Engaging Citizens with Televised Election Debates through Online Interactive Replays

In this paper we tackle the crisis of political trust and public engagement with politics by investigating new methods and tools to watch and take part in televised political debates. The paper presents relevant research at the intersection of citizenship, technologies and government/democracy, and describes the motivation, requirements and design of Democratic Replay, an online interactive video replay platform that offers a persistent, customisable digital space for: (a) members of the public to express their views as they watch online videos of political events; and (b) enabling for a richer collective understanding of what goes on in these complex media events

Weaving the internet together: Imagined communities in newspaper comment threads

Online newspapers (and other spaces) are increasingly seeking to utilise user-generated content alongside professionally developed material. However, this might leave websites increasingly vulnerable to trolls, who work to disrupt online communications in online spaces. Such behaviour can have serious consequences both in peoples online and offline lives, and for the development of coherent online communities. One means of controlling is through the manipulation of the online space to create social norms of polite behaviour through the founding of ‘imagined communities’ online. Approaching the issue from a discursive psychological perspective, this paper draws upon comments published in two online British newspaper comment sections responding to the publication of an academic article on trolling. Imagined communities are shown to arise irrespective of the presence of the virtual infrastructure to support the development of these imagined communities. Key features of imagined communities identified here are: individuation (as opposed to deindividuation); mutual influence between posters; shared history for both the users and the online space; the use of humour to cement social bonds. Analysis also revealed tensions in posters understanding of online and offline behaviours. This research holds implications for understanding online spaces, and the interactions between users within these spaces.N/

A survey of current social network and online communication provision policies to support law enforcement identify offenders

Online forms of harassment, stalking and bullying on social network and communication platforms are now arguably wide-spread and subject to regular media coverage. As these provision continue to attract millions of users, generating significant volumes of traffic, regulating abuse and effectively reprimanding those who are involved in it, is a difficult and sometimes impossible task. This article collates information acquired from 22 popular social network and communication platforms in order to identify current regulatory gaps. Terms of service and privacy policies are reviewed to assess existing practices of data retention to evaluate the feasibility of law enforcement officials tracking those whose actions breach the law. For each provision, account sign-up processes are evaluated and policies for retaining Internet Protocol logs and user account information are assessed along with the availability of account preservation orders. Finally, recommendations are offered for improving current approaches to regulating social network crime and online offender tracking.</p

Money, (Co)Production and Power in Digital

This article discusses the contribution of critical political economy approaches to digital journalism studies and argues that these offer important correctives to celebratory perspectives. The first part offers a review and critique of influential claims arising from self-styled new studies of convergence culture, media and creative industries. The second part discusses the contribution of critical political economy in examining digital journalism and responding to celebrant claims. The final part reflects on problems of restrictive normativity and other limitations within media political economy perspectives and considers ways in which challenges might be addressed by more synthesising approaches. The paper proposes developing radical pluralist, media systems and comparative analysis, and advocates drawing on strengths in both political economy and culturalist traditions to map and evaluate practices across all sectors of digital journalism

Youth Jury Policy Deliberation: Towards a Fair and Responsible Internet

Young people aged between 12 and 17 across three major British cities — London, Leeds and Nottingham — were invited to play the role of ‘jurors’ on a case where ‘the Internet was put on trial’. The recommendations reported in this paper are intended to improve digital experience and online safety as contributions to policy. These recommendations derive from the ‘youth jurors’ policy deliberations designed to encourage young people to reflect on their digital experience and collectively develop their own problem definitions and solutions

A novel method to gauge audience engagement with televised election debates through instant, nuanced feedback elicitation

Despite a steep increase in the use of the Internet and handheld computing devices for media consumption, television is still of critical importance for democratic citizenship. Television continues to be the leading source of political information and its relevance has been recognised at policy level. In addition, television keeps evolving technologically and in how it is experienced by viewers. Nonetheless, the ways researchers have measured audience engagement with televised political events in real-time is often limited to small samples of viewers and is based upon a narrow range of responses. In this paper we look at the audience of televised election debates, and propose a new method to gauge the richness and variety of citizens' real-time responses at scale by capturing nuanced, nonintrusive, simple and measurable audience feedback. We report on a paper prototype experiment, in which we used a set of flashcards to test the method in an actual televised election debate scenario. We demonstrate how the method can improve our understanding of viewer responses to the debaters' performances, to the contents in their arguments, and to the debate as media event. We conclude with design guidelines to implement the method on a mass scale in order to measure audience engagement with televised election debates in distributed contexts through audience feedback web and mobile applications