Helen Margetts will speak about Political Turbulence in her keynote at the 2016 ACM Conference on Web Science in Hannover, Germany.
The keynote is entitled “Understanding Political Turbulence: The Data Science of Politics,” and the abstract is available in full at the link below.
Social media are now inextricably intertwined with the political behaviour of ordinary citizens. As people go about their daily lives on an ever-changing cast of web-based platforms, they are invited to make ‘micro-donations’ of time and effort to political causes: liking, sharing, tweeting, retweeting, following, uploading, downloading, signing petitions and so on, which extend the ladder of participation at the lower end and draw new people into politics, particularly in younger age groups. These ‘tiny acts’ of political participation can scale up to large mobilizations. The overwhelming majority fail, but some succeed rapidly and dramatically through a series of chain reactions and tipping points. …Read more (.pdf)
