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The mediation of political life on Twitter

Date & Time:
16:00:00 - 18:00:00,
Thursday 26 November, 2015

About

Patterns found in digital trace data are increasingly used as evidence of social phenomena. Still, the role of digital services not as mirrors but instead as mediators of social reality has been neglected. Here, I identify characteristics of this mediation process by analyzing Twitter messages referring to politics during the campaign for the German federal election 2013 and comparing the thus emerging image of political reality with established measurements of political reality. The focus of my talk is the relationship between temporal dynamics in politically relevant Twitter messages and crucial campaign events, comparing dominant topics in politically relevant tweets with topics prominent in surveys and in television news, and by comparing mention shares of political actors with their election results.

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Speakers

  • Name: Dr Andreas Jungherr
  • Affiliation: University of Mannheim
  • Role:
  • URL: http://andreasjungherr.net/
  • Bio: Dr. Andreas Jungherr is a Research Fellow at the Chair of Political Psychology at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His research focuses on the effects of the internet on political communication, the mediation of political reality online, and the use of digital trace data in the social sciences. He is author of the books “” (Springer: 2015) and “” (with Harald Schoen, Springer VS: 2013). His articles have appeared in, among other places, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Internet Research, Social Science Computer Review, and Policy & Internet.

Papers