A Gradual Political Change?

In order to understand the contradiction of freedom versus control regarding the internet use in an authoritarian rule, this study is designed to explore a gradual political effect by investigating the agenda-setting effect of internet activism on government political agenda in China from 1994 to 2011. In total, 144 internet activism cases and 526 articles from official newspapers are collected for the analysis and discussion. The results suggest a bottom-up agenda-setting effect from online activism on political agenda, and this agenda-setting effect includes a potential transition from issue level to attribute level. This study also finds that the development of online activism itself obtained a stronger attention from official media, and the continuous growth of activism in forms and scopes generated constant pressure that finally gradually brought about the change of government behavior and strategy.

Exploring a Methodological Model for Social Media Gatekeeping on Contentious Topics

The notion of news networks has changed from primarily one of print and broadcast networks to one of social networks and social media. This study examines the intersection of technological affordances, dialogic activity, and where traditional news gatekeepers are now situated in the contemporary multigated and networked media environment. Using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a topical issue, social data was collected from Twitter. The most connected (and connecting) users were algorithmically identified and then sorted into ‘community' groups. The resultant graphs visually and statistically identify which users were important gatekeepers and how the flow of information on this topic was being structured around and by certain users that acted as ‘hubs' of communication in the network. Results suggest that the ongoing evolution of networked gatekeeping has led to the virtual absence of journalists and news organizations from prominence in social media coverage on certain topics, in this instance GMOs. Normative implications are discussed.

Public Engagement and Policy Entrepreneurship on Social Media in the Time of Anti-Vaccination Movements

North America has experienced a resurgence of measles outbreak due to unprecedentedly low Mumps-Measles and Rubella vaccination coverage rates facilitated by the anti-vaccination movement. The objective of this chapter is to explore the new online public space and public discourse using Web 2.0 in the public health arena to answer the question, ‘What is driving public acceptance of or hesitancy towards the MMR vaccine?' More specifically, typologies of online public engagement will be examined using MMR vaccine hesitancy as a case study to illustrate the different approaches used by pro- and anti-vaccine groups to inform, consult with, and engage the public on a public health issue that has been the subject of long-standing public debate and confusion. This chapter provides an overview of the cyclical discourse of anti-vaccination movements. The authors hypothesize that anti-vaccination, vaccine hesitant, and pro-vaccination representations on the online public sphere are reflective of competing values (e.g., modernism, post-modernism) in contemporary society.

Participedia as a Ground for Dialogue

Participedia (participedia.net) is a wiki-based library of some 1,000 cases of democratic innovations in their historical and cultural contexts. Public-involvement (PI) practitioners can learn about changes in their field of practice. The relative strength of the five dialogic qualities available in Participedia is important because of the values of communicative understanding inherent in the domain of democratic innovations. The question addressed in the study is, How does a community of practice (COP) augment Participedia's capacity to provide a ground for dialogue about PI? A quasi-experiment was carried out among 13 PI practitioners. COP members met face-to-face over a period of four weeks to learn about, apply, and deliberate upon Participedia's online resources. A focus group was then carried out in which the PI practitioners reflected on the qualities of dialogue available in the COP-Participedia experience. Themes from the focus group support the argument that COP-Participedia can augment the dialogic qualities of mutuality, propinquity, and empathy.

Alternative Social Media for Outreach and Engagement

Commercial social media (CSM) play a vital role in support of community outreach and engagement. Despite the apparent benefits of CSM, its widespread use raises important concerns about privacy and surveillance, limits on innovation, and data residency for the organizations that increasingly rely on them. This chapter will consider these concerns in relation to an international research collaboration involving technology stewardship training. Technology stewardship is an approach adapted from the communities of practice literature intended to promote effective use of digital ICTs for engagement. The program currently focuses on using commercial social media platforms for introductory capacity building, but this chapter will suggest important reasons to assist them in exploring non-commercial alternative social media (ASM) platforms. The chapter describes how the technology stewardship model offers a pathway for communities of practice interested in adopting ASM for outreach and engagement.

Centrality of Youth Engagement in Media Involvement

Contextualized within the popularity of new media, youth engagement is a very important concept in the practice of public involvement. Guided by the current literature on youth engagement and media studies, this chapter examines the key engagement-related notions involving youth and media usage. Being informed by a variety of case studies on youth engagement through the use of media within various contexts globally, the chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of engaging youth through media involvement. The specific notions covered in this chapter include (1) the role of “hybrid” media in youth engagement, (2) “intersectionality” illustrating the diversity of youth populations and their media usage, (3) meaning-making through media involvement among youth, and (4) building global social relationships and social and cultural capital through youth's media usage. Importantly, the use of new media can be seen as a means of reclaiming and reshaping the ways in which youth are engaged, as key meaning-making processes, to address personal, social, and cultural issues.

Platform Work and Participation

Platforms like Uber, Deliveroo, and Upwork have disrupted labor markets around the world. These platforms vary enormously in form and function, but generally contain three parts: digital platforms, which set the rules and intermediate communication and transactions between the other two parts, consumers and platform workers. Platform work is a diverse type of labor that developed around these platforms, and it has great potential to increase citizen participation. However, it is under intense scrutiny in light of widely publicized protests and court cases. This report attempts to disentangle the rhetoric surrounding platform work by discussing its emergence and conceptualization, key challenges, and how it may increase participation in the socio-economic sphere. The conclusion discusses how most policy proposals to regulate platform work fail to address the core issues, while potentially stifling innovative practices. Instead, the author suggests more tailored and proportionate regulatory responses.

Social Media and Public Sphere in China

This chapter seeks to answer the question of whether a microblog can function as a promising form of public sphere. Utilizing a combined framework of public sphere based on the theories of Mouffe and Dahlgren, it examines the political discussion and interrogation on Sina Weibo, China's leading microblog site, concerning the Wenzhou high-speed train derailment accident in July of 2011 through a critical discourse analysis. Its results suggest that Weibo enables the creation of new social imaginary and genre of discourse as well as the construction of new social identities.

Salience, Self-Salience, and Discursive Opportunities

Peruvian electoral campaigning, centered on the candidate and lacking a significant connection with contention politics occurring in years previous to the poll, is a very diverse exercise, trying to achieve success through a variety of actions while facing a common-sense interpretation of politics as unreliable and not trustworthy. This fixes an agenda from which candidates have to develop their campaigns, focused on convincing others of their commitment to specific groups and willingness to change whatever does not directly affect each specific constituency that is being appealed to for voting. This behavior is replicated even in Facebook, where candidates try to fix their own issues as salient, but usually failing to respond to the media-set agenda. The potential effectiveness of social media, particularly Facebook, would rest in using discursive opportunities emerging during the campaign to construct self-salience, countering the biases of conventional media.

Citizen Journalism

The last decade has brought several advanced technologies for journalists. This in turn brought in a new era of revolutionary concepts of journalism. One among them is citizen journalism. Although the practice of citizen journalism existed centuries before, it is new media that has accelerated its pace in contemporary times. Citizen journalism is one of the most novel trends in journalism at present. Nowadays, several alternative news sources are available on the internet, such as blogs, social networking websites, etc. These offer a wide variety of news, thus giving a good competition to mainstream media. On many occasions, citizen journalists have reported breaking news faster than professional journalists. With the result, mainstream media no longer serves as the sole source of news. Many established television channels and newspapers are bringing in innovations in their operations to compete with what can be termed as new forms of journalism. The chapter underlines the significance and limitations of citizen journalism, which is only going to grow in the coming times.