Greg Elmer

Live research: Twittering an election debate

This paper questions how vertical tickers on leading social media platforms (blogs, Facebook, and in particular the Twitter micro-blogging platform) pose new challenges to research that focuses on political communications campaigns. Vertical looped tickers highlight the fleeting nature of contemporary networked and socially mediated communications, since they provide an intensely compressed space (interface) and time to have posts viewed by friends and followers. This article draws upon a research collaboration with the news division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to understand how Canadian political parties increasingly worked to strategically intervene, in real time on Twitter, during a broadcast political debate.

Re-tooling the Network Parsing the Links and Codes of the Web World

This article discusses the emergence of experimental Internet research software or ‘toolkits’ that trace the dynamics of web networking. The author argues that such projects have focused too heavily on web hyperlinks as an indicator of social and political association. The article concludes by offering a broader vision for the analysis of web code, expanding beyond the mapping of HREF tags (hyperlink code) toward an understanding of the larger structure and deployment of all web code and content (including text, images, met tags, robot.txt commands and so on).

Blogs I read: partisanship and party loyalty in the Canadian blogosphere

ABSTRACT This article builds upon current hyperlink mapping research to determine the degree of party loyalty and partisanship in the Canadian political blogosphere. The article develops a hyperlink-based method of determining blogger endorsements as a means of tracking cross-party recommendations. The article concludes that bloggers affiliated with the governing Conservative Party of Canada exhibit the most cohesive ideological and party loyal set of blog recommendation links.

Mapping the Cyber-Stakeholders: U.S. Energy Policy on the Web

This article looks to decentered hyperlinking patterns on the worldwide web as a site where media researchers can investigate the treatment of social issues by websites. Such “issue networks” are offered in contrast to the increasingly portalized and commercial nature of information architecture and interfaces on the worldwide web. The article searches for commonly linked sites on the issue of the Bush-Cheney energy policy in an attempt to uncover the hyperlink patterns and debate among the most interconnected sites.

Consumption in the Network Age: Solicitation, Automation, and Networking

was once Kentucky Fried Chicken, there is now only KFC. Where General Hospital and The Young and the Restless once graced our screens, there is now simply GH and Y&R. Similarly, from the more sublime, yet increasingly more pervasive sphere of advertising, we now find logos, trademarks and miniaturised symbols accompanying the promotional mantra of such disparate entities as Nike (’just do it’), Pepsi (’get free stuff’), the nation-state of Canada (’True North Strong and Free’) or ’the artist formerly known as Prince’ (’party like it’s 1999’). Today, however, few corporations, save perhaps the so-called blue-chip stalwarts Coca Cola, Anheuser-Busch, McDonalds etc, can afford to buy enough space within motion pictures, on the surface of football pitches, ice hockey rinks, Tiger Woods’ T-shirts, or at the eye-level of our daily

Precorporation: or what financialisation can tell us about the histories of the Internet

ABSTRACT This paper outlines a framework for a financialised history of social media companies, focusing on Facebook. Developing the concept of “precorporation”, the paper argues that the years immediately preceding the companys initial public offering offer a micro-history of the forces that produce and constrain the core business model of Facebook.

Going Public on Social Media

This brief essay questions the disconnect between the financial goals of social media properties and the concerns of privacy advocates and other new media critics. It is argued that critics of social media often fail to recognize the financial imperative of social media companies, one that requires users to divulge and publicize ever more granular aspects of their daily lives, thoughts, and feelings.

Networked campaigns: Traffic tags and cross platform analysis on the web

This article defines a new methodological framework to examine emerging forms of political campaigning on and across Web 2.0 platforms i.e. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter in the North-American context. The proposed method seeks to identify the new strategies that make use of campaign texts, users, keywords, information networks and software code to spread a political communications and rally voters across distributed, and therefore seemingly unmanageable spheres of online communication. The proposed method differentiates itself from previous Web 1.0 methods focused on mapping hyperlinked networks. In particular, we pay attention to the new materiality of the Web 2.0 as constituted by shared objects that circulate across modular platforms. In this paper we develop an object-centered method through the concept of traffic tags --unique identifiers that by enabling the circulation of web objects across platforms organize political activity online. By tracing the circulation of traffic tags, we can map different sets of relationships among uploaded and shared web objects text, images, videos, etc., political actors online partisans, political institutions, bloggers, etc., and web based platforms social network sites, search engines, political websites, blogs, etc..

A new medium goes public: The financialization of Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company

This article investigates the impact that the initial financialization of the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company (Marconi) had upon its core business model, its relationship with its workers, government, and the bourgeoning investor class (1897–1905). Drawing upon primary sources from the Marconi corporate archives at the University of Oxford, the article investigates how the company used the new financial disclosure requirements of the day to deploy a compelling publicity campaign for wireless communications.

Don’t Be a Loser: Or How Trump Turned the Republican Primaries into an Episode of The Apprentice

Seen through the lens of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s reality TV program ‘The Apprentice,’ his promise to American voters that they’ll tire of “winning” under his regime takes on a darker meaning. This article identifies ‘the loser’ as a potent new political symbol emblematic of ‘contestants’ who in the face of mathematical loss become ‘bigger’ losers if they fail to assert their right to a non-meritorious victory. The fact of one’s loss is not as important as one’s reaction to it. To lose is possible, but to be a ‘loser’ is the ultimate humiliation that justifies taking extreme, even immoral measures. Contestants who are willing to ‘do anything’ to win are rewarded more generously often than those who, in reality, are the rightful winners. Such a perspective rationalizes a politics of exaggerations, lies and defamation. Extending Couldry and Littler’s discourse of passion, we identify the mechanism that enables and compels some voters to embrace Trump’s divisive politics of ‘otherism’ as astute ‘game playing.’ In Trump’s world, to win means many more must lose. Just as in the reality TV world, however, Trump alone holds the power to annoint winners and exile losers, meaning there is no guarantee of success for anyone but him.