0000000000867799
AUTHOR
Salla-maaria Laaksonen
Conversational Gatekeeping : Social Interactional Practices of Post-Publication Gatekeeping on Newspapers’ Facebook Pages
Digital platforms, such as social media networks, have become intertwined in the news ecosystem, leading news media to lose their role as the sole gatekeeper in the public space. This development has given an active voice to audiences and turned journalism more into conversations between journalists and their audiences. The starting observation for this article was that alongside journalists, platforms and audiences play a part in the gatekeeping process that takes place post-publication, and therefore we need to gain a better understanding of this triadic relationship. Furthermore, as conversations are one of the main functions of social media platforms, more understanding of the role of s…
Vaakakupissa vaarat ja vastuu: Julkisen palvelun median arvot sosiaalisen median alustojen paineessa
Sosiaalisen median alustat ovat muovanneet media-alan prosesseja ja käytäntöjä merkittävästi. Alustayritysten toimintaa ohjaavat erilaiset arvot ja tavoitteet kuin mediaorganisaatioita, mikä aiheuttaa toimijoiden välille ristiriitaa. Toimintatavoistaan ja arvoistaan sosiaalisessa mediassa joutuvat neuvottelemaan erityisesti julkisen palvelun mediayhtiöt, joiden peruskivenä ovat julkisen palvelun arvot. Tarkastelemme tässä artikkelissa suomalaisen julkisen palvelun mediayhtiön Yleisradion alustasuhdetta laadullisen haastatteluaineiston avulla. Kysymme, miten Yleisradiossa kuvataan ja perustellaan suhdetta sosiaalisen median alustoihin ja minkälaiseen arvopuheeseen suhteen kuvaaminen kytkeyty…
Mediated by the giants: Tracing practices, discourses, and mediators of platform isomorphism in a media organization
News media are increasingly interwoven with social media platforms. Building on institutional theory, we trace the repercussions of the platform infrastructure inside a media organization by focusing on organizational discourses and practices in connection with the journalistic use of social media. The empirical material includes interviews, field notes, chat logs, and documents collected from a public service media organization during a 6-month on-site and virtual ethnography. The findings show how platform pressures intertwine with content production, audience representation, journalistic values, and organizational development, thus manifesting the infrastructuralization and institutional…
Editorial: New Forms of Media Work and Its Organizational and Institutional Conditions
This thematic issue explores the widening scope of media work and the institutional and organizational conditions that support new forms of media work. The media industry has undergone significant economic, structural, and technological changes during the past few decades, including changing patterns of ownership and digitalization of media production, distribution, and consumption. Simultaneously, practices of media work are adopted also in other industries. The 10 articles in the issue not only focus on the new professional roles and responsibilities emerging in the news media industry but also study the practices of media work in organizations in other fields, such as the music industry …
Working the fields of big data : Using big-data-augmented online ethnography to study candidate–candidate interaction at election time
The paper proposes big-data-augmented ethnography as a novel mixed-methods approach to studying political discussions in a hybrid media system. Using such empirical setup, the authors examined candidate–candidate online interaction during election campaigning. Candidate–candidate interaction crossing party boundaries is scarce and occurs in the form of negative campaigning via social media, with the shaming of rival candidates and engaging in battles with them. The authors posit that ethnographic observations can be used to contextualize the computational analysis of large data sets, while computational analysis can be applied to validate and generalize the findings made through ethnography…
sj-pdf-1-sms-10.1177_2056305120903856 – Supplemental material for Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-sms-10.1177_2056305120903856 for Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning by Matti Nelimarkka, Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mari Tuokko and Tarja Valkonen in Social Media + Society
The Datafication of Hate: Expectations and Challenges in Automated Hate Speech Monitoring.
