I have written an essay for the University of Glasgow Social Sciences Hub on the role of social media in protests and disorder in divided societies. In the piece, I reflect on something I wrote about the 2011 English riots and consider how online platforms are used by citizens to frame contentious issues. I argue that the indirect effects of online incivility seen during divisive events can be detrimental for efforts to promote peace and reconciliation in divided societies.
Thanks to Andrew MacIver for the help in publishing this. It can be read in full here and you can buy a copy of Digital Contention in a Divided Society here.
I have a new article out in Information, Communication & Society this week. Entitled ‘Random access memories or clichéd representations? Exploring historical photographs of the troubles on Instagram’, it explores 100 historical photographs of the Troubles on Instagram.
.The abstract can be read below:
Social media provide unprecedented opportunities for the distribution of photographs capturing experiences of conflict. Instagram in particular renders conflict photography searchable, whilst also aggregating the memories of traumatised communities. This paper adds to the nascent literature in this area by exploring how the photosharing app 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 traumatised. Two decades on from the Belfast Agreement, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided society in which competing narratives over the conflict remain deeply entrenched. This study explored photographic representation of the Troubles, with a specific focus on who was represented in these images and whether they were evoke personal memories of the conflict. A content and narrative analysis of 100 historical images tagged #thetroubles was conducted in order to explore these issues. Results indicate that images showing the ‘peculiarity’ of everyday life during the conflict, such as armed British soldiers standing in close quarters to children playing in the street, were the most prominent visual representations under this hashtag. The memories evoked by such historical photographs reinforce zero-sum narratives on conflict, rather than promote new interpretations that build support for peace in ‘post-conflict’ societies.
The article is published Open Access and can be found here
Many thanks to the editors and reviewers for their help in getting this out. i would ALSO like to express my gratitude to Ekatherina Zhukova and Marguerite Borelli for their comments and input on earlier versions of this paper.
My second book Digital Contention in a Divided Society is due out in paperback on 26 March 2024. It will include a new chapter that explores the role of online platforms in contentious events between 2016 and 2023. It will be on sale for £20 (much more affordable than the hardback version).
Many thanks to Rob Byron and the Manchester University Press team for their help in bringing this to fruition. I am also told there may be a new cover- more on this soon.
I am hoping do do some in-person book talks this time (when the book was launched in 2021 this wasn’t possible due to COVID-19 regulations). I will post details of these on here when they are confirmed. If you are interested in hosting one of these talks then please do contact me (paul.reilly@glasgow.ac.uk).
The updated version of Digital Contention can be preordered here
Virpi Salojärvi (University of Helsinki/University of Vassa) and I are pleased to announce the publication of our co-edited book (De)constructing societal threats during times of deep mediatization today. A description of the book can be found below:
This book explores how both elite and non-elite actors frame societal threats such as the refugee crisis and COVID-19 using both digital and traditional media. It also explores ways in which the framing of these issues as threatening can be challenged using these platforms.
People typically experience societal threats such as war and terrorism through the media they consume, both on and offline. Much of the research in this area to date focuses on either how political and media elites present these issues to citizens, or audience responses to these frames. This book takes a different approach by focusing on how issues such as the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are both constructed and deconstructed in an era of hybrid media. It draws on a range of traditional and innovative research methodologies to explore how these issues are framed as ‘threats’ within deeply mediatized societies, ranging from content analysis of newspaper coverage of the Macedonian name dispute in Greece to investigating conspiratorial communities on YouTube using Systemic Functional Linguistics. In doing so, this book enriches our understanding of not only how civil and uncivil actors frame these issues, but also their impact on societal resilience towards future crises.
(De)constructing Societal Threats During Times of Deep Mediatization will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Communication Studies, Media Studies, Journalism, Cultural Studies, Research Methods, Sociology and Politics.
The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Communication Review. Many thanks to our authors for their excellent contributions, which are listed below:
1. Framing the Macedonian name dispute in Greece: Nationalistic journalism and the existential threat Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis
2. The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality Zhe Xu and Mengrong Zhang
3. A systemic functional linguistics approach to analysing white supremacist and conspiratorial Ddscourse on YouTube Olivia Inwood and Michele Zappavigna
4. Internet regulation and crisis-related resilience: From Covid-19 to existential risks Gregory Asmolov
Ceri Ashwell and I have a chapter in the book based on our work on the Mary Beard Twitterstorm (see here for an article we previously published in Information, Communication & Society).
