Designing a consequentially based study into the online support of pre-service teachers in the UK

This paper reports on the design of a pilot doctoral study into the online support of pre-service teachers. It highlights the significance of a consequential, rather than deontological, perspective in guiding the development of a study's design. The study initially aimed to explore pre-service teachers’ perceptions and use of social media on their school placements by setting up groups on Facebook and Twitter. However, several problems occurred in relation to the recruitment of participants. It became increasingly clear that there was significance in the positionality of the researcher as an “outsider” to the research context and the potential role for gatekeepers in understanding remote research sites. An ethical framework was used to make a more comprehensive analysis of the issues at play, which helped identify ways of proceeding. A redesign of the study followed with a stronger rationale for the way consequential considerations can help address deontological concerns

Women, sport and new media technologies:Derby grrrls online

Sport has long been viewed as a public ‘good’ — a space for the creation and enactment of the ‘good, healthy citizen’. Yet this public ‘good’ has also been gendered masculine: competitive, public and ‘tough’, with women’s participation historically marginal to men’s. In Australia in recent years, the participation of women and girls has fluctuated, with decline or stagnation in more traditional organised sports (netball, basketball) and growth in other areas, such as roller derby and football. However, women’s sports are still largely invisible in the popular sport media. In this chapter we focus on roller derby as one particular women’s sport that has undergone a global revival, mobilised through ‘new’ youth-oriented media forms. We examine four diverse websites that form part of the ‘social web’ of derby: two official league sites, a blog and a Facebook group. The reinvention of roller derby is intimately connected to the alternative mediated spaces made possible by the social web. Roller derby players and organisers have used online spaces for various ends: to promote the sport community, to make visible the relations of power between those involved, to create and maintain boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the sport, and to express ‘creative’ aspects of identity. This chapter provides examples of the strategies and tactics used to establish and maintain roller derby as a ‘women’s only’ sport and some of the challenges and possibilities inherent in this highly mediated space.No Full Tex

"Imagined publics" - Roundtable session

How do producers and designers of Internet services and contents conceive of their publics? Both media studies and Internet studies have highlighted how actual publics and audiences remain unpredictable, heterogeneous and often quite different from how they are imagined. Furthermore, traditional notions and theory-laden terms are frequently used by marketers, journalists and scholars to refer to Internet publics without specifying in what sense they are using them--e.g. communities, social networks, friends, fans, amateurs, customers. This roundtable focuses on potential discrepancies between Internet professionals’ representations of their publics (including their expectations and motivations) and what empirical studies reveal about them. It will also address the imaginaries mobilized in professionals’ representations of their users and their products’ usage. How are these imaginaries influencing design practices? To what extent do actual users correspond to targeted (imagined) publics? The initial speakers will provide some insights to these questions by drawing on empirical case studies that constitute a sample of a broader collective effort to be published in an upcoming special issue of the French-language journal Communication . These studies look at various imaginaries summoned by Internet devices such as "science 2.0", "brand community" or "political Web". Five speakers (including the two organizers) will ignite the discussion: Alexandre Coutant, co-chair (University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada); Guillaume Latzko-Toth, co-chair (Laval University, Canada); Florence Millerand (University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada); Sandrine Roginsky (Catholic University of Leuwen, Belgium) and Julia Velkovska (Orange Labs, France)

Why and how politicians use social media? Understanding sensemaking and representations of digital platforms. Case study in the European Parliament

