This week I was at Edinburgh Napier University to attend the annual MeCCSA conference. The theme this year was ‘Identity and Belonging’, with a specific focus on how identities are mediated and mediate themselves.
First, I was part of a Glasgow University Media Group panel on the Cost of Living Crisis. I presented an overview of the key findings with Cairsti Russell and Gavin Hawkton (unfortunately Catherine Happer was unable to join us due to ill-health).
Key themes included the debate over the use of the word ‘crisis’. There was also a focus on the impact of austerity and cuts in public services on low-income households. Our results suggest that media coverage of the COLC prioritised business perspectives over those of civil society. Citizens are increasingly attracted to alternative news sources. The slides from the session can be viewed below:
These findings are from the GUMG’s forthcoming book ‘Bad News for the Cost of Living Crisis’. The book, edited by Catherine Happer, Alison Eldridge and me, will be published with Palgrave Pivot in December 2025.
My second paper was on my ongoing research on social media, parades and protests in Northern Ireland. I drew on my book Digital Contention in a Divided Society and article on #Brexitriots in my presentation. It explored hashtags as affective ritualised responses to contentious events in Northern Ireland. I examined who was behind these discursive formations online, and who benefited from this activity. The slides can be viewed below:
I will soon be stepping down from my position as Vice-Chair of the IAMCR Crisis Security and Conflict Communication Working Group.
It’s been a pleasure to work with Virpi and the CRI WG over the past four years. Despite a global pandemic, these years were enormously rewarding and saw a significant growth in group membership and activity. It’s been lovely to get to know members of the WG. I’ve also seen colleagues progress their careers since 2021.
Two Vice-Chair roles are among those to be up for election this month. It’s a great opportunity to work with a diverse group of scholars interested in crisis and conflict communication.
Interested candidates should send their name, institutional position, a statement of no more than 500 words and a photograph to elections@iamcr.org by Friday 4 April, with a copy to the S/WG elections coordinator Andrea Medrado (A.Medrado@exeter.ac.uk) and to Virpi and I as current leaders of the WG.
If you have any questions about the role then I please feel free to drop me a line (paul.reilly@glasgow.ac.uk).
My first paper is entitled ‘Watching over the watchers? Ethical dilemmas in qualitative studies of sousveillance on YouTube. Drawing on my previous work on ‘The Battle of Stokes Croft‘ and the union flag protests, I critique the notion that unaware participants are ‘fair game’ in online research. The abstract can be read in full here.
My second paper, co-authored with Suay Özkula, draws on our systematic review of empirical Digital Activism research between 2011 and 2018. We focus on how activists and social movements within the so-called Global South are represented within the field. The abstract can be read in full here.
If you are at the conference this week please do say hi – looks like a great programme!
Suay Melisa Özkula and I were honoured to receive an award at the annual International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Australia today. Our paper ‘Where is the Global South? A Systematic Review of Regional Visibilities in Digital Activism Research’ received the Top Faculty Paper from the ICA’s Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group.
Best Faculty Paper Award, ICA ACSJ 2024
Many thanks to the reviewers and the ACSJ team (Rasha, Hanan and Betty) for the award.
If you are at #ICA24 you can see Suay present our paper as part of the Digital Activism and Social Justice panel on Monday (3:00 PM – 4:15 PM; Surfer’s Paradise 1 Star L3).
Suay picking up our award at the ACSJ Business Meeting!
The abstract for the paper can be read below:
Where is the Global South? A Systematic Review of Regional Visibilities in Digital Activism Research
Recent scholarship has problematised the dominance of the Global North within communication research and called for de-westernisation to incorporate more cosmopolitan perspectives (Badr & Ganter, 2021; Bosch, 2022; Waisbord, 2022). While some scholars argue that a ‘decolonial turn’ in digital media research is occurring (Couldry &Mejia, 2021), it remains unclear whether this is also the case in digital activism (abbreviated: DA) research. Extant scholarship suggests that ‘Western’ social media platforms and activism from Global North countries are over-represented within the field (e.g., Mahl et al., 2022; Ruess et al., 2021) including in research methods applied in these (Bosch, 2022; Schoon et al., 2020). This has, for example, been problematised within African (Moyo & Mutsvairo, 2018, Wasserman, 2018) and Latin-American contexts (Gómez-Cruz, et al., 2023; Medrado & Rega, 2023).
Other studies have drawn attention to the western-centric nature of information and communication technologies, as demonstrated by the countries from which their providers or designers originate (Arora, 2019). Much of this critical research has framed these digitally mediated exploitations as a manifestation of ‘data colonialism’, a concept describing how user data are processed at scale to produce economic value (Couldry & Mejias, 2021, 2019). In the same vein, cognate theories of databased geographies’ (Arora, 2019), ‘technocolonialism’ (Madianou, 2022), and ‘neocolonial media culture’ (Bosch, 2022, p. 299) illustrate how the growth of “big data” has often been linked to the exploitation of those residing in the Global South as knowledge about those regions is typically produced through the lens and paradigms of the Global North.
