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After navigating conceptual and empirical developments in frame analysis research, I reflect on cornerstones and weaknesses in its elaboration of a rigorous analytical prism. In the reflection, I discuss how combining the frame analysis conceptual toolkit with linguistics work on semantic grammars can perhaps help heal some of these weaknesses.

We investigate the interplay of platform mechanisms and user tinkering in relation to invisible health conditions and ultimately challenge approaches that picture platforms as either hegemonic or liberating. We draw on initial findings from a project focused on social media uses relevant to hereditary cancer syndromes. These conditions are invisible in at least three ways. Cancer genetic risk is evidence-based and embodied, but not bodily visible. General health practitioners rarely know about hereditary cancer syndromes. Overall, hereditary cancer syndromes have not yet entered the wider collective imagination. Existing research provides evidence that individuals with these conditions turn to social media to seek, learn, produce and share information. However, little do we know about how these practices form at the intersection of embodied experiences, everyday social media uses, and platform mechanisms. In this paper we explore these dynamics drawing on a social media analysis that incorporates data from Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram and combines computational and ethnographic techniques. When it comes to invisible health conditions, the voice of ordinary social media users easily overcomes that of traditional elites. Local platform mechanisms differently shape how information is shared and who and what become more visible and credentialed in these sharing practices. They also influence how and which personal experiences are more curated and shared. These initial findings suggest that social media platforms are essential in making the invisible visible but raise questions on how participating in one or more platforms’ “local worlds” might affect the lived experience of those who embody this invisible.

It was late February 2020 when part of Northern Italy entered the first Covid-19 lockdown of the West. While stories of people fleeing quarantined areas soon made national headlines, the international news was suddenly reporting of coronavirus patients connected to Italy all around the world. Against this background, Italian social media started thriving with Covid-19 humour. On 9 March the lockdown turned nationwide and became one of the strictest in Europe. This article addresses everyday memes of quarantined Italy as an instance of mundane memetics at a time of crisis. It investigates the leading discourses emerging from these memes to provide insight into the political culture that surfaces at the intersection between the ordinary of everyday social media uses and the extraordinary of crisis events. We combined digital methods and netnographic techniques to generate and analyse a dataset of over 9,000 Covid-19 memetic instances produced on Twitter by Italian publics during the first national lockdown. Our findings show that in early everyday pandemic memes the political stake did not manifest itself in the explicitness of values, attitudes, and knowledge tightly packaged in a purposeful and self-aware political culture. It rather surfaced in the form of a mundane political culture – one that was primarily performative, irrespective of any future political action, and marked by populist values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Information, Communication & Society is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Information and communication technologies occupy a central position in the Covid-19 pandemic. Public response has been deemed extremely important, with social media platforms playing a key role in...

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Social media platforms are increasingly looked at as means to investigate social phenomena like collective events, issues or causes. Digital methods – techniques exclusively focused on online data and shaped by the environment hosting these data – have become part and parcel of these investigations, often approaching platforms as hybrid assemblages of users, infrastructures, and algorithms. In its ‘online groundness’, this type of digital methods research, however, often tends to skim over the socio-cultural, contextual dimension of both wider social phenomena and social media uses and practices. In this paper, we advance a threefold contribution aimed at both sparking future efforts to address this limitation and aligning digital methods inquiry with contemporary epistemological debates that counter universalistic views of platforms and data. First, we question the degree to which digital methods can inform social investigations of collective events, issues or causes. Second, we advance a digital methods paradigm that addresses platforms as socio-cultural artifacts rather than hybrid assemblages. Finally, by reflecting on how we accessed, handled, and explored 9,000 Instagram visuals and around 400,000 Facebook comments to understand influences on middle class understandings of food consumption in Brazil and South Africa, we illustrate a way to design culturally sensitive digital methods research built on ‘quanti-quali’ practices.

Information and communication technologies occupy a central position in the Covid-19 pandemic. Public response has been deemed extremely important, with social media platforms playing a key role in both institutional and bottom-up information sharing processes. The emerging field of platform studies has shown that platforms increasingly influence how society works; however, such studies often adopt a highly Western-centric approach. By developing an exploration of Twitter and Weibo use in the early stages of the pandemic, this study provides a comparative investigation of the role of platforms in societies. Our findings indicate that during the Covid-19 outbreak, Weibo worked as a propaganda tool to unite the Chinese people and promote public policies under the control of the government and the guidance of the mainstream media. Twitter functioned more like a public discourse platform open to personal expression, often showing the influence of defined partisan political discourses. We argue that the participatory dynamics characterising Weibo and Twitter conversations at the outbreak of the pandemic at least partially mirrored the different ‘platforms societies’ currently developing in China and the West.