The title and abstract for the chapter are below:
Resisting (everyday) racism on social media: Analysing responses to the 2018 Mary Beard Twitter-storm
Big tech companies like Twitter have often been accused of not doing enough to address online hate speech. The algorithms and designs of social media have facilitated new forms of platformed racism in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). While they undoubtedly amplify cyber hate, these online platforms also constitute important spaces in which people of colour (PoC), and their allies, can challenge colorblind racism and white privilege within contemporary societies. This chapter uses the 2018 Mary Beard Twitterstorm to explore how Twitter is used by activists to both highlight and counteract these tropes. The Cambridge scholar was heavily criticised by anti-racist activists for a tweet which appeared to condone the sexual misconduct of Oxfam aid workers in Haiti following an earthquake in January 2010. Her reference to the difficulty of ‘sustaining civilised values’ in the disaster zone was considered prima facie evidence of her whiteness and privilege. Researchers of colour, such as Beard’s Cambridge colleague Dr. Priya Gopal used the tweet to reflect on the ‘casual racism’ they experienced working in UK Higher Education institutions. These acts of resistance towards racial inequality and injustice within the academy led to Gopal herself being subject to much abuse and trolling from Beard’s supporters. This paper sets out to explore whether these acts of resistance can facilitate informal learning about issues pertaining to white privilege and frailty in countries such as the UK. It does so by reviewing the literature on social media and whiteness, providing background on the Mary Beard Twitterstorm, and presenting the results of a qualitative content analysis of 1718 unique tweets containing ‘Mary Beard’, posted between 16 and 20 February 2018. Results indicate that there were nearly twice as many tweets criticising the Cambridge scholar for perpetuating white privilege and frailty than defending her tweet. While many of these tweets were agonistic rather than antagonistic in nature, there was little sign that those talking about the controversy on the site were reflecting on their own white privilege. The burden of talking about these issues fell on the few PoC in the study, who were invariably singled out for abuse by Beard’s supporters. Nevertheless, this study demonstrates the crucial role of opinion leaders such as Gopal in leading difficult conversations about racism and whiteness online.
Many thanks to Stamatis, Anastasia and Maria for the invitation to participate and their hard work in pulling together such a great book on social movements and activism.
The book can be ordered here. If you would like a preprint copy of our chapter then please contact me (paul.reilly@glasgow.ac.uk).
My chapter is entitled ‘Watching the Watchers: Sousveillance as a political response to surveillance society’.
The Introduction to the chapter can be read below.
Scholars such as Thompson (2018) have argued that the growth of digital technologies have led to a new era of ‘mediated visibility’ in which virtually every bystander has the means to provide audio-visual evidence of what they have witnessed. This raises important questions about whether mediated witnessing has the potential to destablise power relations within contemporary societies given that the ‘field of vision’ is no longer limited to specific locales. Put simply, elites are more likely have their actions scrutinised in media environments where they are no longer able to control the images of them that circulate online (Thompson, 2005). This chapter explores this visibility through the politics of sousveillance, a form of ‘inverse surveillance’ said to empower citizens to “access and collect data about their surveillance” through the use of information and communication technologies (Mann et al, 2003: 333). This is a concept developed by engineer Steve Mann, who encouraged citizens to wear cameras in order to counteract the pervasive organisational surveillance synonymous with contemporary societies. The rationale for this ‘undersight’ was that the data generated by corporate and police surveillance of private citizens lacked integrity and was “less than the full truth” (Mann 2017:3). Reductive analyses of sousveillance as a panacea to surveillance have gradually been replaced by more contextualised studies recognising their coexistence within contemporary societies. Both have been conceptualised as orthogonal vectors in the Veillance Plane, an eight-point compass showing how levels of oversight and undersight can be altered by the number of people recording footage on their smartphones within physical locations.
The chapter is structured as follows. First, the concept of sousveillance will be introduced and the Veillance Plane defined. Second, prominent examples of sousveillant practices will be discussed in order to explore the motivations underpinning the use of technology to record the actions of authority figures, the type of imagery being shared, and the impact of such activity. These will include the Black Lives Matter campaign to focus attention on violent police attacks on African-Americans since 2014 (Freelon et al, 2016a) and loyalist protesters use of social media to highlight police brutality in Northern Ireland (Reilly, 2020a; 2021). Both constitute contexts in which public confidence in policing is traditionally low and marginalised citizens are motivated to engage in ‘inverse surveillance’ due to their prior negative interactions with individual police officers. The chapter will consider how audience responses to these acts of sousveillance are influenced by news media coverage of these incidents. It concludes by considering whether sousveillant practices facilitated via social media actually constitute a shift in informational power from elites to marginalised groups. A future research agenda for exploring the communicative power of sousveillance is elucidated.
The book can be purchased online and you can read a preprint of my chapter here.
(De)constructing societal threats during times of deep mediatization provides an introduction to a Special Issue based on research presented in the Crisis, Security and Conflict Communication working group at the conference of International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) in 2021.
We provide an overview of the literature on mediatization of conflict and crises, with a specific focus on how online platforms present both challenges and opportunities to the agenda-setting powers of mainstream media and political institutions.
