Hashtag NZPol: New Zealand Women Twitter Users and Political Participation Construction

<p>This dissertation addresses the research question of “How do women Twitter users in New Zealand construct political participation?” On the issue of the potential of the online spaces as political spaces, historical research has tended to be technologically deterministic, and dichotomous. Further, contemporary quantitative research into the impact of online politics on offline political participation has identified a gap: that the qualitative particularities of political participation online have not been sufficiently researched to provide a more nuanced and complete understanding. In a New Zealand context, what little empirical research there has been on online politics has taken a top-down approach. With a focus on political parties, political figures, and campaigning, there has been almost no research into bottom-up citizen-focused online politics, nor political participation construction more widely in New Zealand. It is in these gaps that this research is positioned. Methodologically, 25 unstructured interviews were conducted using prompt-style questions, either in person or via video-call software, with women based in New Zealand who were active Twitter users. Selective snowball sampling was used as a recruitment strategy, providing a range of participants from different ethnic backgrounds, locations around New Zealand, and levels of political involvement. Interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded from themes based both from the literature and emergent from the interviews themselves. A theoretical framework of narrative analysis was used during this analysis to look for the understandings and social meanings that the participants were invoking in their constructions. The findings were grouped largely into four areas: 1) a propensity towards prioritising primary relationships in political behaviour rooted in experience, the everyday, the personal, and understandings of social location and relationality; 2) an issue-based approach to being political and how discussion, listening, reading, and engagement are foregrounded over traditional political forms, including forefronting an empathetic imperative; 3) specifically online political behaviour that prioritised impact (but indirect rather than direct), complicated simplistic ‘echo chamber’ conceptions of online groupings and different social media platforms, as well as how negativity and diversity was managed; and 4) understandings of what might be a particularly ‘New Zealand’ articulation of political participation that centred a lack of size, being conflict-averse, and a less party-political culture negotiating between global and local political narratives, concluding with an introduction of whakawhanaungatanga. Chapter 9 analyses the critical findings of this thesis: the centrality of primary relationships and relationality, indirect impact, how an issue-based approach to politics is negotiated, and the emphasis on personal experience and emotion. Further, it examines the priority of discursive forms of political participation over traditional forms, and the location of such in the everyday, both in topic and embedding. This is all analysed using Sociology of Space, looking to constructions of political space, place, and boundaries. The conclusion summarises these contributions, suggesting that New Zealand policy around online politics requires understanding of how New Zealanders conceptualise bottom-up political participation.</p>

Hashtag NZPol: New Zealand Women Twitter Users and Political Participation Construction

<p>This dissertation addresses the research question of “How do women Twitter users in New Zealand construct political participation?” On the issue of the potential of the online spaces as political spaces, historical research has tended to be technologically deterministic, and dichotomous. Further, contemporary quantitative research into the impact of online politics on offline political participation has identified a gap: that the qualitative particularities of political participation online have not been sufficiently researched to provide a more nuanced and complete understanding. In a New Zealand context, what little empirical research there has been on online politics has taken a top-down approach. With a focus on political parties, political figures, and campaigning, there has been almost no research into bottom-up citizen-focused online politics, nor political participation construction more widely in New Zealand. It is in these gaps that this research is positioned. Methodologically, 25 unstructured interviews were conducted using prompt-style questions, either in person or via video-call software, with women based in New Zealand who were active Twitter users. Selective snowball sampling was used as a recruitment strategy, providing a range of participants from different ethnic backgrounds, locations around New Zealand, and levels of political involvement. Interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded from themes based both from the literature and emergent from the interviews themselves. A theoretical framework of narrative analysis was used during this analysis to look for the understandings and social meanings that the participants were invoking in their constructions. The findings were grouped largely into four areas: 1) a propensity towards prioritising primary relationships in political behaviour rooted in experience, the everyday, the personal, and understandings of social location and relationality; 2) an issue-based approach to being political and how discussion, listening, reading, and engagement are foregrounded over traditional political forms, including forefronting an empathetic imperative; 3) specifically online political behaviour that prioritised impact (but indirect rather than direct), complicated simplistic ‘echo chamber’ conceptions of online groupings and different social media platforms, as well as how negativity and diversity was managed; and 4) understandings of what might be a particularly ‘New Zealand’ articulation of political participation that centred a lack of size, being conflict-averse, and a less party-political culture negotiating between global and local political narratives, concluding with an introduction of whakawhanaungatanga. Chapter 9 analyses the critical findings of this thesis: the centrality of primary relationships and relationality, indirect impact, how an issue-based approach to politics is negotiated, and the emphasis on personal experience and emotion. Further, it examines the priority of discursive forms of political participation over traditional forms, and the location of such in the everyday, both in topic and embedding. This is all analysed using Sociology of Space, looking to constructions of political space, place, and boundaries. The conclusion summarises these contributions, suggesting that New Zealand policy around online politics requires understanding of how New Zealanders conceptualise bottom-up political participation.</p>