It was late February 2020 when part of Northern Italy entered the first Covid-19 lockdown of the West. While stories of people fleeing quarantined areas soon made national headlines, the international news was suddenly reporting of coronavirus patients connected to Italy all around the world. Against this background, Italian social media started thriving with Covid-19 humour. On 9 March the lockdown turned nationwide and became one of the strictest in Europe. By focusing on Covid-19 memes of quarantined Italy, this article explores the local - and mundane - appropriation of memetic practices, in both its cultural and political dimensions. We combined digital methods and netnographic techniques to generate and analyse a dataset of Covid-19 Twitter memes produced by Italian publics during the first national lockdown. This allowed us to follow the circulation - and evolution - of memetic practices, explore how cultural fabric contributed to different dimensions of meme production and categorise the emergence of political expression. Our findings show that Italian pandemic memes had a primarily affective function fed by past and present pop culture, local or sub-local stereotypes and popular public debates. Where political expression did emerge, it was never particularly innovative or new because it was there to mark previously established communal belonging driven by populist narratives more than to initiate contentious practices. Ultimately, this work suggests that memetic practices can highly intertwine with the geographically or linguistically local and point to the need for contextual approaches able to enhance our understanding of digital practices as shaped by local publics.

On 22 February 2020, 11 municipalities in Northern Italy became the first COVID-19 red zone of Europe. Two days later, when it became evident that the virus had been spreading in the country for weeks, Italy entered a “buffer zone,” a temporal zone between normality and pandemic. The buffer zone lasted around 2 weeks and thrived with irony flowing on social media through memes, multimedia remixes, and jokes. As a collective ritual, irony allowed people to temporarily background the mounting feelings of bewilderment and uncertainty by foregrounding the familiar scripts of playful and grassroots expressivity typical of networked publics. While giving the country a way to breathe before grieving, irony delivered both traditional political satire and new symbolic arrangements to frame “us” versus “them”: Northern Italy versus Southern Italy, Italy versus China. We advance initial reflections on irony and its functions during what we call Italy’s COVID-19 buffer zone and argue for the need of more platform research interested in how users appropriate devices and vernaculars in ways that are culturally bound. In other words, can we rethink “The Platform” (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) as a constellation of small-world-platforms—sometimes overlapping, other times segregating—each shaped by local hopes and fears, histories and events?

In 2016 the Italian health ministry launched the ‘Fertility Day’ campaign, aimed at tackling Italy’s low birth rate. Under the accusation of delivering sexist and racist messages, the campaign became a trending topic on Twitter, and a protest was launched to be held during Fertility Day. By applying a combination of digital methods and visual content analysis to the #fertilityday Twitter stream, this paper contributes to existing research on the deliberative strength of political hashtag publics, with a particular focus on their power structures, communication patterns and visual content use. Findings on gatekeeping dynamics downsize optimistic views on the democratising potential of Twitter’s socio-technical infrastructure as they point to the emergence of online satirical media and ‘tweetstars’ – along with mainstream news media– as main producers of spreadable content, with ordinary users only surfacing when traditional media elites and new satirical actors lack or lose interest in the debate. Results confirm that political hashtag publics follow acute event communication patterns, with users highly engaged in retweeting and referencing external material and visual content playing a key role in these gatewatching practices. The transient counter-visuality – or critical stance – of tweets with user-manipulated images, however, also suggests that the deliberative potential of these publics is not easily sustainable over time.

Starting in the 1970s, frame analysis became a popular technique of textual analysis in different disciplines (communication, mass media, sociology). There is no agreed-upon definition of frame analysis or of ways of measuring its key concepts. This paper explores the relationship between frame analysis and rhetoric. The paper reviews all main concepts developed in frame analysis. Concept after concept, it maps the correspondence between frame analysis and rhetorical concepts. It shows how frame analysis stopped short of developing what was really required to measure frames: tropes and figures. The analysis of a specific text confirms the power of rhetorical analysis for teasing out meaning systems and argumentative structures.

By focusing on the aftermath of the 2001 G8 counter-summit in Genoa, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive insight into the interpretative dimension of transformative events leading to backfire. First, in line with the existing literature on transformative events, the study shows that after the violent events, Italian authorities employed all possible strategies to inhibit public outrage (i.e., cover-ups of the situation, stigmatizations of targets to legitimate repressive action, reinterpretations of police violence as different from direct attacks, presence of authoritative assessments and intimidation of participants and witnesses). Second, a multidimensional scaling of symbolic devices from 70 social forum websites shows that after 2001, Italian social movement actors used the narrative of the Genoa events in deliberative (i.e., bridging, extension) or negotiating (i.e., punctuation, articulation) framing processes to build new collective action frames.

