Social bots mimic and potentially manipulate humans and their behaviours in social networks. The public sphere might be especially vulnerable to their impacts, which is why we first discuss their ...potential influence on the public sphere from a theoretical perspective. From an empirical perspective, we analyzed Twitter followers of seven German parties before (N = 638,674) and during (N = 838,026) the 2017 electoral campaigns regarding bot prevalence and activities. The results revealed that the share of social bots increased from 7.1% before to 9.9% during the election campaigns. The percentage of active social bots remained roughly the same. An analysis of the content distributed by both the most popular and the most active bots showed that they disseminate few political hashtags, and that almost none referred to German politics. We discuss the results against the background of normative traditions of public sphere theories and address the methodological challenges bots pose in political communication.
Smart cities as corporate storytelling Söderström, Ola; Paasche, Till; Klauser, Francisco
City (London, England),
20/5/4/, Volume:
18, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
On 4 November 2011, the trademark 'smarter cities' was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in ...the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an 'obligatory passage point' in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term 'smart city' in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.
Large-scale environmental crises are genuinely collective phenomena: they usually result from collective, rather than personal, behavior and how they are cognitively represented and appraised is ...determined by collectively shared interpretations (e.g., differing across ideological groups) and based on concern for collectives (e.g., humankind, future generations) rather than for individuals. Nevertheless, pro-environmental action has been primarily investigated as a personal decision-making process. We complement this research with a social identity perspective on pro-environmental action. Social identity is the human capacity to define the self in terms of "We" instead of "I," enabling people to think and act as collectives, which should be crucial given personal insufficiency to appraise and effectively respond to environmental crises. We propose a Social Identity Model of Pro-Environmental Action (SIMPEA) of how social identity processes affect both appraisal of and behavioral responses to large-scale environmental crises. We review related and pertinent research providing initial evidence for the role of 4 social identity processes hypothesized in SIMPEA. Specifically, we propose that ingroup identification, ingroup norms and goals, and collective efficacy determine environmental appraisals as well as both private and public sphere environmental action. These processes are driven by personal and collective emotions and motivations that arise from environmental appraisal and operate on both a deliberate and automatic processing level. Finally, we discuss SIMPEA's implications for the research agenda in environmental and social psychology and for interventions fostering pro-environmental action.
While much attention is given to young people’s online privacy practices on sites like Facebook, current theories of privacy fail to account for the ways in which social media alter practices of ...information-sharing and visibility. Traditional models of privacy are individualistic, but the realities of privacy reflect the location of individuals in contexts and networks. The affordances of social technologies, which enable people to share information about others, further preclude individual control over privacy. Despite this, social media technologies primarily follow technical models of privacy that presume individual information control. We argue that the dynamics of sites like Facebook have forced teens to alter their conceptions of privacy to account for the networked nature of social media. Drawing on their practices and experiences, we offer a model of networked privacy to explain how privacy is achieved in networked publics.
Are algorithmic news recommenders a threat to the democratic role of the media? Or are they an opportunity, and, if so, how would news recommenders need to be designed to advance values and goals ...that we consider essential in a democratic society? These are central questions in the ongoing academic and policy debate about the likely implications of data analytics and machine learning for the democratic role of the media and the shift from traditional mass-media modes of distribution towards more personalised news and platforms Building on democratic theory and the growing body of literature about the digital turn in journalism, this article offers a conceptual framework for assessing the threats and opportunities around the democratic role of news recommenders, and develops a typology of different 'democratic recommenders'.
Since serving as Mayor of the City of Bandung for the 2014 - 2019 period, Ridwan Kamil has been intensively building public spaces. Two of them are the Cikapundung Terrace and the Cihampelas Terrace. ...Although both are public spaces that provide open access for anyone to interact, they have different characters. The Cikapundung terrace is mor e driven by efforts to educate people to love the environment and rivers, while the Cihampelas terrace is more an effort by the Bandung City government to organize street vendors so that it does not cause traffic jams along the Cihampelas road. This policy has a positive impact on the one hand, but on the other hand it has a negative impact on other parties. For example, the construction of the Cikapundung terraces and the Cihampelas terraces has had a negative impact on the economic conditions of the peopl e who used to earn good fortune along the Cihampelas sidewalks and around Kampung Kolase, which is now the Cikapundung terraces. Thus government policies have an impact on society. As Dye (1981) said that the impact of a policy is the overall implication o r impact caused by a policy. Therefore this study will focus on analyzing the impact of public sphere development policies with a focus on the Cikapundung terraces and Cihampelas terraces using qualitative methods using the Multicase Intertwined Study tech nique from Robert K. Yin (2013). It is hoped that through this research an overview of the implications of public sphere policies for the people of the city of Bandung can be obtained.
According to Berlin, Rawls and Arendt, a democratic system should be characterised by a public language through which to communicate. However, digital platforms lead to individuals closing themselves ...off in echo chambers and filter bubbles. In this paper we attempt to model some scenarios in order to determine the potential consequences of the development of digital platforms on democratic pluralism. The driving forces are the polarisation on the Internet and the possible role of liberal democratic institutions in promoting ＂reasonable＂ pluralism. In the final section, we suggest five possible actions that could mitigate the problem of online polarisation.
One of the reporting strategies is dialogue. Acts 17:16-34 describes Paul's dialogical way of proclaiming the Gospel to the Athenians. First, he used public spaces to meet, communicate, and interact ...with Athenians. Second, he regarded the Athenians as partners in discussion. Third, he used the richness of local Athenian culture as an entry point for his sermons and corrected them. In this way, Paul knew and understood their mindset and lifestyle. Although it has not succeeded in converting the Athenians, it offers an alternative preaching strategy. The next question is how this strategy can be applied today. This paper uses the text analysis method to find the stages of the procedure used in current reporting. Thus, the proclamation of the Church not only elevates the context of society but also makes a positive contribution to them. Therefore, Paul's narrative in Acts 17:16-34 can be a model approach for the Church to realize a dialogical proclamation.
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