Posters
Deliberation in Follow-up Discussions on Social Media and News Sites
Poster Session Olivia Schneider, Eva Moehlecke De Baseggio
The Swiss Armed Forces (SAF) as part of a democratic political system depend on societal legitimacy of the organization and its mandates. Legitimacy is generated by complying with binding principles and by societal acceptance. It is about political transparence and participation. In public the SAF and their mandates become visible, they can be controlled and legitimated by the citizens, as part of a deliberative discussion. Political decisions are communicatively negotiated, arguments and information get compared, and verified by reasonableness. Social media provide a new way to communicate and interact directly with the citizens. The official SAF social media communication starts a dialogue with them. At its best the SAF will become more transparent and social media communication may increase confidence, legitimacy and societal support. Digital communication enables follow-up discussions face to face, but online as well. Organizations such as the SAF can communicate directly via social media. At the same time, a majority of the Swiss people consumes news and information about the SAF via traditional mass media. Therefore the Military Academy at the ETH Zurich is conducting a quantitative content analysis of both information streams and seeks to identify structural differences and communication effects in the follow-up online discussions to direct and indirect communication of and about the SAF. Thus it analyzes official SAF social media communication and the follow-up online discussions and compares the results with the analysis of selected news sites coverage and their follow-up online discussions.
The Structure of the Web and Its More or Less Democratic Effects
Poster Session Roger Bautier
The objective of this poster is to highlight the main trends of thought about the effects of the structural properties of the Web on the potential for democratic participation in political life. Proponents of Web Science (in particular Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web) have considered the Web to be democratic because it has no central coordination for creating hyperlinks. On the other hand, supporters of Network Science (in particular Barabási) have said that the Web is far from democratic, as shown by the statistical distribution of hyperlinks (the more a node is connected, the more likely it is to receive new links). In fact, Berners-Lee made the basic assumption that the Web is a compromise between stability and diversity, a result of self-similarity or fractality (at any scale, the same configuration). Hence an ideal situation: for all levels, neither too many links, nor too few, to allow a good diffusion of information. Self-similarity on the Web has appeared (for example, to Benkler, who analysed the wealth of networks) as one of the reasons for the emergence of a truly democratic public sphere. But the compromise between stability and diversity may be a thing of the past: there are new limits to the Web, as the dissemination of information can be severely limited by digital platforms. Given the real modalities of intervention in a public sphere transformed by digital social networks, are we experiencing the abolition of initial self-similarity and its democratic benefits?
The Continuing Gender Revolution: Cyberfeminism and Democracy-Building in Post Arab-Spring North Africa
Poster Session Maha Tazi
I am currently working on an art project in relation to my doctoral thesis which focuses on cyberfeminism and democracy-building in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I am particularly interested in the blatant “gender paradox” following the series of uprisings, which was evident in women’s limited political representation and access to decision-making in the post-revolutionary context in spite of their active participation in the Arab Spring revolutions. Such a paradox was also evident in the extreme violence directed against female protestors during and after the uprisings, and the backlash against many of women’s already secured rights- that is from before the outbreak of the Arab Spring. As part of an art project I undertook last semester, I attempt to represent/convey the idea of the “gender paradox” through several images and photographs where I act as the main “protagonist” to symbolize the idea of the “aborted” gender revolution. I have also produced a video compilation featuring all these photographs, where many women, including both activists and non-activists, “speak back” to the work to share their insights and tell more stories of the revolutions. In this work, I not only draw my inspiration from these digital stories where women tell their painful stories of the revolution, but also from interviews I conducted with several feminist activists throughout the region during the past four years to convey this idea of the backlash against women’s rights in the aftermath of the uprisings and the necessity for the gender revolution to continue.
The Social Construction of Meaning in Cinematic Online Reality: Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Dramaturgical Theory to Analyse Asynchronous Social Situations in Non-fiction Cinematic Online Reality
Poster Session Phillip Doyle
Nonfiction cinematic VR productions (CVR) are considered here as social situations performed by filmed subject and spectator alike. Drawing on theories of performativity in nonfiction, the filmed subject is considered as enacting their identities on a stage determined in part by the constraints of filming: In CVR it is the 360° VR camera around which they perform. The VR camera positions and constructs the spectator in a manner similar to conventional film-viewing but with additional bodily agency that comes with omnidirectional perspective. The perceptual realism achieved by cinematic VR (as a photographic-immersive form) fosters a level of presence and identification between the spectator and the filmed subject that prompts a co-performance of sorts where meaning emerges in a manner specific to CVR as the subject and spectator negotiate its stage. As a study of an immersive filmic form, multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA) allows for the combining of existing methods of discourse analysis developed for the film image with diverse analytical tools apt in examining the body in space (architecture and proxemics for example). The sociological component is addressed through the dramaturgical theories of Erving Goffman whose ideas centre on meaning as emerging as engagements between participants in micro-social situations. By analysing CVR as a series of perceived micro-engagements between the spectator and the filmed subject on the CVR stage, a picture emerges of how meaning is constructed in the CVR text.
