Conceptualising Community Social Media: The Promise of Cultural Intermediation

Conceptualising Community Social Media: The Promise of Cultural Intermediation

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

International association of media and communication researchCommunity Communication Section

Theorizing Alternative, Community and Citizen Media

Cultural studies

Community media + DIY Citizenship = community social media

Network theory

Digital Media technologies

Cultural intermediation

3 case studies that

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

Cultural Studies - useful to understand online communities

Community Media - maker culture as a form of resistant against dominant discourse

DIY Citizenship - making as a critical protest that reflects on power through institutions,

infrastructures, communicates and practice

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

Community Social Media - combination of the collaborative and enabling practices of social

media, with the political and critical engagement of DIY making

Disjuncture with dominant discourse - there is very little adjustment to power structures

through community social media

How can this problem be addressed?

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

Networking power as gatekeeping to include or exclude actors based on their potential to add value or jeopardise the network;

Network power to coordinate the protocols of communication or the rules for participate within the network;

Networked power which are the collective and multiple forms of power, referred to by Castells as ‘states’, within the network; and finally,

Network-making power, critical as it is “(a) the ability to constitute network(s) and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of the goals assigned to the network; and (b) the ability to connect and ensure the cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation”(Castells, 2011, p. 776).

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

Network-making power, critical as it is “(a) the ability to constitute network(s) and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of the goals assigned to the network; and (b) the ability to connect and ensure the cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation”(Castells, 2011, p. 776).

1st characteristic: Common goals

2nd characteristic: Switchers “control the connecting points between various strategic networks” for example “the connection between the political networks and the media networks to produce and diffuse specific political-ideological discourses” (Castells, 2011, p. 777).

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

Cultural intermediation

Bourdieu (1984) wrote of the ‘new cultural intermediaries’ as those roles concerned with new occupations between consumption and production of cultural products.

Cultural intermediaries are ‘the taste makers defining what counts as good taste and cool culture in today’s marketplace’ (Maguire & Matthews, 2014, 1).

Negus (2002) picked up the cultural intermediary framework to highlight the significance within the market environment, which has recently been appropriated for the media (Maguire & Matthews, 2010), fashion (Skov, 2014), journalism (O'Donnell & Hutchinson, 2015) and advertising (Nixon, 2014), for example.

I continue this trajectory to argue cultural intermediation is useful in assembling and mobilising community social media networks for political purposes

Dr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

#ISIS

• Captured between 17 and 21 June

• 408,381 Tweets

• 176 online communities

• Most influential @permbambungan

• Most connected user @terror_monitor

#KoinUntuk

• Collected between 23 February 8 April

• 22,881 Tweets

• Most connected node @istandforbali3

• Most influential @iyf_id

NSW #PlaySafe

• Collected between 13 and 23 April

• 464 tweets

• Most connected user @casmangroup

• Most influential user @seastsydhealth

Observations• Users congregate online to form community social

media groups

• These groups have problems championing critical and sincere political participation

• Cultural intermediation through network-making power mobilise, connect and empower small clusters

• This is consistent with preliminary findings across three research fieldsDr Jonathon HutchinsonUniversity of Sydney

[email protected]@dhutchman

Jonathon [email protected]

@dhutchman