Studying Networked Publics through Social Media and Controversy Mapping

Associate Professor Jean BurgessDr Theresa Sauter

NETWORKED PUBLICS AND THEIR ISSUESWHY PUBLICS?• American pragmatists: Dewey (The Public and Its Problems, 1927) and

Lippman (The Phantom Public, 1927) “Issues spark a public into being” (Marres, 2005)

WHY NETWORKS?• Latour: ‘an actor is nothing but a network’ and ‘a network is nothing but its

actors’ (2011: 800)• ANT – Tracing material and semiotic relations of heterogeneous elements to

see how they shape one another.

WHY ISSUES?• ‘Hot situations’ (Callon, 1998); ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2003);

‘experimental events’ (Stengers, 2005)• Tracing ‘an assemblage of actors jointly implicated in an issue … as a way

of finding out whether and how issue-networks may organize publics’ (Marres and Rogers, 2005: 929).

DIGITAL METHODS

THE DIGITAL• More data, more information, more experts, more issues.• The ‘expansion of digitality’ (Latour 2011: 802) - increased

complexity and new solutions.

SOCIAL MEDIA• ‘Lively data’ (Savage, 2013: 4)• New voices, new publics, new issues, new tools.

DIGITAL METHODS• ‘Reassembling social science methods’ (Ruppert et al., 2013) • ‘Restructuring the study of social existence’ (Rogers, 2004)• Unite qual and quant, micro and macro, structure vs. agency

CONTROVERSY MAPPING• Exploring and visualising the complexities of a debate around a

contentious public issue. • ANT and STS

CONTROVERSIES• relational, dynamic, democratic, productive.• provide insights into the dimensions of a social phenomenon. • Controversies uncover “the state of an issue and the state of its public”

(Marres and Rogers, 2005: 928), and generate opportunities for new knowledge production.

MACOSPOL (MApping COntroversies on Science for POLitics)• To combine ‘the best research in science, technology and society’ and

“the best research on web-based tools’ to build a ‘web-based platform to help the exploration and mapping of scientific controversies’ (mappingcontroversies.net)

CONNECTING SOCIAL MEDIA

• Everyday experience & popular culture

• Role of emotion and affect• Proliferation of voices,

objects, actors• Proxy access to media

ecology around existing debates

• Early identification of controversies

ISSUE EXPLORATION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

ISSUE EXPLORATION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

#vape

ISSUE EXPLORATION VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

HASHTAG AS HYBRID FORUM#agchatoz @repliesJul-Oct 2013

CONTRIBUTIONS & CHALLENGES

• Existing methods: Identification and exploration of issues and associated controversies– Levels of activity– Identification of themes, discourses– Actors and their relationships– Key media resources and websites– Accounting for the materiality of platforms

• Methodological challenges:– Issue boundary & data access– Misbehaving publics– ‘Quanti-quali’/data-driven ethnographic approaches– Visualisation, public communication & intervention