The evolution of ‘digital methods’ should theoretically create more opportunities for DA research on the Global South. These are typically software-based methods that draw on natively digital objects, methods, and data (Rogers, 2019; Venturini et al., 2018). However, it remains to be seen whether their use correlates with more representative DA research. The often prohibitive cost of these software packages, as well as their configuration for the study of “Western” social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram, suggest that they may primarily intended for privileged Global North researchers.
While previous meta-analyses and systematic reviews have explored either the relationship between ICTs and political engagement (e.g. Ruess et al., 2021; Boulianne et al., 2023) or the platforms being studied in DA research (anonymised), there has been no research to date exploring the geographic foci of empirical DA research, including in relation to digital methods specifically. This paper sets out to address this gap by presenting the results of a systematic review of DA research published between 2011 and 2018 (N=315). Specifically, it explores the representation of Global South and semi-periphery case studies in DA journal articles, the methods and platforms that feature in this body of research, and where the author(s) were based at the time of publication.
72nd International Communication Association conference, 26-30 May 2022
Suay Özkula (Trento), Jenny Hayes (Sheffield) and I are presenting a paper at the ICA Conference in Paris today (30 May). This paper builds on our systematic review of digital activism research, which was recently published in Information, Communication & Society.
Entitled Easy Data, same old platforms?, the slides can be read below:
Disinformation in a divided society: contextualising the current ‘information crisis’ in Northern Ireland.
In this paper, I argue that the contemporary information crisis in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland is neither new nor a manifestation of the growth of online platforms. I begin by exploring the disinformation strategies deployed by state and non-state actors during the 30-year conflict known colloquially as ‘the Troubles’. Drawing on secondary data, examples such as the ‘psyops’ strategies deployed by the British Army in the early 1970s to discredit the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and protect security forces personnel from prosecution for their role in ‘extra-judicial executions’ are explored. The ‘propaganda of peace’, which sought to mobilise citizens in support of a neoliberal agenda conflating economic prosperity with peace, is also elucidated to show how these practices have evolved in the ‘post-conflict’ era. Recent research on the role of Facebook and Twitter in spreading disinformation during contentious parades and related protests is additionally examined in order to explore how Northern Irish citizens respond to false information shared via social media. Finally, public opinion data from organisations like Ofcom is analysed in order to explore the apparent decline in public trust in professional news media and political institutions in the divided society, which are key characteristics of the information crisis facing contemporary societies. My analysis suggests that digital disinformation is likely to persist and possibly thrive in the absence of a political consensus on how to address complex conflict-legacy issues. In this regard, the current information crisis may have much more in common with the ‘propaganda war’ than previously thought.
Panel at 6th International Communication and Media Studies Conference, 26 November 2021
The abstract for my presentation can be found below:
Can machines of hate really facilitate peace? Social media as spaces for intergroup contact in divided societies
As far back as the late sixties, Johann Galtung predicted that the rapid growth of new media technologies would favour associative approaches towards peacebuilding. The assumption was that strategies to keep antagonists apart would likely fail due to the development of more efficient means of communication bringing them closer together. Despite the pervasiveness of platformed racism and hate speech, companies like Facebook frequently claim they provide space for dialogue between social groups traditionally divided along ethnic or sectarian lines. This paper critically evaluates these claims by examining the potential contribution of social media platforms to peacebuilding in divided societies. It does so by reviewing the literature on social media peacebuilding initiatives and assessing whether these platforms constitute shared spaces in which positive relationships between antagonistic groups can be built in deeply divided societies.
The analysis presented in this paper suggests that these platforms amplify content that reinforces tribalism and political partisanship, thus making it harder to promote reconciliation in divided societies. Drawing primarily on the case of Northern Ireland, a society still transitioning out of a thirty-year ethno-nationalist conflict, the paper suggests that the negative stereotyping of outgroups on social media militates against one of the key tenets of reconciliation, namely that citizens treat each other as individuals rather than anonymous members of the ‘other’ community. Therefore, ‘supervised’ online contact projects, revolving around the use of non-commercial platforms and culminating in face-to-face communication, are much more effective in building peace than the contact facilitated by online platforms such as Facebook.
The slides for the presentation can be viewed below:
an example of Don McCullin’s iconic photojournalism during the Troubles
Last year I wrote a blogpost on a project exploring how Instagram is used to share photographs of the Northern Irish Troubles. This morning I presented preliminary findings from this work at the 8th European Communication Conference organised by ECREA.
