Citizenship without community - podcasts

Citizenship - its legal, political, cultural and social status - has been the subject of much reconsideration in the past decade, driven by the collision of multiculturalism, security and migration in what for many have been turbulent times. We have not always seen the provision of rights by states or the fulfilment of duties by citizens, leading to a search for radical alternatives among some. But it seems contrarian to consider the possibility of a citizenship independent of any political community - a citizenship of humanity, for instance - since rights and duties must be enacted through some institutional structure, and such structures tend to map onto political collectives like cities, regions or nations. And underlying these debates, a crisis of representation has been mooted: voters don't trust representatives enough to authorise them to make decisions "in my name", media don't allow for the representation of complex problems like climate change or economic crises, and the concept of representation itself has been abandoned by philosophers and, indeed, media theorists like Richard Grusin. What it means to be a citizen, in a connected, efficacious relationship to politics and public problems, is, today, a fundamental problem.

So thanks to Angharad Closs Stephens and Vicki Squire for organising the Citizenship Without Community conference last week at the British Library. Podcasts of the talks are available here, including for me the most provocative by Prof. Étienne Balibar. Unfortunately, it was only in the Q&A that he addressed the crisis of representation for democracy and communication (for him, it is more of a phenomenological problem than a simple matter of institutions and practices), but his talk on the "impossibility" of a community of citizens, minus that Q&A, is here.

Some pitfalls of twitter analysis

Our colleagues at Linguamatics have found time in the middle of analysing the TV leaders debate twitter data to comment on some methodological pitfalls of such research. To read why automated data mining still needs a human eye, click here.

Final TV debate: policy substance matters little to voters

Linguamatics’ linguistic analysis with NPCU provided insight last night into tweet sentiment towards party leaders during the final televised UK election debate and was immediately picked by Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC. The preliminary results from tweets sent during the debate, including a new view on the instant reactions to particular issues (Figure 1), showed a further narrowing of the gap between the leaders’ performances (Figure 2), but with Nick Clegg still performing best overall.

Figure 1: How twitterers reacted to particular issues in the final debate

The overall tweet analysis (Figure 2) for the three debates shows the percentage of tweets in favour of each of the leaders. Nick Clegg’s share has dropped to 37% from 43% in the second debate, Gordon Brown is down to 32% from 35%, while David Cameron rose to 31% from 22%.

Figure 2: Number of tweets showing positive sentiment towards each party leader

Top issues for the twitterers in the third debate (Figure 3 below) were immigration, banking, economy and tax. Clegg and Brown shared the lead on immigration, Clegg was ahead on banking and tax, whilst Brown clearly won on the economy. The fact that Camercon didn't win any issues of policy substance, but nevertheless improved his performance, suggested viewers are not assessing the leaders on policy specifics - hardly a revelation of course. Try as Labour might to shift the terrain onto policy,  viewers' connection to the leaders is shaped by matters of personality, body language and other factors which Brown performs relatively poorly on. Brown walloped his rivals on the topic of the economy, but didn't win the debate.

Figure 3: Winner per topic from number of relevant positive tweets

Tracking positive sentiment towards each of the leaders during all three debates (Figure 4) also reflects the narrowing gap between their performances.

Figure 4: Positive sentiment towards leader over time during the debate

The published results come from the deep analysis of 187,000 tweets sent by 43,656 twitterers from 8.30pm – 10.00pm on the night of the third televised UK election debate.

Linguamatics’ I2E text mining software was used to find and summarize tweets that have the same meaning, however they are worded. I2E identifies the range of vocabulary used in tweets and uses linguistic analysis to collect and summarize the different ways opinion is expressed.

Description of the figures

Figure 1 shows how the twitterers reacted to particular issues during the debate.
This is a timeline showing the positive tweets made about each leader in relation to audience questions or key statements made by a leader

Figure 2 shows the number of tweets that expressed a positive sentiment towards each of the party leaders.
The analysis identified tweets saying that a particular leader was doing well or made a good point, or that they like the leader, etc. Linguistic filtering removed examples which were about expectations, e.g. “I hope the leader will do well”, questions, such as “anyone think the leader is doing well?”, and negations, such as “the leader did not do well” or “the leader made no sense”.

Figure 3 shows winner per topic from number of relevant positive tweets.
The analysis identified a list of topics by identifying words or phrases which described the discussion subject, for example Trident, nuclear weapons, armed forces, military, and Eurofighter are assigned to defence. The tweets were then analyzed to find out who was saying positive things about each leader in relation to a specific topic.

Figure 4 shows Figure 1 (positive sentiment towards leaders over time during the debate) compared with the positive sentiment results from the two earlier debates.

