Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities

Applications of social data science to environmental communication on social media

Effective environmental communication and activism are critical to the development of public support for the policies, ideological shifts, and behavioural changes needed to systemically address climate change. The last five years have seen a significant increase in global environmental activism on social media, yet there are still many gaps in our understanding of the strategies used, their effectiveness, and the challenges they face in supporting the pro-environmental movement. This thesis presents a combination of interdisciplinary case studies examining three under-studied contexts of environmental communication and activism on social media. Together, they advance our understanding of important dynamics impacting the effectiveness of online activism and provide motivation for key methodological shifts in the way scholars approach researching this topic. The thesis begins with general motivation and contextualisation of the work in Chapter 1. Then, I provide an overview of the research which has analysed environmental communication and activism on social media so far and identify key blind spots in Chapter 2. I then present four empirical chapters, each addressing one of these gaps using mixed-method and interdisciplinary computational social science approaches. The first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) addresses commercial engagement and controversy in vegan activism as a site of targeted environmental activism. The second empirical chapter (Chapter 4) investigates the relationship between psycholinguistic framing in posts of environmental activists and audience engagement on Twitter. The third empirical chapter (Chapter 5) presents an experiment in which the correlational findings of the previous chapter, and a potential cognitive mechanism driving them, are investigated offline. The fourth and final empirical chapter (Chapter 6) compares the topic and sentiment framing used to discuss COP26 conference outcomes in a sample of English-language mainstream (Australia, India, UK, and US) and social media (Facebook and Instagram), paying particular attention to how different stakeholders (major news outlets, politicians, activists, and NGOs) overlap and diverge in their commentary and discussing what implications this has for the development of coherent public dialogue on environmental policy moving forward. To wrap up the thesis, the Conclusion (Chapter 7) summarises the empirical work and individual contributions of each chapter. It also discusses contributions of the thesis as a whole, bringing the findings of each study into conversation with one another to motivate the importance for future research to 1) take increasingly interdisciplinary approaches to the study of environmental activism and evaluations of its effectiveness, and 2) move away from social media-only studies and connect social media dynamics to micro- and macro-level offline outcomes

We have got company – bystanders’ evaluations of organizational responses to user posts on social media

Social media has changed our lives in many ways. The way we communicate is probably affected the most, since social media platforms turn audiences into communicators. By facing these new challenges, organizations have to make sure, not only to satisfy the primary target audience, as it was with mass media before the rise of social media, but also satisfy the online community who observes marketing relevant interactions. The so called by-standers outnumber a single customer with whom the organization interacts with, and therefore they are an important target group. Thus, when organizations are interacting with online users, it is even more critical to determine how the by-stander evaluates the organizational behavior than the actual interaction partner. Altogether, the present dissertation aims to address these new developments by deepening the understanding of by-standers’ evaluation of organizational responses on social media. Two empirical research papers respectively address one of the two discussed major challenges for marketers. Paper 1 aims to investigate how companies should reply to complaints on social media to achieve favorable outcomes of by-standers. Paper 2 examines if the post type of information is crucial for users to determine credibility

Hot in Twitter: Assessing the emotional impacts of wildfires with sentiment analysis

[Abstract]: Social media generates a significant amount of information in terms of perceptions, emotions, and sentiments. We present an economic analysis using the information provided by Twitter messages, describing impressions and reactions to wildfires occurring in Spain and Portugal. We use natural language processing techniques to analyze this text information. We generate a hedonometer estimate on how sentiments about wildfires vary with exposure, measured via Euclidean distance from the catastrophic event, and air quality. We find that direct exposure to wildfires significantly decreases the expressed sentiment score and increases the expressions of fear and political discontent (protest). Economic valuation of these losses has been computed to be between 1.49€–3.50€/year/Kilometer of distance to the closest active fire. Welfare losses in terms of air quality have been computed as 4.43€–6.59€/day of exposure.Agencia Estatal de Investigacion, ´ RETOS program, grant number PID2019-111255RB-I0

Twitter Use and its Effects on Student Perception of Instructor Credibility

This study investigates college student perceptions of instructor credibility based on the content of an instructor’s Twitterfeed and student beliefs about Twitter as a communication tool. Quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized to explore the effects of three manipulated Twitter feeds (e.g., tweeting social topics, professional topics, or a blend) on student perceptions of instructor credibility and examine how students perceive Twitter as a teaching tool. Quantitative results suggest that the profile with professional content was most credible. Credibility ratings were also associated with other Twitter use variables, including positive student attitudes about instructors who use Twitter and Tweet frequency. Coded qualitative responses indicated that Twitter may be both an asset and an obstacle for instructors

