Suchergebnisse

Social media platforms, especially Twitter, have become a ubiquitous element in political campaigns. Although politicians, journalists, and the public increasingly take to the service, we know little about the determinants and dynamics of political talk on Twitter. We examine Twitter's issue agenda based on popular hashtags used in messages referring to politics. We compare this Twitter agenda with the public agenda measured by a representative survey and the agendas of newspapers and television news programs captured by content analysis. We show that the Twitter agenda had little, if any, relationship with the public agenda. Political talk on Twitter was somewhat stronger connected with mass media coverage, albeit following channel-specific patterns most likely determined by the attention, interests, and motivations of Twitter users.

The international rise of populism has been attributed, in part, to digital media. These media allow the backers of populists to share and distribute information independent of traditional media organizations or elites and offer communication spaces in which they can support each other and strengthen communal ties irrespective of their societal standing. Can we identify these functions in distinct usage patterns of digital media by supporters of populists? This could find expression through posting content that comports with the central tenets of populist ideology, higher activity levels, use of distinct vocabularies, and heightened levels of community building. We investigate differences along these dimensions on the online forum Reddit by comparing linguistic patterns and content of comments in two subreddits focusing on a populist, Donald Trump (/r/The_Donald), and a center-left politician, Hillary Clinton (/r/hillaryclinton), during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. Contributors to /r/The_Donald expressed more strongly parts of the populist ideological package, specifically anti-elitism and exclusionism, but failed to express people-centrism; used the platform more intensively; used vocabularies different than those used in other partisan publics; and engaged more strongly in community building.

Contemporary media systems are in transition. The constellation of organizations, groups, and individuals contributing information to national and international news flows has changed as a result of the digital transformation. The "hybrid media system" has proven to be one of the most instructive concepts addressing this change. Its focus on the mutually dependent interconnections between various types of media organizations, actors, and publics has inspired prolific research. Yet the concept can tempt researchers to sidestep systematic analyses of information flows and actors' differing degrees of influence by treating media systems as a black box. To enable large-scale, empirical comparative studies aimed at identifying interdependencies and power relationships in contemporary media systems, we propose the concept of discursive power. This describes the ability of contributors to communication spaces to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers, thus shaping public discourses and controversies that unfold in interconnected communication spaces. We also provide a theoretical framework of how structural features of organizations and media systems contribute to the emergence of discursive power for different types of actors in various contexts. This adds to the theoretical toolkit available to researchers interested in the empirical analysis of contemporary media systems.

Gegenwärtig wird soziale Netzwerkforschung aus den vielfältigsten Perspektiven und in den unterschiedlichsten Disziplinen betrieben. Dabei divergieren die Fragestellungen und Annahmen, sowie die methodischen Vorgehensweisen zum Teil deutlich. Die elf Beiträge dieses Symposiums umreißen aus ganz unterschiedlichen Fächern und Richtungen ihre Sichtweise auf Netzwerkforschung: Soziologie, Politikwissenschaft, Ethnologie, Geographie, Stadtforschung, Erziehungswissenschaft, Wirtschaftsinformatik und Computerlinguistik. Sie zeigen einerseits aktuelle Trends in der sozialen Netzwerkforschung auf und leuchten andererseits neben der disziplinären Pluralität auch die methodische und epistemologische Vielfalt der Forschung zu Netzwerken aus. Das Symposium hat seinen Ausgangspunkt in der Initiative Netzwerkforschung interdisziplinär. Diese will Vorteile wie Herausforderungen interdisziplinärer oder auch transdisziplinärer Netzwerkforschung diskutieren und entsprechende Kooperationen unterstützen. Social network research is currently pursued from a wide variety of perspectives and by very different disciplines. The assumptions and research questions, but also the methods deployed diverge considerably. This symposium comprises eleven contributions that sketch the approaches from different disciplines and directions: sociology, political science, anthropology, geography, urban research, education, computer science, and computer linguistics. They point to current trends in network research, as well as shedding light on the variety of disciplines, methods, and epistemological positions involved. The symposium springs from the Initiative Interdisciplinary Network Research. The initiative aims at discussing the advantages and challenges of network research between the disciplines, and at encouraging and supporting cooperation bridging these divides.