While a growing literature is exploring blogs and blogospheres as loci for informal political engagement, the development of political discourse via specific framing dynamics in blogging practice has so far been overlooked. By investigating the content of 62 blogs from four different ideological streams, this study specifically focuses on the Cuban blogosphere to address the question of how political consciousness and potential for collective action may emerge in blogging practice. Findings show that (1) critical evaluations, personal narratives and traditional socialist rhetoric mix as the raw materials of an emerging online political debate; (2) this particular mix varies depending on the political leaning of the bloggers; (3) the potential for collective action is very limited mostly due to the lack of a strong agency component among critical bloggers and the still heavy presence of an outdated socialist rhetoric among state-aligned bloggers.

Despite the rapid growth of a blogosphere literature interested in blogging practices across democratic countries and authoritarian regimes, little is known about Cuban blogs. This study aims to bridge this gap by specifically looking at 66 blogs from four ideologically diverging Cuban blog platforms. By applying a combination of social network analysis and content analysis techniques, the study investigates structure and content of the Cuban blogosphere. Findings show that blog interactions have developed differently depending on the blogs’ ideological orientation although cross-ideologictsal interactions have sometimes emerged. The Cuban blogosphere has extended beyond national borders primarily via diaspora blogs, centering its discourse network on domestic political issues divergent from those available on state- or US-controlled mainstream media.

The study of new media use by transnational social movements is central to contemporary investigations of social contention. In order to shed light on the terrain in which the most recent examples of online mobilization have grown and developed, this paper combines the interest in the transnational dynamics of social contention and the exploration of the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for protest action. In specific terms, the study investigates how early twenty-first century social movement coalitions used Internet tools to build symbolically transnational collective identities. By applying a hyperlink network analysis approach, the study focuses on a website network generated by local chapters of the World Social Forum (WSF), one of the earliest social movement coalitions for global justice. The sample network, selected through snowball sampling, is composed of 222 social forum websites from around the world. The study specifically looks at hyperlinks among social forum web...

Social media have become central to the organizational and logistic dynamics in contemporary social contention. Not only have they eased centralized processes of information sharing between social movement entrepreneurs and social movement publics, they have also bolstered the crowdsourced management of public discussion around social contention. This article investigates the use of social media for public reasoning around issues related to social contention. By investigating Twitter streams with reference to the Italian chapter of the 15 October 2011 polycentric protest for global change, this study specifically addresses the use of this medium in the aftermath of protest events of high impact for the general public. The quantitative analysis of longitudinal progression, networking mechanisms and processes of meaning construction in over 8000 tweets shows that Twitter does bolster public reasoning around social contention. It does so as a news medium rather than a conversational platform, primarily providing a space to share information alternative to that available in mainstream media coverage.

This paper advocates an actor-centered, relational view of agency and proposes Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) as a promising method for operationalizing and measuring agency. QNA organizes the information contained in narrative texts by exploiting the invariant linguistic structural properties of narrative—namely, sets of SVOs (Subject, Verb, Object) organized in predictable sequences and where in narrative S are actors and V are actions. The relational data made available by QNA are ideally suited for analysis with geographic information systems (GIS) tools, sequence analysis, or network analysis. These tools preserve the centrality of agency (actors and their actions) in social scientific explanation of social reality. An application of QNA to newspaper stories of lynchings in Georgia (1875–1930) will illustrate the power of this approach. The paper complements the illustration of this quantitative way of measuring agency with discourse analysis—another popular social science approach to texts. We will rely on this approach to illustrate how linguistic and rhetorical strategies can be used to hide agency in texts and the challenges (and solutions) this poses for measurement: How can we measure something that is not there?

This paper shows how to carry out quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) with different text analysis software (PC-ACE, Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events, and various CAQDAS programs, Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software: ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and NVivo). QNA is a methodological approach to narrative texts that exploits invariant properties of narrative (namely, a “story grammar”, based on actors, actions, and their attributes) to make a statistical analysis of words possible. In comparing PC-ACE and CAQDAS, the paper leads the reader through the steps involved in setting up a grammar, in data entry, and in data query. A careful comparison of limits and possibilities of the two types of software will allow the reader interested in QNA to make an informed choice between a full implementation of QNA in a specialized but unknown software (PC-ACE) and a limited implementation in any of the widely used and popular CAQDAS programs.