This month the paperback version of Digital Contention in a Divided Society (featuring a new afterword) is published. It can be preordered on the Manchester University Press website here.
I am delighted to be back in Leicester for a book talk on 24 April, hosted by John Coster (Documentary Media Centre). There is no need to register for this free event. Details are below:
Join Paul Reilly (University of Glasgow) and host, John Coster (Doc Media Centre), to celebrate the paperback launch of Paul’s book, Digital contention in a divided society: Social media, parades and protests in Northern Ireland.
About the book
How are platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used by citizens to frame contentious parades and protests in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland? What do these contentious episodes tell us about the potential of information and communication technologies to promote positive intergroup contact in the deeply divided society? These issues are addressed in what is the first in-depth qualitative exploration of how social media were used during the union flag protests (December 2012-March 2013), the Ardoyne parade disputes (July 2014 and 2015), and the ‘Brexit riots’ in April 2021. The book focuses on the extent to which affective publics, mobilised and connected via expressions of solidarity on social media, appear to escalate or de-escalate sectarian tensions caused by these hybrid media events. It also explores whether citizen activity on these online platforms has the potential to contribute to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland.
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 like to express my gratitude to Ekatherina Zhukova and Marguerite Borelli for their comments and input on earlier versions of this paper.
Please join the authors for a book launch event to mark the publication of the book ‘Deconstructing societal threats during times of deep mediatization’. This will be held online on 16 April (9-10:30am GMT).
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
The book can be ordered here and you can register for the online book launch here
What role do photographs and other visual media play in shaping perceptions of conflict? Do news media have a responsibility to ensure future generations ‘never forget’? How have digital platforms helped shape collective memories of traumatic events?
These were among the many issues discussed at ‘Media and Conflict Memory’, an IAMCR sponsored workshop held at the University of Glasgow in November 2023. This event brought together a diverse group of researchers to discuss the role of media in remembering conflict.
Day 1 saw the majority of papers presented remotely. Panels covered topics such as the use of X (formerly Twitter) for memory activism in Zimbabwe, how young Nigerians used Facebook to document police brutality, and Gazan citizens’ use of smartphones to share experiences of military occupation. A session dedicated to the Russian invasion of Ukraine then provided new insight into how memes and digital technologies represented a virtual battleground in the ongoing conflict.
The first in-person panel focused on media representations of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A recurring theme here was how photographs of atrocities such as Bloody Sunday had become used to support different narratives on the conflict. Context was provided on how a BBC Radio series had been developed to help bridge the competing narratives on Irish history and the origins of the Troubles. There was also evidence presented showing how popular memes were used both constructively and divisively to discuss the region’s troubled past.
Memes focussing on legacy of Troubles
We finished the day with a Q&A session about the documentary Freedom to Run featuring filmmaker Cairsti Russell and hosted by John Coster. The film focuses on two running groups, one based in Palestine and the other from Glasgow, as they participate in marathons in their respective countries. Several clips were shown illustrating the restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank, including several unsettling scenes showing settler communities harassing and recording the running groups as they toured Hebron. The conversations afterwards focused on the experiences of the filmmakers, the challenges of documenting their experiences when faced with such repression, and the feedback received during recent screenings.
Freedom to Run
Day 2 saw the focus switch more to innovative methods of exploring conflict memory. This included how researchers used Telegram to examine Russian-Ukrainian battles over contested heritage sites, YouTube videos and collective memories of the Greek civil war, and two papers exploring colonialism and migration memory activism in Portugal. A multisensory presentation showcased how horseshoe cartography could be used to map conflict sites through film, text and collages. It was striking how many of the examples discussed in these panels were under-researched. For example, the Dersim massacre in Turkey has lived on through personal photographic archives while images of Nepti the Tiger, a British military mascot during the Malayan insurgency in the 1950s, remain long forgotten in museum archives.
Participants at Media and Conflict Memory workshop, Glasgow, November 2023
There were a few common themes from the workshop I wish to end on. First, many of the presenters reflected on their proximity to the conflicts they studied. Many felt a moral duty to provide evidence about how these were memorialised and passed down to future generations. Second, there was the lack of a fixed understanding of conflict represented in both traditional and digital media platforms. There will always be a section of the audience who choose not to agree with dominant readings of these conflict memory materials. Finally, while the digitization of conflict memory was viewed as generally positive in terms of accessibility, there were concerns that traumatic incidents were constantly relitigated and weaponised by those with no direct lived experience of them. In this respect, both traditional and digital media often highlight the lack of shared narratives on war and conflicts of the past.
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
Scotland’s distinctive public sphere: a media policy roundtable
This roundtable will explore Scotland’s distinctive media and public sphere, with a particular focus on questions of sustainability in respect of funding, trust and the changing regulatory landscape. It contextualises these questions in a turbulent political environment, in which the constitutional question continues to dominate, and the radical changes brought by digital technologies.
Devolution in 1999 significantly shifted Scotland’s political landscape, and 2014’s referendum illuminated the way in which Scotland’s public sphere has developed in parallel as an often uncomfortable hybrid of UK-rooted institutions and emerging Scottish players. Analysis of media structures in the devolved state have however often been subsumed under UK-wide research which can fail to fully illuminate Scotland’s distinct challenges and nature.
