Live research: Twittering an election debate

This paper questions how vertical tickers on leading social media platforms (blogs, Facebook, and in particular the Twitter micro-blogging platform) pose new challenges to research that focuses on political communications campaigns. Vertical looped tickers highlight the fleeting nature of contemporary networked and socially mediated communications, since they provide an intensely compressed space (interface) and time to have posts viewed by friends and followers. This article draws upon a research collaboration with the news division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to understand how Canadian political parties increasingly worked to strategically intervene, in real time on Twitter, during a broadcast political debate.

[1]  Arthur Sanders.  The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning, Randolph Kluver, Nicholas Jankowski, Kristen Foot, and Steven Schneider (Eds.) , 2008 .

[2]  Sharon Poggenpohl.  Else/where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories , 2007 .

[3]  Stuart D. Cunningham.  Political and media leadership in the age of YouTube , 2008 .

[4]  Matthew Fuller,et al.  Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software , 2003 .

[5]  Kevin C. Desouza,et al.  Information politics on the Web , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[6]  Christine Hine,et al.  Connective Ethnography for the Exploration of e-Science , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[7]  C. Healy.  Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics , 2012 .

[8]  A. Chadwick.  Britain's First Live Televised Party Leaders’ Debate: From the News Cycle to the Political Information Cycle , 2011 .

[9]  Peter Hall.  Else/Where: Mapping - New Cartographies of Networks and Territories , 2006 .

[10]  N. Anstead,et al.  The Emerging Viewertariat and BBC Question Time , 2011 .

[11]  Niels Brgger,et al.  Web History , 2010 .

[12]  Dee Dee Myers.  New Technology and the 1992 Clinton Presidential Campaign , 1993 .

[13]  Alexander Galloway,et al.  Protocol, or, How Control Exists after Decentralization , 2001 .

[14]  Mira Sotirovic,et al.  A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies , 2001 .

[15]  J. Blumler,et al.  Political Communication —Old and New Media Relationships , 2009 .

[16]  James Allan,et al.  Topic detection and tracking: event-based information organization , 2002 .

[17]  Annette N. Markham,et al.  Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space , 1998 .