Wordfeud: Swedes’ latest smartphone addiction (The Local).

According to sociologist Lindgren, the link between the mobile game (Wordfeud) and the board game (Scrabble) is an example of how new and old media interact in contemporary society. The game is neither simply re-used nor completely replaced, but rather developed to suit the small screens and multi-tasking lifestyle of users smartphones and tablet devices.

As part of our ongoing fieldwork visit to London for the digital activism project, we went down to St Paul’s Cathedral to have a look at the things that are happening at #occupyLSX. Hundreds (thousands? — hard to say) of people were out there hanging around their tents, holding meetings, giving speeches, playing music (The Guns of Brixton by The Clash) and handing out flyers. My ethnographic focus was to get an insight into the offline practices relating to the #occupyLSX hashtag, and also to find and note expressions of on-site activities connecting to the digital.

Yesterday, I visited the Museum of London to take a look at a youth activism project where suburban kids of various classes and ethnic backgrounds have “broken into the museum” by creating two-minute YouTube clips representing their comments to the exhibits of London throughout history. These online audiovisual comments are accessed through QR codes that are scanned and decoded with smartphones. The code takes the viewer to the short films that renegotiate the meanings of the museum objects. This is a good example of how offline, very physical, places and things that are embedded in hegemonic understandings of history and voice, can be — not replaced but rendered in alternative ways with digital and social media tools.

I am currently doing fieldwork for my research on digital politics. The project seeks knowledge about conditions for activism, collective action and social movements in the age of digital media. Particular interest is devoted to the issue of interplay between the digital spaces and physical place in relation to creative initiatives in the overlapping fields of culture, media and politics. Today, we visited ReelNews out in Hackney. They are an activist video collective, set up to publicise and share information on inspirational campaigns and struggles from across the world. They are producing a bi-monthly newsreel, made up of a number of videos short enough to use in union and campaign meetings. The interview was great and gave lots of highly interesting information about translating engagement from the digital to the physical and vice-versa.

This is a video version (slides + voiceover) of the talk from Screening Gender 2011.

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The Norwegian version of the edited book “Mange ulike metoder” (~Many Methods) is now out with Gyldendal Publishers. It was edited by Katrine Fangen and Ann-Mari Sellerberg. It will also be out shortly in a Swedish edition. The book consists of sixteen chapters describing various existing research methods to students. The aim is to introduce different methods as such but also to give inspiration to try out, remix and combine them. My contribution deals with various approaches to analysing texts.

This is a video version (slides + voiceover) of the talk from Transforming Audiences 3.

These are the slides for last week’s presentation at Westminster University and the Transforming Audiences 3 conference. It is about the use of Twitter for activism in the Libyan revolution. You get a basic idea about the conclusions from the text on the slides towards the end. Please contact me if you want more on this.

This week, I am attending Transforming Audiences 3 at the University of Westminster in London. The event was put together by a group headed by David Gauntlett, who eventually failed to show up at his own conference due to having a baby (congratulations to him!). The keynotes, featuring prominent internet public researchers such as Nancy Baym, Jean Burgess and Patricia G. Lange, are all great (see conference hashtag #ta3), and the sessions cover a number of really really interesting topics.

We will give our presentation today in the “Politics and Citizenship” session. The title is Twitter Revolutions and Digital Uprisings: Mapping the #feb17 hashtag. The paper is on how Twitter has been used during the ongoing revolution in Libya, and we use social network analysis together with qualitative close readings to get an understanding of how this kind of activism actually works.