Proactive ephemerality: How journalists use automated and manual tweet deletion to minimize risk and its consequences for social media as a public archive

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482097238
Author(s):  
Sharon Ringel ◽  
Roei Davidson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
New York City ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Human Judgment ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Record ◽  
Precarious Labor

Despite their ephemeral constantly changing nature, social media constitute an archive of public discourse. In this study, we examine when, how, and why journalists practice proactive ephemerality, deleting their tweets either manually or automatically to consider the viability of social media as a public record. Based on interviews conducted with journalists in New York City, we find many journalists delete their tweets, and that software-aided mass deletion is common, damaging Twitter’s standing as an archive. Through deletion, journalists manipulate temporality, exposing the public to a brief tweeting window to reduce risks and regain control in a precarious labor market and a harassment-ridden public sphere in which employers leave them largely unprotected. When deleting tweets mechanically, journalists emulate platform logic by depending—as commercial platforms often do—on automatic procedures rather than on human expertise. This constitutes a surrender of the very qualities that make human judgment so valuable.

Abraham Heschel

2021 ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Susannah Heschel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
West Side ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Public ◽  
Prophetic Voice ◽  
The Public Sphere

The friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr was both personal and intellectual. Neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York City, they walked together in Riverside park and shared personal concerns in private letters; Niebuhr asked Heschel to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. They were bound by shared religious sensibilities as well, including their love of the Hebrew Bible, the irony they saw in American history and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and in their commitment to social justice as a duty to God. Heschel arrived in the public sphere later, as a public intellectual with a prophetic voice, much as Niebuhr had been for many decades prior. Niebuhr’s affirmation of the affinities between his and Heschel’s theological scholarship pays tribute to an extraordinary friendship of Protestant and Jew.

The Role of Twitter in Opening New Domains of Discourse in the Public Sphere

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Badreya Nasser Al-Jenaibi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Flow Of Information

The use of Twitter to coordinate political dialogue and crisis communication has been a vital key to its legitimization. In the past few years, the users of Twitter were increased in the GCC. Also, the use of social media has received a lot of ‘buzz' due to the events that unfurled in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring. Although not as dramatic as overthrowing a regime, the use of social media has been revolutionary in most areas of the Middle East, especially in the most conservative societies that have been relatively closed to the flow of information. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, now have the largest-growing Twitter community of all the nations in the Arabian Gulf. Known for its tight rein on public discourse and the flow of information, even elements of the current regime are opening doors to a new public discourse, due in large part to the influence of social media. This paper explores the social media phenomenon that has had such an impact on the relatively closed societies of the Arab world, examining how it has changed the nature of the public sphere. The researcher used content analysis of four GCC journalists' accounts for four months. The paper concludes that the use of Twitter is shifting the Arab public's discourse and opinions in the region because those opinions are being heard instead of censored. Social media is having a major impact on the conservative Saudi, Qatar, and UAE societies.

DELETION WILL BE MY EPITAPH: JOURANLISTS DELETION PRACTICES ON TWITTER

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Ringel ◽  
Roei Davidson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Public Square ◽  
The Past ◽  
Web Archive ◽  
The Web

This study seeks to understand the practice of the deletion of tweets by journalists while arguing that these uniquely reflect the contemporary fragility of archiving and journalism – two human enterprises central to societies’ ability to reflexively consider the past and present and democratically chart a future course. From the perspective of journalism as a profession, it argues that the study of tweet deletion is a means of examining the constraints under which journalists operate today including the occupational precarity and polarized public sphere with which they contend. From the web archival perspective, this study methodologically informs scholars who are relying on public tweets as a source for their research as well as other social actors – such as NGOs, activists, politicians, cultural producers – who rely on social media as a web archive in their public activities. It proposes to identify some of the voices that will be removed from this public square as it becomes a public archive and highlights the proactive ephemerality of journalistic social media content. Based on interviews conducted in the winter of 2019 with 17 journalists working in New York City, the study examines how journalists perceive the action of deleting their tweets and how they justify it.