5 May film event: Watching the Daily Life

The Reflections of Turkey-EU Relations Beyond Politics: Watching the Daily Life

We would like to invite you to our workshop and the screening of the
film ’Coffee Futures’ by Dr. Zeynep Gursel from the University of
Michigan. The event is co-organized by the Department of Media Arts and
the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal
Holloway, University of London:

Title of the event: “The Reflections of Turkey-EU Relations Beyond
Politics: Watching the Daily Life”

Date: Wednesday 5 May 2010, 4-7pm
Venue: Windsor Building Auditorium, RHUL, Egham

The event is open to public and free.

There will be refreshments and a wine reception.

Details of the film are here.

For any queries please contact: Ayca Tunc (A.Tunc@rhul.ac.uk) or Didem
Buhari (M.D.Buhari@rhul.ac.uk)

Programme
16:00 Opening remarks by H.E. Mr. Yigit Alpogan, Ambassador of the
Republic of Turkey

16:10 First presentation on Turkish public opinion by Didem Buhari and
Baris Gulmez(Royal Holloway, Department of Politics and International
Relations)

16:30 Screening of the film ’Coffee Futures’ and Q&A by Zeynep Devrim
Gursel(http://www.coffeefuturesfilm.com/)

17:20 Coffee break

17:40 Prof. Chris Rumford’s talk (Royal Holloway, Department of
Politics and International Relations)

18:00 Second presentation on the reception of Turkish-German filmmakers
in the Turkish press by Ayca Tunc (Royal Holloway,Department of Media
Arts)

18:20 Q&A session

18:30 Conclusion remarks by Dr. Daniela Berghahn(Royal Holloway,
Department of Media Arts)

18:40 Wine reception

TV election debate II: New findings

Linguamatics, a leader in enterprise text mining, working in collaboration with the NPCU, announced a new view on the instant reactions made on Twitter about party leaders during the second UK televised election debate. For those who followed the instant polls after the debate last week, these results will be of great interest. Preliminary results are published of the linguistic analysis of 169,000 tweets sent by 38,986 twitterers from 8.00pm to 9.30pm on the night of the debate.

Updated results for the analysis of 211,000 tweets sent by 47,420 twitterers from 8.30pm - 10pm on the night of the first UK election debate, April 15 2010, are also presented.

The overall tweet analysis (Figure 1) shows that for the second debate 43% of twitterers who expressed an opinion said that Nick Clegg performed best, down from 57% in the first debate, followed by Gordon Brown (35%, up from 25%), and then David Cameron (22%, up from 18%).

For the second debate the twitterers indicated that their top 3 issues were Europe, immigration, and religion, including the discussion on the Pope’s visit. The second debate covered a wider variety of topics than the first and so the tweets are more widely spread. Cameron won narrowly on Europe, Clegg on immigration as for the first debate, and Brown on religion (Figure 2). However, the combined analysis of winner per topic shows that Clegg has maintained his lead (Figure 3), as he does for the debate as a whole (Figure 1).

Linguamatics’ linguistic analysis of the debate transcript itself (Figure 4) shows that, in the second debate, Europe dominated the leaders’ discussion. The twitterers talked more about immigration than the leaders relative to the other topics (Figure 2).

Linguamatics’ I2E text mining software was used to find and summarize tweets that have the same meaning, however they are worded. I2E identifies the range of vocabulary used in tweets and uses linguistic analysis to collect and summarize the different ways opinion is expressed.

Description of the figures in the press release

Figure 1 shows the number of tweets that expressed a positive sentiment towards each of the party leaders.
The analysis identified tweets saying that a particular leader was doing well or made a good point, or that they like the leader, etc. Linguistic filtering removed examples which were about expectations, e.g. “I hope the leader will do well”, questions, such as “anyone think the leader is doing well?”, and negations, such as “the leader did not do well” or “the leader made no sense”.

Figure 2 shows winner per topic from number of relevant positive tweets.
The analysis identified a list of topics by identifying words or phrases which described the discussion subject, for example Trident, nuclear weapons, armed forces, military, and Eurofighter are assigned to defence. The tweets were then analyzed to find out who was saying positive things about each leader in relation to a specific topic.

Figure 3 shows the percentage of specific topics won by each leader.
This is an aggregation of all positive tweets about each leader with specific reference to any one of the topics. The same data is used for both Figure 2 and Figure 3.

Figure 4 shows number of times a particular topic was mentioned per leader.
This analysis is based on the transcript and not the tweets. As before, topics are not just a mention of a word, but bring together words or phrases which have similar meaning. It shows how important a particular topic was to a leader based on how many times they mentioned it during the debate.

More analysis - including timelines illustrating the 'worms' of success during the debate, will be posted here. Analysis of last week's debate is here.

