How E-Scooters Are Discussed in Almaty: Evidence from Social Media

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

From Café Culture to Tweets

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

The growth of online communities and social media has led to a growing need for methods, concepts, and tools for researching online cultures. Particular attention should be paid to polarizing online discussion cultures and dynamics that increase inequality in online environments. Social media has enormous potential to create good, but in order to unlock its full potential, we also need to examine the mechanisms keeping these spaces monotonous, homogenous, and even hostile toward some groups. With this need in mind, I have developed the concept and theory of othering online discourse (OOD). This chapter introduces and defines the concept of OOD and explains the key characteristics and different attributes of OOD in relation to other concepts that deal with disruptive and discriminatory behavior in online spaces. The attributes of OOD are demonstrated drawing on examples gathered from the Finnish Suomi24 (Finland24) forum.

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Framing is a political strategy in which politicians carefully word their statements in order to control public perception and discussion of current issues. Previous works exploring political framing have focused on analysis of frames in longer texts, such as newspaper articles, or tweets relevant to specific events. We present the first in-depth analysis of issue-independent framing for political discourse in social media, specifically the microblogging platform Twitter. Building upon the fifteen frames designed by Boydstun, we propose three additional frames relevant to Twitter and provide insights into the dynamic usage of frames by party and over time. Finally we present a global probabilistic model for combining linguistic, issue, and party bias features of the tweets of politicians for the task of tweet frame prediction.

This article examines the theme of social networks in Mark Z. Danielewski’s serial novel The Familiar, as well as the social networks involved in the work’s reception, as a means of assessing the contemporary novel’s imbrication in social networks and social media. It contributes to critical discussions about The Familiar—and to broader conversations about the novel in the social media age—on two fronts. First, it analyzes Danielewski’s diegetic social networks. I argue that, in The Familiar, the planetary social is largely represented as a source of anxiety, as the existential threat of violence is amplified and perpetuated through social media. Yet the novel also explores how social networks offer the potential for resistance and protection from such violence. Second, the article describes how Danielewski’s real-world socially networked communities have impacted the interpretation of his writing. The analysis centers on the Facebook “Reading Club” dedicated to The Familiar and on the online discussion, conducted through WordPress, wherein students and faculty at multiple universities blogged about The Familiar, Volume 1. The WordPress discussion pushes the classroom into the blogosphere, troubling distinctions among academic interpretation, social networking, and public discourse. The Facebook group harnesses the conventions of both social media and book clubs, demonstrating how academic-adjacent interpretation may flourish in contexts not typified by such reading. At stake is a more nuanced understanding of the power and potential violence of communities constituted through social media; of the novel’s ability to represent and theorize such communities; and of the ways that reading communities’ emergence across social media has problematized longstanding conceptualizations of contemporary reading culture as characterized by a series of divisions (such as that between amateur and professional readers).

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

Web 2.0 and academic debate: Social media challenges traditions in scientific publishing.

Blasphemy is an issue that is currently being discussed throughout social media. Each incident always raises the pros and cons even blasphemy turns into one of many issues in the political vortex. It cannot be denied that the emergence of blasphemy is inseparable from the role of mass media, particularly from collegian circle. SUAKA UIN, LPM Institute UIN, and Media Mahasiswa Indonesia, became the leading fighters for facing this national issue. Basically, framing is a method to see how the media tells the story of an event (story telling). Through frame, a journalist creates an event that can be understood by a particular perspective. According to Pan and Kosicki, framing analysis can be one of the alternatives in analyzing the text media besides quantitative content analysis. Framing analysis is considered as public discourse on an issue or constructed or negotiated policy. Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Konsicki operationalized four structural dimensions of news text as a framing tool: syntax, script, thematic, and rhetorical. In the process of writing itself, SUAKA UIN gives more educational side to community on how to be alert of blasphemy in the political vortex, LPM Institute UIN, describes political development in Indonesia today and Media Mahasiswa Indonesia, reports the commodification of SARA in Jakarta political glass screen.

Mass media digitization is an unfolding phenomenon, posing novel societal opportunities and challenges that researchers are beginning to note. We build on and extend MIS research on process digitization and digital versus traditional communication media to study how and to what extent social media—one form of digital mass media—are emancipatory (i.e., permitting wide-spread participation in public discourse and surfacing of diverse perspectives) versus hegemonic (i.e., contributing to ideological control by a few). While a pressing concern to activists and scholars, systematic study of this issue has been elusive, owing partially to the complexity of the emancipation and hegemony concepts. Using a case study approach, we iteratively engaged with data on the discourse surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and source literature to identify six facets of interpretive media packages (i.e., competing social constructions of an issue) as measurable constructs pertinent to emancipation and hegemony. These facets included three structural constraints (on authorship, citation, and influence) and three content restrictions (on frames, signatures, and emotion). We investigated propositions regarding effects of social versus traditional media and lean versus rich social media on these interpretive media package facets by comparing the SOPA discourse across two lean traditional and social media (newspapers and Twitter) and two rich traditional and social media (television and YouTube). Our findings paradoxically revealed social media to be emancipatory with regard to structural constraints, but hegemonic with regard to an important content restriction (i.e., frames). Lean social media mitigated structural advantages and exacerbated content problems. These findings suggest that, as with traditional media, some inevitable evils accompany the societal benefits of social media and that mass media is having a detrimental effect on public discourse. We offer practical steps by which private and public institutions may counter this effect, theoretical implications for wider consideration of the six interpretive media package facets proposed here, and encouragement to MIS researchers to increase their efforts to compare different digitized processes so that a more comprehensive theory of the effects of different forms of digitized processes can be developed.

