Algorithms, as constitutive elements of online platforms, are increasingly shaping everyday sociability. Developing suitable empirical approaches to render them accountable and to study their social power has become a prominent scholarly concern. This article proposes an approach to examine what an algorithm does, not only to move closer to understanding how it works, but also to investigate broader forms of agency involved. To do this, we examine YouTube's search results ranking over time in the context of seven sociocultural issues. Through a combination of rank visualizations, computational change metrics and qualitative analysis, we study search ranking as the distributed accomplishment of 'ranking cultures'. First, we identify three forms of ordering over time-stable, 'newsy' and mixed rank morphologies. Second, we observe that rankings cannot be easily linked back to popularity metrics, which highlights the role of platform features such as channel subscriptions in processes of visibility distribution. Third, we find that the contents appearing in the top 20 results are heavily influenced by both issue and platform vernaculars. YouTube-native content, which often thrives on controversy and dissent, systematically beats out mainstream actors in terms of exposure. We close by arguing that ranking cultures are embedded in the meshes of mutually constitutive agencies that frustrate our attempts at causal explanation and are better served by strategies of 'descriptive assemblage'.
Over the past 15 years, YouTube has emerged as a large and dominant social media service, giving rise to a ‘platformed media system’ within its technical and regulatory infrastructures. This paper relies on a large-scale sample of channels (n=36M+) to explore this media system along three main lines. First, we investigate stratification and hierarchization in broadly quantitative terms, connecting to well-known tropes on structural hierarchies emerging in networked systems, where a small number of elite actors often dominate visibility. Second, we inquire into YouTube’s channel categories, their relationships, and their proportions as a means to better understand the topics on offer and their relative importance. Third, we analyze channels according to country affiliation to gain insights into the dynamics and fault lines that align with country and language. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the inductive character of this research, by highlighting the many follow-up questions that emerge from our findings.
(UAB) where he has been a member of the teaching team since 2008. He has accumulated more than 15 years of experience in digital marketing. He is coordinator of the Master in Communication and Digital Marketing and member of Griss (Grup de Recerca en Imatge, So i Síntesi). His PhD thesis deals with the mediation on Twitter of political disputes. His research interests are digital culture in general, and social media and digital research methods in particular.
Social networks provide new mechanisms for participating in politics and it has been argued that they favor debate, citizen empowerment, and propel democratic changes. This is crucial at a time when forms of political organization, such as parties or unions, have lost their effectiveness. Beyond the debate about the capacity of social networks to incite change and its influence on the outcome of electoral contests, these platforms have become fundamental in the mediatization of politics by turning users into key players in setting the agenda and building the story around politics. This article analyzes a collection of 2,385,396 tweets from the participatory process in Catalonia on November 9, 2014. KeywordsTwitter; Political communication; Digital methods; Social platforms; Social networks; Social media. ResumenLas redes sociales proporcionan nuevos mecanismos para participar en la política y se ha argumentado que favorecen el debate, el empoderamiento ciudadano y la profundización democrática. Este hecho resulta crucial en un momento en el que formas de organización política como partidos o sindicatos pierden efectividad. Más allá del debate sobre la capacidad de las redes sociales para provocar el cambio y su influencia en el desenlace de contiendas electorales, estas plataformas son fundamentales en la mediatización de la política y convierten a los usuarios en actores clave a la hora de marcar la agenda pública y construir el relato de los acontecimientos políticos. Este artículo toma como caso de estudio la conversación en Twitter alrededor del proceso participativo del 9 de noviembre de 2014 en Cataluña y basa su análisis en una colección de 2,385,396 tweets. Palabras claveTwitter; Comunicación política; Métodos digitales; Plataformas sociales; Redes sociales; Medios sociales.Coromina, Òscar (2017). "The struggle for the story in political disputes. The case of the 9N participation process". El profesional de la información, v. 26, n. 5, pp. 884-893. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2017.sep.10 Manuscript received on 09-03-2017 Accepted on 20-06-2017 Nota: Este artículo se puede leer en español en:
Desde la invención de la televisión, el acto de visionado siempre ha tenido vinculado un componente social, pasando a convertirse en un agente socializador al que se le asocia una actividad de condición colectiva. Este aspecto se ha visto acrecentado de forma marcada en los últimos años desde la aparición y popularización de los smartphones y las redes sociales. Estos nuevos dispositivos han conseguido extender las posibilidades sociales vinculadas a la televisión, llevando, entre otras cuestiones, a la transformación de los modos de consumo o las formas de participación y rol de la audiencia, configurando lo que se entiende como televisión social. Focalizando el interés en el fenómeno, dada su relevancia, y teniendo en cuenta la importancia de la participación de la audiencia en el género info-show, el presente estudio analiza y describe los modos de apelación a la audiencia social empleados por productores y programadores en los programas de info-show más exitosos de Francia, España, Italia, Reino Unido y Alemania. El trabajo se centra en una observación comparativa de las prácticas, patrones y modos de actuación llevados a cabo por los programadores televisivos para potenciar la acción participativa. El análisis de contenido y herramientas específicas para el estudio de las plataformas online nos permiten aproximarnos a estas apelaciones a las audiencias.
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