The list of papers published in our Special Issue are as follows:
Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis (2022) Framing the Macedonian name dispute in Greece: nationalistic journalism and the existential threat, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129125
Zhe Xu & Mengrong Zhang (2022) The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129118
Olivia Inwood & Michele Zappavigna (2022) A Systemic Functional Linguistics Approach to Analyzing White Supremacist and Conspiratorial Discourse on YouTube, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129122
Gregory Asmolov (2022) Internet regulation and crisis-related resilience: from Covid-19 to existential risks, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129124
We would like to thank all the authors, reviewers and the editorial team at TCR for their help bringing this Special Issue together.
I have a new journal article out this month in the European Journal of Communication. Entitled ‘Can social media help end the harm? Public information campaigns, online platforms, and paramilitary-style attacks in a deeply divided society’, the paper explores how social media was used to promote the Ending the Harm campaign in Northern Ireland. This built on research conducted with Dr. Faith Gordon (ANU) in 2019.
The abstract can be read below:
Online platforms can help public information campaigns reach target audiences who are unlikely to engage with content distributed via traditional media. This paper adds to this emergent literature, as the first study of the Ending the Harm campaign, which is designed to change public discourse about paramilitary-style attacks in Northern Ireland. Campaign effects were explored through interviews (N = 7) conducted with key stakeholders, as well as the results of a quantitative survey of residents (N = 805) in areas most affected by these attacks. Results indicate that exposure to the ETH advertisements correlated with a belief that PSAs were unjustified. Platforms like Snapchat helped the campaign reach younger demographics (16–34 years old). Nevertheless, it was unclear whether self-reported changes in attitude toward PSAs would lead to sustained behavioral changes.
The paper is published Open Access and can be read and downloaded (for free) here
Many thanks to EJC, the anonymous reviewers, the interviewees, Damian Boylan (NI Executive Programme for Tackling Paramilitarism, Criminality & Organised Crime), and Faith for their input. I will hopefully have an update on this work later in the summer.
New article published in Information, Communication & Society this month
Ceri Ashwell and I have an article out this week in Information, Communication & Society. Entitled ‘Exploring Discourses of Whiteness in the Mary Beard Oxfam-Haiti Twitterstorm’, this paper draws on the results of a content analysis of tweets discussing the Twitterstorm.
The abstract can be read below:
Social media may have amplified the Black Lives Matter movement, but companies like Facebook are often accused of not doing enough to address online hate speech. These platforms nevertheless have the potential to facilitate informal learning about the color blind racism through which whites rationalize the inequalities and injustices experienced by People of Color (PoC). This paper adds to the emergent literature in this area by exploring a high-profile Twitterstorm in February 2018 following a tweet from Cambridge University Professor Mary Beard about the sexual misconduct of Oxfam aid workers in Haiti. Academics like Dr Priya Gopal faced much criticism for suggesting the tweet was evidence of the white fragility and privilege to which they were frequently subjected. A qualitative content analysis of 1718 unique tweets containing ‘Mary Beard’, posted between 16 and 20 February 2018, was conducted to assess whether there was much evidence of agonistic debate between critics and supporters of Beard about whiteness. Results indicate that there were twice as many tweets criticising Beard for her performative white privilege and frailty than those defending her. While the framing of the Twitterstorm was generally agonistic, there was little evidence of informal learning, with PoC conspicuously under-represented. Indeed, the burden of talking about racism and whiteness fell on the few PoC in the corpus, in much the same way as the ‘pre-social media’ era.
50 free copies of the article are available here and a preprint can be downloaded here.
Many thanks to the editors and reviewers for their help in getting this out. And big congratulations to Ceri for her first publication!
New article with Suay Özkula and Jenny Hayes published in iCS
Suay Özkula, Jenny Hayes and I have an article out today in Information, Communication & Society. Entitled ‘Easy data, same old platforms? A systematic review of digital activism methodologies’, this paper draws on the results of a review of 315 articles published between 1994 and 2018.
The abstract can be read below:
Burgess and Bruns (2015) have linked the computational turn in social media research to an increase in the number of studies focussing exclusively on ‘easy data’, such as the ‘low hanging fruit’ provided by Twitter hashtags. This paper explores whether there is a preponderance of such easy data in digital activism research through a systematic review of relevant journal articles published between 2011 and 2018 (N = 315). Specifically, it examines whether computational digital methods have become increasingly prominent in digital activism research during this period. A key focus of the paper is the extent to which digital activism research focused on easily accessible Twitter data, and whether these were obtained via standard API services. Results indicate that (1) traditional research methodologies were more commonly deployed in these articles than digital methods, but (2) Twitter was the most researched platform in the corpus, and (3) single-platform hashtag studies were an archetype of digital activism research alongside single-platform Facebook studies and holistic approaches (hybrid, multi-method & multi-sited, e.g., ethnography). The paper concludes by advocating for greater diversity in terms of the methodological approaches adopted in digital activism research.
Many thanks to the editors, reviewers, and the iCS team for their help in getting this out. And of course to Suay and Jenny, for their collaboration on this. Hopefully the first of many!
There are 50 free downloads of the article, which can be accessed here
Dr Paul Reilly 