This roundtable draws on a recent stakeholder report produced by academics at Glasgow University. Speakers will share insights on a set of key themes including sustainable funding and support for Scotland’s media and how it works in other small countries, digital regulation and competition, holding power to account in Scotland, and the impacts of global digital media on engagement with local issues. It will then invite contributions from the panel speakers and audiences about the future trajectory of Scotland’s media in the next decade.
Participants will include:
Dr Paul Reilly, Senior Lecturer, Politics Dr Catherine Happer, Director of Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG), Sociology Professor Philip Schlesinger, Professor in Cultural Theory, and Dr Dominic Hinde, Lecturer, Sociology.
Tomorrow (5 September), I will be presenting a paper based on a project that explored social media, sectarianism and football in Scotland. The panel, entitled Scottish Media and Culture, place at 9am in Room W010B (Annie Lennox Building). The abstract can be read below.
#ScotlandsShame: Twitter, affective publics and football-related sectarianism in Scotland
Social media have frequently been identified as a significant contributing factor to sectarianism in contemporary Scotland. What is typically absent from these debates is empirical evidence showing the prevalence of sectarianism on online platforms in relation to football, and specifically how the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers fans is contested online. This paper sets out to address this gap through a qualitative study of tweets (N=84,028) posted during the disorder that followed the Rangers ‘title celebrations’ in Glasgow city centre on 15 May 2021. Results indicate that there was much evidence of dehumanising and sectarian language being used to ‘other’ Rangers supporters. Hashtags like #ScotlandsShame were used by citizens to document their experiences of what they perceived as the ‘anti-Catholic bigotry’ on display in the city centre that evening. The Scottish establishment was criticised for not doing enough to eliminate this bigotry, whether it be in the form of banning contentious Orange Order marches or abolishing segregation within schools. In response, Rangers supporters accused the Scottish Government of having an agenda against their club, as demonstrated by its failure to condemn the anti-deportation protests at Kenmure Street a few days earlier. In this way, social media afforded these affective publics opportunities to contest the dominant media narratives on both the Celtic-Rangers rivalry and football-related sectarianism in Scotland. The paper concludes by considering whether the sectarianism visible on online platforms during such contentious events is reflective of broader societal trends.
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).
We discussed the privacy concerns raised in relation to Threads, whether it can replace the immediacy and news of Twitter, and what politicians hope to gain from setting up accounts on the new platform.
A few selected quotes are below:
On the future for Twitter if Threads continues to grow in popularity:
“I do wonder if it doesn’t have the key functionality of Twitter, which is to break news and tofollow things, and that’s hashtag focused. To me, it probably has a limit in terms of how manypeople will give up on Twitter completely and move there. Unless Twitter does collapse and maybe that does happen“.
On whether people will migrate from Twitter to Threads in large numbers:
“I think it’s harder to pack up and move an entire group of people there [..] Particularly when they’re used to the kind of rhythms of Twitter and whether it’s following events or following things which are breaking“.
On why politicians might sign up to Threads:
“But there is a question mark there about these platforms, it’s as if almost every politician or party has to be on them because they think that’s where they’re going to reach younger people“
Last week I attended an event in Glasgow marking twenty five years of the Good Friday Agreement. There were vivid recollections from former Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt about his experiences as a journalist reporting on the talks at Castle Buildings from the car park outside. Professor Monica McWilliamsrecounted the sexism and misogyny experienced by members of the NI Women’s Coalition both during and after the negotiations. However, it was former SDLP leader and Deputy First Minister Mark Durkan’s reflections on how social media creates a cycle of ‘reacting to reactions’ that particularly resonated. He suggested that it would have been much harder to achieve the Good Friday Agreement in the context of the polarised political debates on social media today.
Yet it would be premature to suggest that online platforms have no potential to promote reconciliation in societies transitioning out of conflict. I found that the most significant peacebuilding contribution of social media was its empowerment of citizens to correct misinformation and disinformation that had the potential to generate sectarian violence. Such false information appeared to have a relatively short lifespan, due in no small part to the fact that tweeters had corrected them and professional journalists had chosen not to share these social media posts in their coverage of these events. Furthermore, it was apparent that much of the social media activity followed contentious parades and protests with little evidence it was directly influencing events on the ground. While it might be convenient to blame platforms like Facebook and Twitter for intercommunal violence, it was the context in which they were used that shaped the interactions between members of rival communities. During periods of political instability the publics mobilised on social media can both help and hinder efforts to moderate sectarian tensions in these contexts.
Would the peace process of the mid-nineties have been possible in the social media era? Certainly it would appear more difficult to keep negotiations private. Journalists like Nesbitt are no longer left outside in the car park looking in. Those within Castle Buildings would also have been subject to much online hate speech, misinformation and trolling by those who opposed the peace process. Yet, it does a disservice to those who negotiated the Agreement to believe that it would have been derailed by such online chatter and noise. While acknowledging the imperfect nature of the Agreement, Monica McWilliams suggested that the leaders of the main parties had the courage not only to compromise but also to explain why they had done so to their respective communities. Fast forward to 2023 and relations between the two largest parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, remain fractious. Both have collapsed the powersharing institutions at various points in the past decade; most recently, the DUP have refused to take their seats in the Executive unless the Northern Ireland Protocol and the so-called ‘Irish Sea Border’ created by the UK’s EU Withdrawal Agreement are removed. The politicisation of issues such as a proposed Irish language act has reverberated online as supporters of these parties engage in whataboutery and accuse each other of bad faith. Perhaps the current generation of political leaders need to heed the words of Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume:
Dr Paul Reilly 