Fighting for Rights in the 1910s and 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie A. Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter covers the dynamic period of the 1910s and 1920s in New York City. During these years black women from various backgrounds, native New Yorkers and new arrivals alike, including Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Irene Moorman Blackstone, and Ruth Whitehead Whaley, stepped into the public sphere to fight for economic, social, and political rights. The chapter explores how these and other African American women viewed and tried to use the various branches of government in their grassroots and their formal political efforts, and the implications of their work on their communities, on New York's political machinery, on black women's collective struggles for equality, and on themselves.

scholarly journals Social Media as a New Form of Public Sphere

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
Erlis Çela
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Web Communication ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
First Time

The public sphere is a concept widely studied from many different disciplines such as political sciences, sociology, dhe communication sciences. It is crucial for the well-functioning of democracy, to have a well-structured process which creates the public opinion as a synthesis of individual thoughts acting for the common interest. The concept public sphere in itself and its formation process has gone through a lot of changes since the time where the german scholar Jurgen Habermas brought for the first time its definition. The appearance of the new medias and the development in the communication technology have brought huge transformations even in the conceptual term of public sphere and public discourse. Web communication, especially the communication handled in the dixhital environment is a completely new reality which needs to be explored. Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube etc, are a new communication field being used from the public factors to communicate with the audiences. The technical opportunities that these platforms offer make it possible for the transmitter and the receiver of the message to communicate in a higher level. In contrast, virtuality serves as an inducement mean for the users in the social network to be near the participators in the process of communication.

scholarly journals Social Media and the Public Sphere

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The University

Social media has become a key term in Media and Communication Studies and public discourse for characterising platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Blogspot, Weibo, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr. This paper discusses the role of the concept of the public sphere for understanding social media critically. It argues against an idealistic interpretation of Habermas and for a cultural-materialist understanding of the public sphere concept that is grounded in political economy. It sets out that Habermas’ original notion should best be understood as a method of immanent critique that critically scrutinises limits of the media and culture grounded in power relations and political economy. The paper introduces a theoretical model of public service media that it uses as foundation for identifying three antagonisms of the contemporary social media sphere in the realms of the economy, the state and civil society. It concludes that these limits can only be overcome if the colonisation of the social media lifeworld is countered politically so that social media and the Internet become public service and commons-based media.Acknowledgement: This paper is the extended version of Christian Fuchs’ inaugural lecture for his professorship of social media at the University of Westminster that he took up on February 1st, 2013. He gave the lecture on February 19th, 2014, at the University of Westminster.The video version of the inaugural lecture is available at:https://vimeo.com/97173645

scholarly journals Social Media and the Public Sphere

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The University

Social media has become a key term in Media and Communication Studies and public discourse for characterising platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Blogspot, Weibo, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr. This paper discusses the role of the concept of the public sphere for understanding social media critically. It argues against an idealistic interpretation of Habermas and for a cultural-materialist understanding of the public sphere concept that is grounded in political economy. It sets out that Habermas’ original notion should best be understood as a method of immanent critique that critically scrutinises limits of the media and culture grounded in power relations and political economy. The paper introduces a theoretical model of public service media that it uses as foundation for identifying three antagonisms of the contemporary social media sphere in the realms of the economy, the state and civil society. It concludes that these limits can only be overcome if the colonisation of the social media lifeworld is countered politically so that social media and the Internet become public service and commons-based media.Acknowledgement: This paper is the extended version of Christian Fuchs’ inaugural lecture for his professorship of social media at the University of Westminster that he took up on February 1st, 2013. He gave the lecture on February 19th, 2014, at the University of Westminster.The video version of the inaugural lecture is available at:https://vimeo.com/97173645

Asian New York: The Geography and Politics of Diversity

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
The Public ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
The U.S

This article describes and interprets some of the events associated with the demographic and economic restructuring that has occurred in Flushing, in the Borough of Queens in New York City. Since the liberalization of the U.S. immigration laws in 1965, many of New York's neighborhoods have been transformed by the rapid influx of immigrants. In the case of Flushing, the majority of newcomers have been Asians, particularly from China, Korea, and the Indian subcontinent. The introduction of Asian capital and enterprise into the neighborhood has revitalized what was considered to be an ailing economy and a sluggish housing market. From the perspective of some of the long-term residents, however, the costs of progress have outweighed the benefits. The paper examines the public discourse accompanying the Asianization of Flushing, centering on the conflicts that have emerged between capital and community, immigrants and long-term residents, Asians and non-Asians.

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