TY - GEN

T1 - Discontinued Public Spheres? Reproducibility of User Structure in Twitter Discussions on Inter-ethnic Conflicts

AU - Smoliarova, Anna S.

AU - Bodrunova, Svetlana S.

AU - Blekanov, Ivan S.

AU - Maksimov, Alexey

N1 - Funding Information: The research has been supported in full by the Russian Science Foundation, grant 16-18-10125-P. Publisher Copyright: © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - Recently, communication scholars have paid attention to the growing dissonant and dissipative character of the public spheres, especially in their connection to networked discursive spaces. While substantial dissonance of the discussions is well addressed, structural discontinuity of public discussion remains under-explored. Reproducibility of the discussions on similar issues or events in time, we argue, needs to be seen as a marker of stability of public spheres. In this paper, we compare the user and influencer structure of two similar discussions on German Twitter of 2016 (the Cologne mass harassment) and 2019 (the Chemnitz killing). We show that the overall reproducibility of the discussions is extremely low, and the only structural element that reproduces are influential media, mostly of national reach. But even the stability of media presence must be questioned, as both intensity of their presence within the discussion and user engagement with their tweets varies much from one discussion to the other. Thus, one may conclude that the structural stability of public discussion of similar events on Twitter is not reached.

AB - Recently, communication scholars have paid attention to the growing dissonant and dissipative character of the public spheres, especially in their connection to networked discursive spaces. While substantial dissonance of the discussions is well addressed, structural discontinuity of public discussion remains under-explored. Reproducibility of the discussions on similar issues or events in time, we argue, needs to be seen as a marker of stability of public spheres. In this paper, we compare the user and influencer structure of two similar discussions on German Twitter of 2016 (the Cologne mass harassment) and 2019 (the Chemnitz killing). We show that the overall reproducibility of the discussions is extremely low, and the only structural element that reproduces are influential media, mostly of national reach. But even the stability of media presence must be questioned, as both intensity of their presence within the discussion and user engagement with their tweets varies much from one discussion to the other. Thus, one may conclude that the structural stability of public discussion of similar events on Twitter is not reached.

KW - Chemnitz

KW - Cologne

KW - Computer-mediated communication

KW - Conflictual discussion

KW - Discussion structure

KW - Germany

KW - Influencer

KW - Inter-ethnic conflict

KW - Media on Twitter

KW - Public sphere

KW - Twitter

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097061721&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/0a24eeae-c5da-359e-b398-09e874d145e4/

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-60700-5_34

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-60700-5_34

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85097061721

SN - 9783030606992

T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science

SP - 262

EP - 269

BT - HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Posters - 22nd International Conference, HCII 2020, Proceedings

A2 - Stephanidis, Constantine

A2 - Antona, Margherita

A2 - Ntoa, Stavroula

PB - Springer Nature

T2 - 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International 2020

Y2 - 19 July 2020 through 24 July 2020

ER -