To engage the young, political parties must dare more democracy

One of the most striking features of recent British general elections is the fall in voter turnout. Since 1997, the number of people voting has plummeted from around 74% in each of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, to an average of only 60% in the 2000s. This trend is most visible amongst younger voters: turnout fell to below 40% in the 18-25 group in 2001 and 2005. Young people are not apathetic but are turned off by electoral politics in its current form.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 showed that young people can become more engaged, not only in voting but also campaigning, but we can safely predict that this will not happen in Britain. Why?

First, politicians do not address issues of concern for young people. Let’s take the subject of university education. Over 40% of young people now go on to higher education (HE), but this policy area has barely been discussed. In fact, it has taken a pro-active campaign by the National Union of Students—to name and shame prospective MPs who support an increase in fees—to even bring HE onto the agenda.

Second, political parties have lost much of their representative capacity. Recent decades have witnessed the individualisation of society in general and young people in particular in terms of values, life-styles and types of political participation. Young people have more diverse interests and participate in democracy through more diverse means, for example demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq or support for Fair Trade products. On the other side of the equation, in their efforts to respond to the demands of the 24-hour media, political parties have become more hierarchical. As a consequence, policy making has become increasingly shut off from ordinary party members.

Third, the first-past-the-post electoral system in Britain does not encourage parties to engage with young people. Since parties’ resources are heavily concentrated in the battle for marginal constituencies, most people in the country are unlikely to come into personal contact with a politician or even a party activist, even in the run-up to the general election. This is particularly true for young people, who, because, they are statistically less likely to vote are viewed as less important by the political marketing experts who now dominate the campaign.

Finally, of course, Britain does not have a politician like Obama. Despite the energising performance of Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, in the first prime ministerial debates, no British politician has yet captured the views and aspirations of young people in this country.

What can we do? Well, certainly increasing political literacy through, for example, improved citizenship education, would be one answer. But the main problem lies with the politicians and the institutions. In short, they must ‘dare more democracy’. They must open up their parties to new social groups. They must reinvigorate local democracy—where people are more likely to succeed in their political endeavours—by granting it more power. They must get involved and actively mobilise young people throughout the whole of the electoral cycle.

Here is one telling experience. Not too long ago I participated in a conference on political participation for academics and politicians at Westminster, where one senior politician complained that he had never been invited to give a talk at a school. That was pathetic. If politicians cannot be bothered to get engaged through their own initiative, how can regular citizens be expected to return the favour?

NPCU@Oxford - Social media monitoring: The next Mass Observation?

Lawrence Ampofo and Ben O'Loughlin will present a paper on social media monitoring at the CRESC Annual Conference on 31 August - 3 September 2010, University of Oxford. Previous CRESC conferences have been an excellent forum bringing together social theory and methodology and this year's theme, 'The Social Life of Methods' allows us to explore the intriguing possibility that our methods dictate our knowledge and action rather than being tools we use to shape social change.

Our paper, 'Real-Time Social Media Monitoring: Automated Mass Observation?', presents a new method of mining and extracting insight from social media feeds. It exemplifies the dilemma of how new forms of tracing and visualising social interactions may channel the questions we ask and the conclusions we seek to draw. Designed by experts in computational linguistics at Linguamatics and researchers at Royal Holloway's New Political Communication Unit, the methodology Real-Time Social Media Monitoring allows researchers to aggregate and analyse data from social media platforms as an event or crisis unfolds to inform timely decision making.  The tools and techniques that constitute the methodology can be used for a broad range of purposes in politics and business, such as identifying shifting brand reputations, key opinion leaders, viral content, and emergent groupings, networks and the geolocation of citizens/users. The paper demonstrates this through a series of case studies examining public responses to H1N1 vaccine take-up, the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, Haiti's earthquake, and the 2010 UK General Election. 

The presentation of this methodology and the case studies raise a number of methodological, conceptual and ethical questions. Methodologically, how do we visualise social networks as they evolve in real-time and how do our visualisations feed back into policy interventions? How can we maintain validity of conceptualisation, measurement and inference in social media analysis? And how do we discern intent? For instance, acts of expression-for-itself, persuasion, and deception all occur in our cases. Conceptually, what does our methodology imply for traditional distinctions of public/private, broadcast/dialogue and directed/emergent communications? Ethically, is social media monitoring simply a non-intrusive instant polling technique, or a form of Mass Observation for the 21st Century?



Next stage in Strategic Narratives research: Dialogue and Diversity in Diplomatic Interaction

On 3-5 June 2010 Ben O'Loughlin will present a paper, 'How do we talk about nukes? EU, US and Iranian Strategic Narratives in Contemporary Diplomacy' at a symposium in Hamburg, Unclenching Fists: Dialogue and Diversity in Diplomatic Interaction. The paper, co-authored with Alister Miskimmon (Royal Holloway) continues the NPCU's research on 'strategic narratives' in international political communication. 

