Arguments on social media bout the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire indicate the injustice of attention
On the evening of April 15, 2019, hoary plumes of smoke erupted from Notre-Dame Cathedral and rolled across the rooftops of the Ile de la Cité in Paris, France. World leaders expressed their condolences over the loss, and many experts publicly warned that, though it can be rebuilt, the 12th-century monument to Catholicism will never “be the same.” By the end of the next day, cathedral bells tolled across the city in honor of the devastating fire and hundreds of millions in euros already had been pledged, with the uber-wealthy leading the way. In the days that followed the fire, the fire and fundraising efforts garnered a veritable tempest of media coverage and ignited a social media fervor. The hashtag #NotreDameFire trended on Twitter, spread virally across Facebook and, to date, has garnered almost 22,000 posts on Instagram. Much of this online popular discourse has not been as kind and can be read as a form of political struggle around the meaning and identity of Notre-Dame waged on the digital archive of Instagram. This article examines the #NotreDameFire hashtag on Instagram, reading the associated visuals through the framework set out by Cara A. Finnegan in Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. It considers Finnegan’s presence, character, appropriation and magnitude in the context of Instagram as an archive of, in this case, both site and sight of one imperial landscape — Notre-Dame Cathedral.
Journalists are constructing public opinion when they use social media accounts to tell the story of politics
Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories about the 2016 US election, as well as interviews with journalists, to shed light on evolving practices that inform the use of social media to represent public opinion. I find that despite social media users not reflecting the electorate, the press reported online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion that services the horserace narrative and complements survey polling and vox populi quotes. These practices are woven into professional routines – journalists looked to social media to reflect public opinion, especially in the wake of media events like debates. Journalists worried about an overreliance on social media to inform coverage, especially Dataminr alerts and journalists’ own highly curated Twitter feeds. Hybrid flows of information between journalists, campaigns, and social media companies inform conceptions of public opinion.
It's the affordances more than anonymity that leads people to post what they post
Francesca Tripodi dives into the nuances of Yik Yak, a social media platform tied to college campuses. Her in depth study of the platform and what makes its users more likely to post concludes that people who already feel like they belong on campus use the platform to reinforce that sense of belonging. But the same algorithm that creates and recreates their sense of belonging simultaneously produces social norms about what to post that constrain future use. This year long ethnography of the app Yik Yak provides insight on user engagement and the connection between the digital and physical worlds of college campuses.