Laaksonen, S-M.; Haapoja, J.; Kinnunen, T., Nelimarkka, M. & Pöyhtäri, R. (2020, accepted). . Frontiers in Big Data: Data Mining and Management / Critical Data and Algorithm Studies. doi:10.3389/fdata.2020.00003 Hate speech has been identified as a pressing problem in society and several automated approaches have been designed to detect and prevent it. This paper reports and reflects upon an action research setting consisting of multi-organizational collaboration conducted during Finnish municipal elections in 2017, wherein a technical infrastructure was designed to automatically monitor candidates' social media updates for hate speech. The setting allowed us to engage in a 2-fold investiga…
I 🌹🍀🇫🇮 You! : Emojis as Emotional-Political Signifiers in Finnish Election Campaign Discussion Online
Social media platforms and the forms of vernacular expression they support invite citizens to emotionally react to political content. This study focuses on the affective networks of emoji use in the Facebook comment threads on 18 politicians’ public pages before the Finnish 2019 parliamentary elections. We aim to generate a holistic understanding of the use of emojis in campaign communications while providing a more profound understanding of the affective practices emerging in specific contexts, such as in relation to particular political actors. We analyze the data using computational methods and network analysis and complement this with qualitative analysis. The results indicate that emoj…
Puhekaverina botti : viestivä tekoäly inhimillistettynä vuorovaikutuskumppanina
Viestivät tekoälyt eli luonnollisella kielellä käytävään keskusteluun kykenevät algoritmit ovat yhä tyypillisempiä vuorovaikutuskumppaneita erilaisilla teknologisilla alustoilla. Yksi tyypillinen viestivän tekoälyn muoto on botti: automaattinen ohjelma, joka käyttää verkkopalvelun käyttäjätiliä tavallisen käyttäjän tavoin ja suorittaa yksinkertaisia toimintoja tai viestii. Tyypillisesti botit tavalla tai toisella pyrkivät näyttäytymään ihmiskäyttäjinä, tai ainakin niille ohjelmoidaan ja suunnitellaan ihmisenkaltaisia piirteitä. Artikkeli tarkastelee bottien roolia vuorovaikutuskumppaneina sisäisessä ja julkisessa mediatilassa kytkeytymällä tuoreeseen ihmis-koneviestinnän tutkimusalaan. Kesk…
Practical, Not Radical : Examining Innovative Learning Culture in a Public Service Media Organization
Recent scholarship has argued for media organizations’ need to radically innovate to ensure their survival in the future. This study deploys the innovative learning culture (ILC) framework to qualitatively study innovation and learning in a legacy public service media organization. While innovation and learning are linked, the learning processes of professional journalists have received only little attention. Through an analysis of a development network operating in a public service media organization, we identify characteristics of ILC in the network and how those characteristics manifest in practice, as well as examine contextual factors that shape ILC. Our findings indicate that innovati…
Puhekaverina botti
Viestivät tekoälyt eli luonnollisella kielellä käytävään keskusteluun kykenevät algoritmit ovat yhä tyypillisempiä vuorovaikutuskumppaneita erilaisilla teknologisilla alustoilla. Yksi tyypillinen viestivän tekoälyn muoto on botti: automaattinen ohjelma, joka käyttää verkkopalvelun käyttäjätiliä tavallisen käyttäjän tavoin ja suorittaa yksinkertaisia toimintoja tai viestii. Tyypillisesti botit tavalla tai toisella pyrkivät näyttäytymään ihmiskäyttäjinä, tai ainakin niille ohjelmoidaan ja suunnitellaan ihmisenkaltaisia piirteitä.Artikkeli tarkastelee bottien roolia vuorovaikutuskumppaneina sisäisessä ja julkisessa mediatilassa kytkeytymällä tuoreeseen ihmis-koneviestinnän tutkimusalaan. Keski…
sj-pdf-1-sms-10.1177_2056305120903856 – Supplemental material for Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-sms-10.1177_2056305120903856 for Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning by Matti Nelimarkka, Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mari Tuokko and Tarja Valkonen in Social Media + Society
Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning
Interaction between candidates and constituents via social media is a well-studied domain. The article takes this research further through a synthesis with platform studies, emerging scholarship that applies a critical perspective to the role of digital platforms in society. Examination of candidate–constituent interaction via Twitter and Facebook during the 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections revealed that the types of interaction differ between the two platforms: Facebook was used for formal campaigning and for praising and expressing support, while Twitter was utilized for information and for seeking and sharing opinions. An additional finding is that interaction approaches may be plat…
Slacking with the Bot: Programmable Social Bot in Virtual Team Interaction
Nonhuman communicators are challenging the prevailing conceptualizations of technology-mediated team communication. Slackbot is a social bot that can be configured to respond to trigger words and, thus, take part in discussions on the platform. A set of 84 bot-related communication episodes were identified from a journalistic team's Slack messages (N=45,940) and analyzed utilizing both qualitative content analysis and interaction process analysis (IPA). This integrated mixed-methods analysis revealed novel insights into the micro-level dynamics of human-machine communication in organizational teams. In response to Slackbot's greetings, acclamations, work-related messages, and relational mes…
Conquering the liminal space : Strategic social media influencer communication in the Finnish public sector during the COVID-19 pandemic
Public sector organisations have traditionally used mass media and their own communication channels to communicate urgent matters to citizens. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced these organisations to look for new communication approaches. In Finland, several public-sector organisations collaborated with social media influencers (SMIs) to maximise their efforts in communicating about the measures needed to constrain the spread of the virus. Using a multiple-case study design, this chapter scrutinises four public-sector organisations and their collaboration with SMIs during the pandemic in 2020. We found that public organisations turned to SMIs through influencer marketing and influen…
appendices – Supplemental material for Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning
Supplemental material, appendices for Platformed Interactions: How Social Media Platforms Relate to Candidate–Constituent Interaction During Finnish 2015 Election Campaigning by Matti Nelimarkka, Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mari Tuokko and Tarja Valkonen in Social Media + Society