My talk was part of a panel entitled ‘Emotions, rituals and memories’, which should be made available later to watch on the conference platform.
The abstract for the paper is below:
Conflicting Memory and Social Media: Memorialising the Northern Irish Troubles on Instagram
Photosharing app Instagram provides unprecedented opportunities for distributing photographs challenging the ‘official memory’ of conflict. The ‘connective turn’ not only renders conflict photography searchable, but aggregates the memories of traumatised communities. This paper adds to the nascent literature in this area by exploring how Instagram is used to share photographs of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles,’ a low-intensity conflict that resulted in 3,600 fatalities and left many more bereaved, injured and traumatized. Twenty years after the Agreement, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided society in which competing narratives over the conflict and its constitutional status remain deeply entrenched. This study explored the visual representation of these narratives on Instagram, with a specific focus on the type of images shared and the comments they generated from other Instagrammers. A content and visual framing analysis of 100 historical images tagged #thetroubleswas conducted between August and December 2019 in order to explore these issues. Results indicate that images of everyday life during the conflict, such as children playing in desolate urban landscapes, and British soldiers, typically depicted holding weapons against a backdrop of civil unrest, were the most prominent visual representations under this hashtag. Those shared by British army veterans depicting their experiences typically sparked a polarised debate between pro-British and pro-republican commenters on the origins of the conflict. While the affordances of Instagram broaden participation in processes of memorialization, they also lay bare the absence of a shared narrative on the violent past in ‘post-conflict’ societies such as Northern Ireland.
Diana Dajer (University of Oxford) and I delivered a paper comparing social media and intergroup contact during contentious episodes in Columbia and Northern Ireland. The abstract for our paper is below:
Social media and intergroup contact during contentious episodes in divided societies: Comparative perspectives from Colombia and Northern Ireland
Diana Dajer, University of Oxford
Paul Reilly, University of Sheffield
Abstract
This paper adds to the emergent literature on social media and intergroup contact in post-conflict societies through a comparative study of contentious episodes in Colombia and Northern Ireland. A qualitative case study approach is used to explore how online social media platforms act as ‘connectors’ and ‘dividers’ in these two societies, both of which remain deeply-divided along sectarian lines despite peace settlements being in place. Using case studies such as the UK EU Referendum and the plebiscite on the Colombian peace agreement (both held in 2016), the paper examines whether there is any evidence of the ‘agonistic pluralism’ envisaged by Mouffe (2013), where former enemies are recast as ‘adversaries’ who respectfully disagree about contentious issues. The cases show that unstructured online contact during contentious episodes was invariably antagonistic, rather than agonistic. Despite initiatives to foster intercommunity dialogue online, pre-existing ‘offline’ polarisation was mirrored and intensified by the affective publics mobilised on social media, with online disinformation and misinformation exacerbating tensions between sectarian communities.
The online conference paper can be found here (please note you will need to registered for the conference to access this).
The panel was recorded and edited by our chair Virpi Salojärvi (University of Vaasa), and can be viewed below (from now until 11 September):
IAMCR panel on communication and peacebuilding
Thanks to Virpi for putting this panel together and please do email me if you want more details about our paper.
Suay Ozkula, Jenny Hayes and I have a paper at the AoIR Life 2020 conference this month. Suay has created a short video summarising the paper, which can be found on the AoIR 2020 playlist.
The title and abstract can be found below:
Ozkula, S., Reilly, P.J. and Hayes, J. (2020) Easy Data, usual suspects, same old places? A systematic review of methodological approaches in digital activism research, 1995-2019, Selected Papers in Internet Research 2020. Research from the Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers.
Burgess and Bruns (2015) have linked the computational turn in social media research to a rise in studies that focus exclusively on ‘easy’ data, such as the ‘low hanging fruit’ provided by Twitter hashtags. This paper set out to explore whether this preponderance of easy data and studies focused on the 2011-12 protests is evident in research between 1995 and 2019 through a systematic review of digital activism literature (N = 1444). A particular focus of the review was the extent to which digital activism research revolved around the use of computational digital methods, case studies based in Europe and North America and data gathered from single online platforms (e.g. Twitter). The review showed that most of these studies focused on social movements, campaigns, activists, and parties based in the United Kingdom and United States, and were conducted by researchers based in universities in these countries. In contrast, there were relatively few articles addressing activism, institutions and platforms in non-Western /Global South contexts with the exception of the Arab Spring in 2011. In terms of methodological approaches, traditional research methods and big data digital methods studies were prevalent. In response to the easy data hypothesis, the study found that Twitter was the most researched platform in the corpus, but that digital methods were not as commonly deployed in these articles as traditional methods. Thus, the paper concludes argues in favor of greater diversity in digital activism research in terms of its methods, participants, and countries of origin.
Dr Paul Reilly 