A strategic narrative is a narrative forged by a state with the express purpose of influencing the foreign policy behavior of other actors. This paper will examine whether the EU and the USA’s strategic narratives concerning Iran have been complementary or competitive, taking as its focus the 2009 Geneva talks between the EU3, USA, and Iran concerning Iran’s nuclear programme.  Such moments of high politics represent ‘tests’ in which the (moral, political) criteria of worth present in each actor’s narrative is evaluated by others with reference to an empirical problem: in this case, Iran’s nuclear programme (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991/2006).  We examine the narrative strategies employed by each participant, respectively, as well as the style and mode of delivery or projection, and the manner in which each took the others’ strategic narrative and its delivery into account during interactions in this period. To what extent did each actor take into account the others’ criteria of worth and alter the content and register of their own narrative work by accounting for the perspective of the others; when was this useful and when not, when did this work and when not? How were principles of justice, legality, legitimacy and so forth invoked and negotiated as each actor pursued their interests? We explore the forms of evidence presented and made public by each actor, and the visual and rhetorical modes used to contextualise and frame the meaning of the evidence presented. We also analyse how these stylistic and evidentiary aspects of each actor’s diplomacy was received in the national media of each actor, and the degree to which this fed back into the process being reported on.

Culture, Politics & Arab Media @LSE 29 April

LSE DEPT. OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS

Research Dialogues 2009-10

THURSDAY 12:30 – 2:00

Room H202, Connaught House

Culture, Politics and Arab Media

Speakers:

Mina Al-Lami, Visiting Fellow, Department of Media and Communication, LSE

Shawn Powers, Visiting Fellow, Department of Media and Communication, LSE

Respondent:

Dr. Ben O'Loughlin, Reader in International Relations and Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit, Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstracts

Virtual Spaces of Contestation and the futility of closing Jihadist websites

Mina Al-Lami

On 10 September 2008 the three top Jihadist sites sponsored by Al-Fajr Media Centre, an Al-Qaeda media wing, were closed simultaneously. It wasn’t long before the remaining major Jihadist sites were similarly mysteriously closed, forcing Jihadists to look for alternative platforms. The persistent closure of the three Al-Fajr sites, still down today, and “attack” on others prompted rigorous discussions and debates amongst Jihadist forum administrators and members on how to counter this “media attack”. While the closing of the Al-Fajr sites shortly disturbed Jihadists in terms of finding new trustworthy and credible platforms, it did nothing to obstruct the flow and accessibility of Jihadist media nor regrouping of Jihadists. If anything, the closing of the sites - seen as yet another “crusade” by the West - further radicalized Jihadists. It drove them to increase their “media Jihad” efforts and come up with innovative means to survive in a hostile virtual environment.

This paper will try to argue that closing and/or curtailing of Jihadist sites as a means of countering online extremism in general and Al-Qaeda propaganda in particular is technically ineffective in the presence of web 2.0 and morally counterproductive. The paper suggests that allowing Jihadists a platform is more effective in exposing their violence and undermining their narratives. The case of the leading Arabic forum Al-Jazeeratalk, which does allow Jihadists a voice, is used to illustrate such a potentially successful counter-extremism measure.

The Politics of Exclusion: An Examination of American Efforts to Silence Arab Satellite News

Shawn Powers

Manuel Castells (2009) argues that an important area of inquiry in today’s Network Society is that of the politics of inclusion and exclusion into critical networks of power. The three principle types of networks—media, political and financial—provide the backbone for modern society, and those people, groups, organizations and states that are excluded from these networks can thus be shut out of the increasingly essential circuitry of today’s world. Whereas in previous generations exclusion was often identified and examined in more tangible, physical processes, today exclusion to and from critical networks of power—all tied together via the global media—must also be examined as it has profound consequences on how power relations are negotiated and shaped.

This paper examines contemporary American efforts at excluding Arab-based news networks from reaching their target audiences. Two case studies will be examined: Al Jazeera English’s (AJE) attempts to access audiences in North America, and the US government’s recent attempt to sanction satellite providers carrying television networks classified as “terrorist entities” by the American Congress. Each case study will be analyzed in an effort to better understand how corporate and government policymaking influence the flows of international communication, though not always in the ways intended.

Free access to new Media, War & Conflict special issue: Images of War

The April 2010 issue of Media, War & Conflict, Volume 3 Issue 1, is now published and available online to read for free until 30 April. To access the issue click here. Media, War & Conflict is an international, peer-reviewed journal that maps the shifting arena of war, conflict and terrorism in an intensively and extensively mediated age. It explores cultural, political and technological transformations in media-military relations, journalistic practices, and new media, and their impact on policy, publics, and outcomes of warfare.