Hybrid Media and Political Trials: How legacy journalism perceives citizen journalism and social media in political trials - the case of #jobstownnotguilty

The relationship between Social Media and Legacy Media has been of much interest to scholars. This paper investigates an interesting, contentious and politicised court case where the heretofore monopoly of professional journalism, court reporting, was challenged by citizen journalists. The case concerned a 2014 sit down protest in Jobstown, Tallaght, a working-class suburb of Dublin, where a sitting Minister Joan Burton TD, was blocked in her car for several hours by local protesters. A number of protesters, many months after the incident, were arrested and charged with false imprisonment

Analysis of Photo Sharing and Visual Social Relationships. Instagram as Case Study

This article discusses how visuality, through the mobility of Instagram, modifies individuals’ mediated lives. In particular, it examines how Instagram transforms individuals’ perceptions of their interpersonal relationships. It advances a critical re-reading of the concept of mobility (smart mobile devices) and the new approach to sociality. Conducting an empirical examination, this article delineates the changing dynamics that digitality determines within contemporary life experiences. Findings show that the ubiquitous use of smart mobile devices leads individuals towards the development of new forms and conceptions of mobile mediated visualities. In order to understand the rise of new visual practices based on Pink’s (2007) ethnographic work, this article considers how relationships develop among individuals, visual technologies, practices and images, society and culture. A qualitative approach informed by netnography (Kozinets, 2010), computer-mediated interviews and visual analysis (Rose, 2007) is employed in this study. The critical analysis of 44 participant interviews and their photo sharing behaviour presents the transformations that the mediation and mobility of Instagram bring into everyday relations between humans and technologies. The increased use of social media shows how sociality is affected and mediated by new mobile technologies. Although the social potentiality of (visual) social relationships itself does not offer a variety of verbal communication mechanisms, it encourages offline meetings or the relocation onto other social media. This shows that every alteration in the structure of societies has influence on individuals and on their means of expression

Hybrid media and movements: the Irish water movement, press coverage, and social media

In 2010, as part of the Troika intervention into Ireland, the then government agreed to the imposition of domestic water charges and the creation of a centralized water company. The imposition of charges for domestic water, which was until then universally available, met spontaneous militant action, including mass protests and the blockading of districts to prevent meter installation. The campaigns were quickly dubbed “violent” and accused of being “infiltrated” by “dissidents” and other “sinister” elements, while minor acts of disobedience, such as pickets and sit-down protests, were recast as violent. In response, water activists used social media networks to disseminate opposition and as a critical media literacy tool. This article offers a comparative analysis of legacy print media and activist-driven social media coverage of a politically important court case involving water activists as an example of how the hybrid media system operates in a political conflict