LSE Politics & Policy blog have published a summary of the recent ECPR paper Nick Anstead and I presented. The paper concerns what we call 'semantic polling' - the continual mining of social media data to produce real-time measures of public opinion. We discuss its emergence and use in the 2010 UK General Election, as we work towards a fuller explanation of this phenomenon in political communications. Read the blogpost here.
Conflict prevention and early warnings: closing the gap through communications?
The catastrophes of Rwanda and Bosnia led to a debate in the 1990s about the warning-response gap. Conflict prevention and early warning systems did not seem up to scratch. Third parties intervened too late, if at all. Spending was skewed towards mitigating the effects of conflicts, not on stopping them happen in the first place. The spread of satellite television brought conflicts into more immediate public vision. It was feared this created a CNN effect whereby policymakers were forced into military intervention for humanitarian causes to satisfy a more globally-aware public opinion. But this meant only those conflicts caught on camera would be responded to. The overall picture was a mess, it was argued. International relations lacked an effective system of warning-response.
A new study has cast doubt on these assumptions. This opens a space for a more analytical approach to how media, NGOs and intelligence agencies provide warnings and how states and international organisations can decide to respond. The Foresight project has spent three years analysing under what circumstances warnings are noticed, prioritised, and acted upon. The team, led by Christoph Meyer, has looked at a series of case studies offering various degrees of warning and response, including Estonia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Macedonia, Darfur, and Georgia. They have interviewed responders from the UK, US, Germany, the UN, EU and OSCE and analysed media and NGO reporting around these conflicts. In short, they’ve done a lot of the empirical work that was missing from the 1990s debate. What have they found?
First, Rwanda could not have been prevented. Valid warnings only emerged when conflict was escalating, not pre-escalation. Those who suggest a lack of political will or ignorance on the part of decision-makers have misinterpreted the warning data available at the time. Second, those providing warnings anticipate what responders want to hear, and provide them with that. Decision-makers hate surprising warnings which don’t fit their mental models of how the world works. They are overloaded with situations they’re already dealing with and favour responding to emerging conflicts that look like ones they’ve dealt with before. Third, decision-makers are as likely to respond to warnings from preferred journalists or NGOs rather than intelligence from their own state agencies. They trust lone, grizzled hacks or aid agencies they might be funding. Fourth and finally, for all the usual factors of resource-availability, credibility of warning sources and so on, military and aid responses are often a matter of context and chance, neither of which social scientists handle particularly well.
At a discussion of the findings yesterday, Piers Robinson, author of The CNN Effect, made the point that journalists cannot be relied on to provide early warnings in the future. The study indicates it is too dangerous, insurance is too expensive, and they are driven by news cycles in which what is happening trumps what might happen. Robinson also suggested that the Foresight project misses the systematic relation media and NGOs have to political power. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all point to the fact that journalists only question a war when leading politicians have already expressed dissent. Journalists don’t lead, they follow. While the former BBC journalist Martin Bell might argue for a ‘journalism of attachment’ that ‘cares as well as knows’, mainstream media organisations do not employ journalists to undertake moral crusades to warn states that if they don’t act in Rwanda, Georgia or wherever, there’ll be trouble.
Will citizen journalism and data mining of social media conversations around the world lead to improved warnings? This is the question decision-makers have been asking recently. They want to know how to integrate warning data from journalists, social media, NGOs and intelligence channels. In theory, the warning-response gap should shrink to zero. The time between an event and the state knowing about it promises to disappear with the right technology and tools to mine Big Data. But decision-makers are often of an age or disposition not even to understand Facebook and Twitter: there is a generational anxiety they are missing out on something and the kids have all the answers, and a cultural faith that free information will lead to the best outcomes. No discussion can develop until someone has mentioned ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘if only we had known’. But anyone who has done social media monitoring knows it requires a lot of qualitative know-how and interpretive work to get any sensible findings.
And as the Foresight study shows, decision-makers will still pick up the New York Times or turn on the BBC and trust their favourite reporter, even though those reporters might no longer be able to go to the countries they’re reporting on. Hence, for all the promise of communication technology, foreign policy is still about the human factor and cognitive biases. Understanding the warning-response gap in the next decade will involve some careful unpicking of the interplay over time of stressed, confused people in media, humanitarian and government agencies.
Working Paper: Political Attitudes and the British Riots
In the aftermath of the recent riots, a short paper by Sarah Birch, University of Essex, and Nicholas Allen, Royal Holloway, University of London, suggests that attitudes toward politics may have a significant impact on people’s willingness to engage in law breaking. The paper which is based on survey and focus-group data, systematically tests the various claims that have been advanced in the media about the causes of the riots. It suggests that whilst socio-economic deprivation and personal moral values have some part to play in any explanation, a lack of confidence in political leaders and disengagement from public affairs appears to make a significant minority of people potentially available for participation in rioting. The research, taken from Sarah Birch and Nicholas Allen's broader Ethics and Integrity project, funded by the ESRC and the British Academy, is presented in a working paper, '"There will be burning and a-looting tonight": The social and political correlates of law-breaking.'
