This illuminating Vanity Fair article captures an important transition in digital politics, as the data science driven Clinton campaign was eclipsed by the social media savvy Trump campaign: While Democrats spent the last decade running A/B tests and refining their voter models, Republicans stumbled into learning how to weaponize content […]
This passage from Tim Wu’s The Master Switch pg 225 offers a useful account for making sense of the rise of a figure like Lawrence Fox. When the ‘arms race of exposure’ is more intense than ever because social media means a great many of us have entered into it, […]
I’ve resisted blogging about the Labour leadership election in spite of the fact I’m both obsessing about it and deeply conflicted about who to support. To my surprise I’m taking Lisa Nandy very seriously and this is in large part because she seems to be the only candidate to have […]
From The Hybrid Media system pg 254-255. It’s not about followers, as much as the capacity to leverage a following into online events which invite media coverage which would otherwise be restricted to those with greater political capital. He notes how this is compounded by the tendency for journalists to […]
From Suicide pg 120-121: We must beware, indeed: when one speaks of imitation, one implies a phenomenon of contagion and, not unreasonably, we may pass very easily from the first of these ideas to the other. But is there anything contagious about carrying out a moral precept, or deferring to […]
There’s a simple question at the end of Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System which rewards serious thought. From pg 288: Today, we might ask whether the average citizen interested in influencing politics but without ambitions for high political office should join a political organization or create a Twitter account […]
found this quote from Craig Elder, a former senior Conservative comms strategist, fascinating as an account of how ‘the internet’ has ceased to be a siloed technological function and instead become something integrated into the existing communications functions of the party. It’s from Andrew Pickering’s The Hybrid Media System pg […]
The sustainability implications of 5G are increasingly recognised, as this overview from GSMA makes clear. Note that this is the industry’s own trade body rather than a pressure group external to it: Energy is becoming even more important due to climate change and sustainability considerations. The potential increase in data […]
Call for papers At a critical time when European solidarity is questioned, the 8th IARS International Annual Conference will launch the findings of the Erasmus+ “Youth Empowerment and Innovation Project (YEIP)”. Led by young people and coordinated by Professor Theo Gavrielides, YEIP was delivered in partnership with 18 EU partners. […]
From Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 220: A central theme in Marsh’s discussion of the rise of online media is how growing torrents of audience feedback have come to shape the style and ethos of the BBC’s approach to political coverage. The rise to ubiquity of e-mail during […]
I’m saving this account from Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System because I want to come back to it later. From pg 185: I chose these interviewees because I wanted to “sample” a range of different political and media settings: those associated with formal organizations but also those working in […]
It is based in large part upon what we might term “live ethnography”: close, real-time, observation and logging of a wide range of newspaper, broadcast, and online material, including citizen opinion expressed and coordinated through online social network sites. Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 71