Fandom versus citizenship: the “weirdisation”of politics

This paper examines occurrences of humour in Twitter-fed celebrity-follower communities. Using a small, one-month sample of the Twitter feeds of 12 British celebrities, we examined political and humorous content of celebrity tweets and the first five responses from their followers. From this preliminary study, we found that the notion of “weirdisation” strongly emerges, together with the new conceptual tool of “shards of humour”.Keywords:fandoms

The role of Twitter in legitimating the Energy East Pipeline, Canada

This thesis explores the value of social media in contemporary democratic practices; more precisely, on the use of social media in Canadian tar-sands pipeline infrastructure debate through the lens of public sphere theory. The study aims to contribute to improved understanding of Twitter’s shaping the course of the proposed Energy East pipeline, its legitimacy and formation of public debate around it. It is based on a mixed-methods approach employing both qualitative and quantitative research methodology. Data was collected from a topic-specific content stream on Twitter, followed by a series of semi-structured interviews with some of the most influential users within a sample of collected tweets. The study identified the users, the content and socio-political context of tweets that are posted in connection with the pipeline as well as users’ perceptions of Twitter as a tool for online deliberative democratic practices. Findings indicate Twitter is praised for offering an enabling environment for citizen journalism on real-time events, its swiftness of information dissemination, enabling contact with individuals outside of users’ established social circles and the power to influence public opinion. However, the medium is not without limitations which diminish its role as an optimal tool for democratic online public deliberation. My study suggests the main hindrance for this is the absence of constructive debate due to Twitter’s character-limitation of posts and predominantly one-sided communicative processes that take place within this medium. Its role in Energy East debate remains constrained within informative and reactive aspects of its service on current developments on the pipeline polemics and has as such a limited influence on legitimation processes surrounding the project. I therefore conclude that Twitter represents only a fragment of what can be considered the new public sphere and definitely not one-size-fits-all solution to the contemporary legitimation crisis of proposed large-scale industrial projects such as Energy East pipeline.M-IE

Can environmental citizenship be enhanced through social media? A case study of engagement in a UK University

The research presented in this thesis focuses around the question: “can social media tools be used effectively to foster a participatory process that increases environmental citizenship and promote pro-environmental behaviour-change?”. The research aims to understand the role of staff and students in the socio-technical system that influences an institution’s environmental impact. Users need not to be educated, but empowered in order to be able to take decisions that would reduce the environmental impact of their institutions. Therefore a participatory process is suggested as the right tool to nurture environmental citizens, who will be able to take ‘right’ and ‘good’ decisions about their pro-environmental actions. In the last years, social media have emerged as a worldwide phenomenon. But alongside the grand claims of a social media inspired ‘revolution’ lie more nuanced questions around the role of digital tools in ‘every day’ contexts, and whether or not they are facilitating a cultural change or merely adding to the noise of modern life. The thesis contributes to the debate through presenting findings from an action research study at an East Midlands University in which a case study approach was implemented to explore the potentialities offered by participating in decision-making regarding pro-environmental issues in the institutional context, as they are mediated by social media. To generate behaviour-change the two correlated theories of public engagement and environmental citizenship were tested. Findings indicate that behaviour change and enhanced environmental citizenship are achievable through participation using social media, as several interviewees reported a change or a reinforcement of already existing pro-environmental behaviours as a consequence of the campaign. However, the reported changes were minor and it is difficult to advocate that they could noticeably contribute to the requested reduction targets on carbon emission from behaviour-change of the HE sector

Diffusion of tax-related communication on social media

Taxation is a recurrent topic in people's conversations, also on social media. Yet, informal channels such as social media have been widely neglected in studies that examined how information about taxation spreads across social networks. Using posts on Twitter (currently called “X”) with taxation related hashtags from 2010 to 2020, we examined what linguistic cues are associated with information diffusion, that is, the number of retweets a message receives. The use of emotional, moral, and moral-emotional language in a tweet was associated with greater diffusion (i.e., more retweets). In contrast to the negativity bias literature, positive emotional words were more strongly associated with information diffusion than negative emotional words. Among the specific emotions that taxation research has focused on, only the use of anger (but not anxiety) words was associated with more retweets. The study contributes to the literature by examining individuals’ reasoning about taxes