Download here.
Media and memories of 7/7: 6 months free downloads
The recent special issue of Memory Studies on media and commemorations of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005 has been made available for free download by Sage for six months. Click here for the articles.
The top 50 most downloaded articles in Memory Studies also includes excellent pieces by Paul Connerton and Marita Sturken - available here.
The Emerging Viewertariat - out now in Press/Politics
The International Journal of Press/Politics have published Nick Anstead and Ben O'Loughlin's article, 'The Emerging Viewertariat and BBC Question Time: Television Debate and Real-Time Commenting Online'. To download it click here, or email Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for a copy.
This paper advances the study of microblogging and political events by investigating how one high-profile broadcast acted as a stimulus to real-time commentary from viewers using Twitter. Our case study is a controversial, high-ratings episode of BBC Question Time, the weekly British political debate show, in October 2009, in which Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, appeared as a panelist. The “viewertariat” emerging around such a political event affords the opportunity to explore interaction across media formats. We examine both the structural elements of engagement online and the expressions of collective identity expressed in tweets. Although many concerns noted in previous studies of online political engagement remain (inequality in the propensity to comment, coarseness of tone), we find certain notable characteristics in the sample, especially a direct link between the quantity of tweets and events on the screen, an ability to preempt the arguments offered by panelists, and ways in which viewertariat members add new content to the discussion. Furthermore, Twitter users commenting online express a range of overlapping identities. These complexities challenge broadcasting and political institutions seeking to integrate new, more organic models of engagement.
New article by Andrew Chadwick: "The Changing News Media Environment"
James Stanyer and I have just had a new article published. It's in the latest volume of the bestselling book about British politics, Developments in British Politics 9, edited by Richard Heffernan, Philip Cowley, and Colin Hay, and published by Palgrave Macmillan.
The chapter covers new media usage patterns, the changing face of news consumption, the growing pressure on newspapers, Gordon Brown's relationship with the press, the changing nature of media management inside Number 10, and the experience of Britain's first live televised prime ministerial debates during the election of 2010.
To give you a flavour of what's in it, here's an excerpt, from the conclusion.
As this chapter has shown, the political communication environment in Britain is in transition. While broadcasting still remains at the heart of national political life, the nature of mediated politics is evolving rapidly and in directions that are sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary. The election leaders’ debates reinforced television’s predominance, though as we saw above, even those events were accompanied by a panoply of online activism, some of it facilitated by the broadcasters themselves.
The way citizens consume political information is changing in the new digital environment. As use of the internet and mobile technologies has grown, so they have become an important port of call for those seeking political news. Audiences have never had access to so much political information through such a variety of news outlets. At the same time, these technologies provide new opportunities for audiences to engage in political activities, express their opinions and contribute content in historically unprecedented ways. The evidence suggests that growth in the numbers taking advantage of these interactive opportunities is likely to continue.
There are, however, cautionary themes. Concerns about the stratified nature of the digitised public sphere remain. Those that take advantage of new technologies to participate in politics remain a minority and still tend to be wealthy, well educated and younger. Second, this new communicative digital space has also impacted upon politicians and media organisations, creating opportunities, but at the same time new uncertainties. Established news outlets remain a visible presence but face financial pressures. While news organisations have responded innovatively, competition, shrinking audiences, and lower revenues – especially from advertising – have negatively affected their resource bases. There have often been no alternatives to cost cutting. The public service provider, the BBC, has fared well up to now, but it too is likely to face future financial constraints, and this may well have implications for the quality of news citizens receive.
Politicians and their strategists have been forced to adapt to a rapidly pluralising digital sphere. Party leaders have promoted themselves using a range of interactive features to try and connect with citizens, albeit with varying degrees of success. While the internet has opened up new ways for politicians to interact with the public, it has also posed a series of challenges. Some aspects of the online information environment have proved difficult to control. The fast-moving news cycles require constant monitoring and are significantly more difficult to direct. The public spread of gossip and rumour is perhaps more common place. While political elites have been keen to be seen embracing new media, they are understandably less keen to be seen reverting to necessary but dubious methods of control. The leaked emails that led to “Smeargate” reveal, not only that some old command and control techniques of the broadcast era are still hugely important, but also that the new media environment is inherently porous. Understanding the complex new political communication environment in the twenty-first century remains a challenge, but one to which students of politics must rise if they are to fully comprehend the nature of British democracy.
The book as a whole is excellent and as usual it's a must-read for anyone interested in British politics. You can buy a copy now from Amazon here.
It will publish in the U.S. in August and will be available here.
The full reference for our piece is: Chadwick, A. and Stanyer, J. (2011) "The Changing News Media Environment" in Heffernan, R., Cowley, P. and Hay, C. (eds) Developments in British Politics 9 (Palgrave-Macmillan), pp. 215-237.
Can social media monitoring predict events? Mediating Diplomacy workshop on Thursday
Ben O'Loughlin will address the relationship between social media monitoring techniques and the emergence and prediction of events at the following conference this Thursday. From the Arab Spring to the News International scandal it is clear that international events can catch policymakers off guard. Can analysis of our tweets and user comments help spot an event before it breaks? And if this is possible, what are the ethical consequences?