The ‘Open Letter to the Evangelical Church’ and its Discontents: The Online Politics of Asian American Evangelicals, 2013-2016

Recent treatments of Asian American evangelicals tend to focus on a shift of attention from their identity-based attempts to found autonomous congregations to online self-publications. I evaluate this new trend by considering two episodes in Asian American evangelical self-publication: the ‘open letter to the evangelical church’ in 2013 and the Killjoy Prophets initiative from 2014-2016 when their leader Suey Park disappeared from the Internet. I argue that while Asian American evangelical online selfpublication is intended to reform evangelicalism, its discursive nature leads to debates among Asian American evangelicals about whether the cyber-discourse about them is adequately representational. This sobering analysis demonstrates that the identitarian claims of Asian American evangelicalism are not transcended by cyberspace, but are exacerbated by it.

Melihat Perbincangan #Pilpres2019 di Media Sosial dengan Social Media Analytics

Riset deskriptif ini berupaya menjelaskan tentang partisipasi warganet dalam membicarakan beragam topik politik seputar Pemilihan Umum 2019 di Indonesia. Dengan mengambil kasus diskusi online di platform media sosial Twitter, peneliti menganalisis sejumlah hashtag terkait dengan kampanye online dari kedua pasangan calon presiden dan wakil presiden, Joko Widodo-Ma’ruf Amin dan Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno. Menggunakan metode penelitian social network analytics, peneliti menemukan bahwa diskusi online di Twitter dalam sejumlah topik seperti #DebatPilpres2019, #PrabowoMenangDebat dan #DebatPintarJokowi seringkali didominasi oleh akun-akun yang tidak selalu popular serta tidak selalu dilakukan oleh ‘buzzer’ politik; meskipun akun @jokowi dan @prabowo masih merupakan dua tokoh utama yang diperbincangkan dalam diskusi tersebut. Dalam konteks ini, peneliti melihat bahwa media sosial semacam Twitter dapat berperan sebagai mini-publics, di mana diskursus yang hadir tidak harus selalu sejalan dengan wacana dominan (di media massa maupun di masyarakat luas). Selain itu, partisipasi masyarakat dalam berbincang soal politik juga dapat dimaknai sebagai praktik online politics yang tidak kalah pentingnya dalam proses demokratisasi di Indonesia. Kata Kunci: komunikasi politik, hashtag politics, social media analytics, online politics

POLITICS, ACTIVISM AND TROLLING ON THE RUSSIAN INTERNET

In the years that have passed since the social media powered protest movement of 2011-2012, the Russian government has dramatically expanded its restrictions on the Internet, while simultaneously consolidating its grip on traditional media. The Internet, which long provided a space for alternative media and free speech to blossom, is becoming increasingly restricted by a growing corpus of legislation and expanding state surveillance. With legally ill-defined prohibitions on, e.g., offending the feelings of religious believers, propagating 'non-traditional family values' and disseminating 'extremism' in place, online freedom of speech in Russia is at threat. Meanwhile, the Russian state continues to refine its skills in covertly manipulating online discourses, as it has quite successfully practiced it since the 2000s. Yet, because of its transnational configuration, the Internet continues to evade comprehensive state control and offers ever new opportunities for disseminating and consuming dissenting opinions. Developments over the past year, including the series of anti-corruption mass protests organised by opposition leader Aleksei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, have demonstrated how online challenges to the status-quo are still able to gather momentum and create 'real world' political turbulence. The panel presents a multifaceted investigation of how the Russian-language segment of the Internet, often dubbed Runet, is shaped by and gives shape to online politics and activism. How should we understand the particular complexities of these contestations between an increasingly authoritarian state and its citizens? How are these processes facilitated or hampered by the infrastructural conditions created by national and global media industries and internet companies?

Gender and Online Politics: Digital Media as Friend and Foe in Times of Change

This volume highlights gender issues related to using digital media for online politics. The submissions offer a balanced perspective about the role of digital media; this tool can be used for social change or to limit social change. The submissions use qualitative and quantitative analyses of digital trace data and survey data to present a rich perspective on gender and online politics. The collection offers a cross-national perspective including research on China, Germany, Norway, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging: Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in their speeches, the diverging national contexts prompted the two presidents to emphasize contrasting emotional positions: the insecure Finn, threatened by abusive asylum seekers, and the compassionate Estonian, capable of identifying with the plight of refugees. In contrast, the reactions to speeches by Finnish and Estonian citizens on tabloid news sites demonstrated highly converging emotional positions. Online comments in both countries revealed deep anger and distrust of political elites among tabloid news audiences, articulating a complex relationship with the nation as a divided and exclusive political community.