug [@gelsen], David J. Ludwigs #dl [@cronenbuerger] und Florian Braun #fb [@flobraun]. Um der Unpersönlichkeit eines Teamfeeds zu entgehen nutzen wir eindeutig zugewiesene Hashtags, so dass zu jeder Zeit nachvollziehbar ist welcher der Autoren gerade twittert.
Über den Twitter Account @NRWRuettgers twittert das Unterstützteam von Veranstaltungen,
Generell ist uns die Interaktion um unsere Beiträge gleich auf welchem Kanal sehr wichtig. Auch wenn manchem die Zeit von dem posten eines Kommentars und seiner Freischaltung etwas zu lange dauert wir freuen uns über Kommentare und Aktivität um unsere Beiträge. Zeigt dies doch, dass wir mit unserem Angebot auf Interesse stossen und Debatten auslösen.
Die oben beschriebenen Elemente der Onlinekampagne sind für uns zur Zeit die wichtigsten Bausteine, auf die wir den Großteil unserer Aufmerksamkeit konzentrieren. Zusätzlich zu diesen Onlineangeboten findet die Kampagne aber auch auf anderen Onlinekanälen statt: Flickr, CDU Nordrhein-Westfalen, Jürgen Rüttgers und CDU NRW/Blog.
Für eine Diskussion weiterer Aspekte der Onlinekampagnen zur Landtagswahl 2010 in Nordrhein-Westfalen haben Oliver Zeisberger für die SPD und ich für die CDU im Westen ein Interview gegeben. Dieses Interview ist eine gute Ergänzung zu dieser Beschreibung unserer Kampagnenelementen.
[Update 2010/04/04]
Dieser Beitrag wurde inzwischen ebenfalls sowohl auf dem CDU NRW / Blog als auch auf dem Blog Homo Politicus veröffentlicht.
Oliver Zeisberger betreut mit seiner Agentur den Onlinewahlkampf der NRW SPD während ich das Onlineunterstützerteam der CDU Nordrhein-WestfalenNRW für Rüttgers berate.
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.
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.
Recently I started reading Vaclav Havel’s memoirs To the Castle and Back which he wrote in 2005. In his State of the World 2010Bruce Sterling mentioned Havel’s memoirs as a good illustration of the imp of the perverse:
People don’t need what they want, and don’t want what they need. My intuitions about this have been sharpened by reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoirs TO THE CASTLE AND BACK.
[…]
There’s a lot of stuff in there about people being surprised and even flummoxed by the spectacular glee of being given what they want — great things that are clearly good for them. They’re better off by almost every objective measure, and they’d never go back, but somehow they seem to live less.
inkwell.vue.373: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010 permalink #46 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 5 Jan 10 07:21
While this is definitely an element of Havel’s memoirs. Still, after reading the first pages Havel’s memoirs made me think of something else. I’m reminded of the Red Queen’s race out of Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass:
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Havel writes his memoirs in the year 2005 looking back on his presidency. These short reflective vignettes are interspersed with excerpts from Havel’s memos to his staff which he wrote during his time in The Castle. These memos offer a detailed view on the minutiae of the day to day life of a president and his staff. What is especially poignant are the plethora of mundane details that fill these memos. As Havel puts it himself:
When I think of all those thousands of meetings I held as president, of how many worries and preparations were necessary for every one of them and how many things I had to answer – from the very basic ones concerning the future organization of the world to the most petty ones concerning, for instance, the placement of cutlery or the seating arrangements for some official dinner – it occurs to me that not only will no one ever be able to fully appreciate all that but that today, practically no one knows about it anymore.
How wonderful it is, by comparison, to be a writer! You write something in a couple of weeks, and it’s here for the ages. What will remain when presidents and ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, most likely inaccurate.
Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. 2008. p. 35.
From this perspective Carrol’s Red Queen’s Race finds an uncanny likeness in political life. Good or Bad? Well, this judgement will have to wait.
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’ 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.
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.
The quiet days at the end of any semester are great for side projects. So for this semester I decided to go through my back catalogue of presentations and publications and make some of them available on this site. Today I’ll start with a poster from 2008 which Pascal Jürgens and I presented at the International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland.
Modeling Small Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels
In this poster we used the bigLacy/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.
