#HashingItOut: Participatory Mediation in Social News Spaces

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, news and journalism have undergone a rapid transformation. Heading into the digital age, one of the most prominent features of this shift involves the introduction of social platforms that facilitate the participation of their users by helping to coordinate their engagement with flows of information. This project focuses on the impact of Twitter on news culture, and investigates the ways through which Twitter’s platform affords its users new ways to locate, propagate, and mediate news. Twitter has unsettled the definition of newsmaking, as news is increasingly transmitted through users of social platforms instead of being broadcast from mass media. This project considers the technological aspects of this shift, and examines the structural changes in the way hyperlinking tools on social platforms can be used to coordinate networks of users to engage with flows of information. This thesis introduces, develops, and draws together the work of three case studies to frame developments in news through two dimensions: the algorithmic and the social. Examining the evolution of news and the process of journalism over the past decade, this project revisits the origins and functionalities of the hyperlink and two social linking devices used on Twitter, the “@mention” and the hashtag, and the participatory culture that their use has introduced. As a grounds for understanding the social news ecosystem, this project leverages a range of case study data, theoretical ideas, and methodologies to examine user practices. The first case study explores how hashtags on Twitter were used to “break” two of the biggest news events of 2011: The Egyptian uprising and the Japan disaster event. The second case study investigates emergent practices by elite news actors on Twitter through a longitudinal examination of hashtag and hyperlink use. The third case study deconstructs how hashtags can be used to form “public access” news channels, and examines the hashtag’s utility in facilitating access to news across different social, political, and cultural contexts. The boundaries between users’ social connections, circulating information, and news media have become less clear. Disrupting organizational news practices, Twitter is a space for networked engagement that helps to redefine communities, participation, and interests. Twitter is redefining journalistic norms, because the adoption of instruments like the "@mention" and hashtag now afford their users a degree of real-time engagement with the flows of news that circulate through the platform.