The mainstream perspective on politicians who use social media has been based on the premise that social media technology is, by nature, an innovative tool and that politicians are not using it to its full potential. In my presentation, I will outline some of the existing claims made for the innovative potential of social media regarding politics and lay out a number of issues and questions that should lead us to be wary about celebratory accounts. Such an approach requires us to first focus on digital imaginaries as apprehended by social media promoters before looking at its development and circulation within a specific political context – taking into account the different types of actors that may be encountered (internet specialists, journalists, politicians, employees…). As underlined by Flichy, “the imaginaire is at the center of (…) use of the internet” and is diverse and riddled with contradictions (2004:11). I will challenge the mainstream normative approach and will rely on a socio-technical approach to demonstrate that social media technology is not innovative by nature and innovation is not necessarily where it is expected, nor it is necessarily easily visible: it is however part of a “technical imaginaire” (Flichy, 2004:10). Such an approach highlights the existence of a “symbolic universe” (Granjon, 2014:113) accompanying adoption and uses of social media. This will lead me to call into question the capacity of quantitative analysis of large datasets to understand how social media are used as a tool for political communication and the manner in which politicians use it. In the realm of new media, populated as it is by rhetoric about technical possibilities and potentials, it is indeed important to look at actual users, uses and experience. However, there is a lack of comprehensive accounts of how politicians perceive social media. We must therefore examine carefully the experiences politicians make in specific environments and understand how practices are shaped. In other words, “scholars should not take the technological affordances of social media for granted – but should carefully consider the way in which users understand, appropriate and experience social media” (Barassi, Treré, 2012: 12). How to study uses and representations of social media? In this regard, the presentation will highlight the contribution of ethnographic methods to better understand perceptions and uses patterns of social media technology, focusing on the recursive intertwining of users and technology in practice. I will argue that communication emerges from the performativity of social media as interacting with actors’ practices. The performativity is sociomaterial, shaped by the way in which the technology is designed, configured but also engaged in practice (Orlikwoski, 2007). Such an approach demonstrates the importance to look at “social media imaginaries” in order to understand how political actors make sense of social media and how it drives their usages of such digital tools. Indeed social media practices are not phenomena that take place exclusively online but are rather consecutive with and embedded in other social spaces (Miller & Slater, 2005:5). Case study in the European Parliament Throughout this presentation, I will use one specific field to exemplify my arguments – my research related to the use of social media by Members of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014. The approach is longitudinal and sheds light on the evolution of representations and uses of social media over five years. I will provide empirical insights into how politicians make sense of social media technology and the “imaginary world” (Mésangeau, Povéda, 2013) they create, emphasizing the importance of contexts and interactions. Political actors act with social media technology as a function of the meaning this technology has for them, and this meaning is constructed in the course of social interactions as well as individual and collective practices. This research adopts an ethnographic perspective in order to investigate how social media technology is described and discussed among users. It includes a mix of participant observation within the European Parliament (2009-2012) and about 60 interviews with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and/or their staff (2010-2014). The analysis of the representations of social media by political actors does not limit itself to ethnography of situational practices but includes the analysis of published messages on social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter). Triangulation of methods allows the researcher to study practices and uses of social media from more than one standpoint in order to explain more fully the richness and the complexity of the different ways that social media are imagined in the political realm. Textual readings of profiles are conducted and status updates analysed, focusing on those politicians and staff who have been interviewed. Hine (2009) notes indeed that the ethnography of the internet should involve mobility between contexts of production and use as well as between online and offline. This presentation is intended to show (1) the richness and complexity of user practices in relation to social media (2) the contribution of an ethnographic approach to actors’ uses and practices toward a better understanding of the manner in which they understand and make sense of social media and (3) the contribution of triangulation to validate the observations. The research hopes to contribute to the knowledge of social media’s representations and imaginaries within the political realm, emphasizing why and how political actors use social media in everyday political life

‘It’s all about the packaging’: investigation of the motivations, intentions, and marketing implications of sharing photographs of secondary packaging on Instagram

The phenomenon of ‘unboxing’ purchases has confidently and prolifically emerged into popular culture, with consumer-generated images of the branded and stylised shopping bags, boxes, and parcels from new acquisitions now ubiquitous in the social media world. Bringing this relatively unexplored phenomenon from popular culture into the academic literature, this netnographic investigation coupled with in-depth semi-structured interviews aims to understand the motivations, intentions, and marketing implications of such image sharing. Four distinct but interwoven uses and gratifications emerged, driven by identity presentation, documentation, socialisation, and aesthetics. Actions appeared to be rooted in hedonic and symbolic play for both the self and others, but also had significant ability to actively and incidentally influence brand communities, brand perceptions, and consumption intentions. Findings confirmed and extended current uses and gratifications theories surrounding both conspicuous brand association and Instagram involvement and suggested the multi-directional impact of secondary image sharing for individuals, peers, and brands