Mediating Diplomacy:
Strategies, Challenges, Methodologies
An International Workshop
The Open University, Camden Town
28 July 2011
1-5pm
PROGRAMME
1400-1415 Welcome and Introduction
Marie Gillespie and Hugh Mackay Public Diplomacy or Intercultural Dialogue?
1415-1515
Nick Cull The Future Landscape of Public Diplomacy
Annabelle Sreberny The Hubris of Public Diplomacy
1515-1615
Ali Fisher Networked Audiences: New Rules of Engagement
Ben O’Loughlin Can Social Media Monitoring Predict Events?
1645 -1700 DISCUSSION
1700-1900 RECEPTION
NPCU at ECPR 2011, Reykjavik
Andrew Chadwick and Ben O'Loughlin will each present papers at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, 25-27 August. Their papers are in the eight-panel section, Internet and Politics: Bridging Current Research and Outlining Future Directions, chaired by Andrea Calderaro (European University Institute) and Anastasia Kavada (University of Westminster). Andrew Chadwick will also be discussant on a further panel in the Internet and Politics section. Here are details of the two papers.
Andrew Chadwick
This paper combines theory and empirical analysis to explore recent systemic change in the nature of political communication. Drawing on evidence from Britain and the United States on the changing relationships among politicians, media, and publics, I argue for the concept of the hybrid media system. This system is built upon interactions among old and new media and their associated technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizations. Actors in the hybrid media system are articulated by complex and evolving power relations based upon adaptation and interdependence. We now require a holistic approach to the role of information and communication in politics—one that does not exclusively focus on new or old media, but instead empirically maps where the distinctions between new and old matter, and where they do not. The focus of my attention in this article is news. First, I outline an ontology of hybridity. Next, I discuss assemblages of hybridized news making. Then I examine the phenomenon of WikiLeaks as an example of power and interdependence in the construction of news.
Semantic Polling and the 2010 UK General Election
Nick Anstead and Ben O’Loughlin
While journalists speculated about whether the 2010 UK General Election was the country’s “first Internet election”, one important way in which the Internet was incorporated into the election process was under-examined: semantic polling. Semantic polling refers to the use of algorithms and natural language processing to “read” vast datasets of public commentary harvested from the Internet, which could be disaggregated, analysed in close-to-real-time, and presented to various audiences. We present findings from interviews with social media monitoring firms, the parties that used those firms’ services, and journalists who used such firms’ results in their electoral coverage, as well as content analysis of media electoral coverage. We examine assumptions about: (i) the utility of such data, (ii) the correspondence of semantic polling to normative models of democracy, (iii) the demand for insights into why citizens would vote as they did not just who/what/where (i.e. the demand for “intelligence”), and (iv) how semantic polling could be integrated with traditional methods. Such techniques were at a very early stage, with problems of data gathering, analysis and the presentation of results to parties and publics. Nor were methodological shortcomings necessarily explained when polling was presented. Nevertheless, we consider how such approaches will continue to develop in coming years in different countries.
Please contact Andrew.Chadwick@rhul.ac.uk or Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for copies of their papers. And we hope to see some of you there.
Hoskins/O'Loughlin podcast: Does the BBC cause radicalisation?
On 15 July 2011 Bournemouth University hosted a conference, Responding to extremisms: media roles and responsibilities. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin gave a 20 minute talk about how jihadist statements by bin Ladin, Al-Zawahiri and others come to reach mass audiences through mainstream news. The consistent process through which this occurs shows a renewal of 'gatekeeping', a journalistic practice that, with the internet's proliferation of channels, platforms etc, we might have expected to disappear.
To listen to the talk, click here. To read the paper the talk was based on, click here.
Thanks to Barry Richards and the organisers for a very interesting day's discussion.
New Ampofo article published: The social life of real-time social media monitoring
NPCU doctoral candidate Lawrence Ampofo's new article has been published in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. The article is entitled, 'The social life of real-time social media monitoring'. Click here to read it.
Abstract:
Real-time social media, social media that publish information as soon as it is available, has become a mainstay in contemporary society with the widespread adoption of status updates, tweets and blogging. In response to this growth of data, specific methodologies and software tools have been developed that aggregate and analyse the saliency of such content. However, despite the wealth of resources available, researchers face significant challenges in accurately and ethically conducting such an endeavour. This essay takes as its starting point the conception that real-time social media are artefacts of social and cultural interactions online. The analysis of such real-time information is therefore problematic as ethical and methodological issues suitable for such research are currently not well developed. Two case studies from BBC Mundo’s Your Say discussion boards contextualise the complexity inherent in the above issues within the framework of the BBC World Service’s mission to foster a global conversation. The analysis of discussions hosted by BBC Mundo highlights the intricate nature of correctly analysing such content and underscores the need for new methodological processes, in addition to heightened analytical sensitivity, in interpreting the results of real-time social media analyses.