Political Scientist at HIIT

Matti Nelimarkka matti.nelimarkka@hiit.fi Twitter: @matnel ; IRCNet: matnel

Today I will talk about

Pervasive participation tool •  background

•  current system

•  preliminary results

•  future work

Social media and politicians •  background

•  parliamentary elections (2011)

•  municipal elections (2012)

Participation?!

Voting

Riots

Discussing

E-mailing council members

Contacting administration

Petitions

Liking in Facebook

Anduiza, et al. (2009). Political participation and the internet. Information, Communication & Society, 12: 6, 860 -878

Consuming

van Deth (2001). Studying political participation: towards a theory of everything?. Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research

Participation?!

Voting

Riots

Discussing

E-mailing council members

Contacting administration

Petitions

Liking in Facebook

Consuming

Graham (2012). Beyond ”Political” Communicative Spaces: Talking Politics on the Wife Swap Discussion Forum. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(1), 31–45.

Dahlberg (2011). Re-constructing digital democracy: An outline of four “positions”. New Media & Society, 13(6), 855–872.

Deliberative digital democracy

Liberal-individualist digital democracy

Hitchhikers guide to Deliberation

A B

a b

Hitchhikers guide to Deliberation

A B α à a

?

a

…

Hitchhikers guide to Deliberation

A B b ≈ a’

b > a?

α = a’

a’ a’

Online world and participation

Machintosh et al (2003): Electronic Democracy and Young People

Jensen (2003): Virtual democratic dialogue? Bringing together citizens and politicians

Albrecht (2006): Whose voice is heard in online deliberation? A study of participation and representation in political debates on the Internet.

Strandberg (2008): Public deliberation goes on-line? An analysis of citizens’ political discussions on the Internet

prior to the Finnish parliamentary elections in 2007

Dahlberg (2001): Extending the public sphere through cyberspace: The case of Minnesota E-Democracy

Baek et al (2011): Online versus face-to-face deliberation: Who? Why? What? With what effects?

They have just been building platforms… What

recommendations would I give to someone building such

system?

They have just been building platforms… What

recommendations would I give to someone building such

system?

“… comparatively testing different forum interfaces to see how they impact deliberation (and other values)

would enhance Saward’s democratic toolkit. …”

Wright (2012). Politics as usual? Revolution, normalization and a new agenda for online deliberation. New Media & Society, 14(2), 244–261.

Presemo and work on that

Backchannels and stuff IRC (McCarthy & boyd, 2005)

Twitter (Elmer, in press)

backchan.nl (Harry et al., 2009)

ClassCommons (Du et al., 2012)

McCarthy, & boyd (2005): Digital backchannels in shared physical spaces. CHI ’05 Elmer (in press). Live research: Twittering an election debate. New Media & Society

Du et al.. (2012):. Augmenting classroom participation through public digital backchannels. GROUP ’12 Harry et al. (2009): backchan.nl. CHI 09

Our Contribution: ���Support for (study of) ���control mechanics���

My thinking

Social structure Affordances and

limitations Feedback mechanics

My thinking

Social structure Affordances and

limitations Feedback mechanics

Anonymity? Message length?

Turn taking?

My thinking

Social structure Affordances and

limitations Feedback mechanics

Computational analysis?

Social feedback? Karma?

Evaluation ‘framework’

Experience

Deliberation

Approaches to study

Maija Matti Minni

Mika

The Study Anonymous Nicks

New threads 2.2 3.4

Responses 3.1 13.8

Σ 3.4 13.6

per contributor

Observation In the context of boarding school students presenting their progress on weekly bases:

1.  Anonymous participants and named participants generated circa same amount of new topics

2.  Named participants were much more interested in the conversation

Example Mui.  

mui  rekursiivinen  mui  mui  rekursio  jatkuu  tuska,  rekursio  ei  mene  tämän  syvemmälle  asia  on  korja5ava  potkitaan  ma7a  kayte5avyysongelmasta  

(with nicks)

Hello.  hello  recursive  hello  hello  recursion  con<nues  oh  my,  the  recursion  doesn’t  go  deeper  this  must  be  fixed  let’s  no<fy  ma7  about  an  usability  issue  

Example oo5e  kaikki  homoja  t.  anonymous  

väitän,  e5ä  naisille  oikea  termi  ois  "lesbo"  väitän  e5ä  "lesbo"  on  puhekielinen  ilmaus  ja  myös  naispuoliset  homot  ovat  homoja  väitän,  e5ä  ''homo''  on  puhekielinen  ilmaus  ja  homot  ja  lesbot  ovat  homoseksuaaleja'  to5a!  

(anonymous)

you’re  all  gay  t.  anonymous  

i  claim  that  for  women  the  correct  term  is  “lesbian”  I  claim  that  "lesbian”  is  a  spoken  language  term  and  all  female  gays  are  also  gays  I  claim  that  “gay”  is  a  spoken  language  term  and  all  gays  and  lesbians  are  homosexual  I  agree  

Futu

re w

ork

Something totally different next!

“These are the social media elections”

Previous work

Golbeck et al (2010): Twitter use by the U.S. Congress. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(8)

Adamic & Glance (2005): The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog.

Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery

Lassen & Brown (2011): Twitter: The Electoral Connection. Social Science Computer Review, 29(4)

Schweitzer (2011): Normalization 2.0: A longitudinal analysis of German online campaigns in the national elections 2002-9. European Journal of Communication, 26(4)

Williams & Gulati (in press): Social networks in political campaigns: Facebook and the congressional elections of 2006 and 2008. New Media & Society

Stromer-Galley, J. (2000). On-line interaction and why candidates avoid it. Journal of Communication, 50(4)

Parliamentary elections 2011 Presence in social media Number of followers in social networks

Parliamentary elections 2011 Presence in social media Number of followers in social networks

Younger people are more likely to be present in social media and they are also more active

Parliamentary elections 2011 Presence in social media Number of followers in social networks

The money spend on the campaing does not increase the engagement in the media, even while the presence is increased

Parliamentary elections 2011 Presence in social media Number of followers in social networks

The importance of the party has no positive impact in the presence nor in the engagement.

Parliamentary elections 2011 Presence in social media Number of followers in social networks

Personal attributes have no significant impact.

Social media ~ (big) data

Status updates Comments Likes Shares Friendships Followership

Social media ~ (big) data

Status updates Comments Likes Shares Friendships Followership

Fancy method

We have a clue

Social media ~ (big) data

Status updates Comments Likes Shares Friendships Followership

Fancy method

We have a clue

About what?

Something interesting…

Normalization Homogeneity

Equality Impact

Data – we have it!

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~55 M of Facebook dumps ~25 M of Tweets

Futu

re w

ork

Political Scientist at HIIT

Matti Nelimarkka matti.nelimarkka@hiit.fi Twitter: @matnel ; IRCNet: matnel