This study sought to analyse social media’s conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Several conflicting theories about the origin of the coronavirus have been advanced in most public discourses, especially on social media platforms, particularly Twitter and Facebook. Since no studies have been done concerning the study area, there is a need to analyse conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic on social media. The study relied on descriptive research design and premised on conspiracy theories in situations of uncertainties, in this case, the COVID-19 pandemic. Purposive sampling is used to select social media content with messages, particularly from Facebook posts on the coronavirus and the responses or comments from social media users. This data was extracted between the periods of March and August 2020. Textual analysis is the main form of data analysis in the study. The study findings are useful to the ministry of health and the media houses to inform what and how they disseminate information, especially on the coronavirus. This study concludes that COVID-19 pandemic has created the perfect circumstances for conspiracy theories, and research suggests that they negatively affect people’s compliance with preventive behaviours.

Egyptian Women Controversial Issues and the Digital Public Sphere:Can Social Media Debates Be Used as Indicators of Social Struggle in Society? Enas Abou Youssef (bio) 1. Introduction Can social media networks be used as indicators of social class conflict in society? This is the core research question of this study. Social media networks have opened a new digital public sphere era. In Egypt, ever since the uprising on January 25, 2011, social media networks are considered one of the focal communicative tools that encouraged civic participation from many socio-ideological classes to the extent that the uprising was called the "Facebook revolution."1 Since 2011, the country has witnessed many waves of polarization. At the beginning, polarization was political where Islamists were facing secular trends. That polarization shed its light in other [End Page 58] aspects of social and economic life in Egypt later on. Many cultural and socioeconomic issues were displayed on social media and reflected diverse attitudes, approaches, and even values specifically regarding women's issues. In Egypt, among other Arab countries, the assumption that digital public sphere has higher freedom ceiling with socio-cultural issues is true to a substantial extent. Based on this assumption, one can examine socio-cultural struggles in Egyptian society from social issues debated and displayed on social media. Facebook, twitter, Tik-Tok, and reels can be considered reflections of different social classes that have access and are digitally empowered to dominate in the digital public sphere.2 According to Pierre Bourdieu, social status can be analyzed by considering three exchangeable capitals: economic, social, and cultural. In general, economic capital consists of money, assets, and property the individual holds. Social capital includes actual or virtual groups to which the individual belongs, their durable networks, and more or less institutionalized relationships.3 Cultural capital refers to the type of education and socialization that allows individuals to demonstrate their knowledge and cultural consumption and that differentiates them from other social groups.4 This article aims to present an analysis of Egyptian women's controversial issues that are displayed on the social media "Facebook" from one side and their indications to types of socio-cultural conflict existing in society from the other side during June 2021-July 2022. The key question is: What are the recent social conflict characteristics concluded from debates addressing Egyptian women's controversial issues displayed and trended on social networks? [End Page 59] 2. Reviewing the Literature and Theoretical Conceptual Framework 2.1 Digital Public Sphere One of the major points Jürgen Habermas highlighted when presenting the concept of "Public Sphere" is that sphere is "open to all." A public sphere refers to a society that can become engaged in "critical public debate."5 Accordingly, the public sphere would be linked to media for information, communication, and access by all citizens. Media plays the role of promoting the open market of ideas in liberal societies. Habermas thereby stresses that the public sphere is not just a sphere of public political communication, but also one that enables social relations using media.6 However, some scholars have argued that the idea of a public sphere, which is free from state censorship and private ownership, does not exist. Niklas Luhmann, for example, assured that all social systems, including communication systems, are related to the power of money and the paid/unpaid in the economy or the power of who is in office/out of office in politics.7 It should be noted that media systems never function in a vacuum. They are part of the political, socioeconomic system in society. Yet, recent technological factors have loosened the public sphere and opened access to more societal participants. Social media networks created new public sphere horizons of political communication. In 2011, there were revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and beyond. The common aspects of these protests were the use of social media networks as tactics of political, economic, and social protests, creating a new public space that reflected a common crisis of society.8 The digital public sphere is a communicative sphere that is provided or supported by online or social media – from websites to social network sites, weblogs, and micro-blogs. These platforms provide...

BackgroundThe use of social media by hospitals has become widespread in the United States and Western European countries. However, in Japan, the extent to which hospitals and clinics use social media is unknown. Furthermore, recent revisions to the Medical Care Act may subject social media content to regulation.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to examine social media use in Japanese hospitals and clinics. We investigated the adoption of social media, analyzed social media content, and compared content with medical advertising guidelines.MethodsWe randomly sampled 300 hospitals and 300 clinics from a list of medical institutions that was compiled by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. We performed web and social media (Facebook and Twitter) searches using the hospital and clinic names to determine whether they had social media accounts. We collected Facebook posts and Twitter tweets and categorized them based on their content (eg, health promotion, participation in academic meetings and publications, public relations or news announcements, and recruitment). We compared the collected content with medical advertising guidelines.ResultsWe found that 26.0% (78/300) of the hospitals and 7.7% (23/300) of the clinics used Facebook, Twitter, or both. Public relations or news announcements accounted for 53.99% (724/1341) of the Facebook posts by hospitals and 58.4% (122/209) of the Facebook posts by clinics. In hospitals, 16/1341 (1.19%) Facebook posts and 6/574 (1.0%) tweets and in clinics, 8/209 (3.8%) Facebook posts and 15/330 (4.5%) tweets could conflict medical advertising guidelines.ConclusionsFewer hospitals and clinics in Japan use social media as compared to other countries. Social media were mainly used for public relations. Some content disseminated by medical institutions could conflict with medical advertising guidelines. This study may serve as a reference for medical institutions to guide social media usage and may help improve medical website advertising in Japan.