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Accepted Version (PDF 3MB) This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Burgess, Jean& Matamoros Fernandez, Ariadna (2016) Mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), pp. 79-96. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/95337/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155338 Mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: One week of #gamergate on Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr Forthcoming in a special issue on Digital Methods of the journal Communication, Research & Practice. Preprint version, please cite the final version when published. Jean Burgess (corresponding author) Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández QUT Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia QUT Digital Media Research Centre, Z1-515, Creative Industries Precinct, Queensland University of Technology, Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059, Australia. Phone: +61 7 3138 8253 Dr Jean Burgess (@jeanburgess) is Professor of Digital Media and Director of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology. Her research focuses on the cultures, politics, and methods for studying social and mobile media platforms. Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández (@andairamf) is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology and member of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) with a background in Journalism. Her research seeks to understand the cultural dynamics of race and identity in Australian social media. Mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: One week of #gamergate on Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr Social media play a prominent role in mediating issues of public concern, not only providing the stage on which public debates play out, but also shaping their topics and dynamics. Building on and extending existing approaches to both issue mapping and social media analysis, this paper explores ways of accounting for popular media practices and the special case of ‘born digital’ sociocultural controversies. We present a case study of the Gamergate controversy with a particular focus on a spike in activity associated with a 2015 Law and Order: SVU episode about gender-based violence and harassment in games culture that was widely interpreted as being based on events associated with Gamergate. The case highlights the importance and methodological challenges of more adequately accounting for the cultural dynamics of digital media within and across platforms. Keywords: social media; digital culture; games culture; gender; issue mapping; Twitter Introduction If you haven’t heard of #GamerGate, lucky you. If you have, and you have an opinion about it, you probably fall into one of two camps. You’re in the camp that thinks it’s a Web-based movement of gamers upset about a perceived lack of ethics among video games journalists. Or you’re in the camp that thinks it’s a Web-based campaign of harassment against women who make, write about and enjoy video games, masquerading as a movement of gamers upset about a perceived lack of ethics among games journalists. (Wofford, 2014). In this paper we outline a novel approach to applying controversy analysis and issue mapping to social media, and to demonstrate how this approach can be used to account for popular media practices and the special case of ‘born digital’ sociocultural controversies—that is, controversies that originate and are substantially enacted via digital media. We do so through a case study of GamerGate (GG), with the #gamergate Twitter hashtag used as an initial anchoring point for the cross-platform exploration of the controversy. We confine our analysis to a particular week in the unfolding history of the social media activity around the keyword ‘gamergate’, during which a Law & Order: SVU episode directly based on gender-based harassment and violence in videogame culture, and explicitly ‘ripped from the headlines’ around the GamerGate controversy, was broadcast. We further refine our focus to concentrate on the key media objects circulating during that period. As we outline the method and describe our findings, we walk through the three principal steps of issue mapping as applied to social media: • Building an issue inventory; • Mapping the issue networks; and • Identifying the key mediators. We suggest a number of additional metrics and analytics that would be needed in order to properly account for the role of other digital media platforms; and the further supplementary qualitative analyses that are needed to make sense of cultural aspects of sociocultural controversies - aspects like intertextuality, humour, and visual culture. The paper concludes with an outline for future issue mapping studies that may more adequately account for the medium-specificity of social media controversies, rather than treating social media platforms as transparent sources of behavioural data on social issues; as well as a discussion of the limitations of publicly available data, especially hashtags like #gamergate which are oriented towards particular perspectives on controversial issues. Theoretical framework This paper is concerned with the role of digital media in giving rise to and coordinating communication within issue publics. We understand ‘publics’ to be emergent socio- political assemblages with shared or interlocking concerns who know themselves as, and act as, publics through media and communication. Digital media platforms and practices influence both the nature of publics and the means through which they engage in issues (Bruns & Burgess, 2015). The internet, and especially social media, have troubled any clear division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ topics, discourses and spaces (Papacharissi, 2010; 2015); and some have argued that it is a constitutive feature of the digital media environment that publics are increasingly ‘issue-ified’ (Marres, 2015). We note here that there is no necessary correspondence between the public’s degree of visibility (in the vernacular, its ‘publicness’ as opposed to its privacy), and publics as formations of parties (who may not be ‘publicly’ visible) to an issue. Post-Habermasian critiques and interventions over the past several decades (e.g. Fraser, 1990) have made it clear that publics can mobilise in private; that they need not be explicitly co-present, and—crucially for the issue mapping method—may be called into being by the mere implication that others are engaging with the same media, cultural or social experiences as we are, rather than through direct discursive interactions (Berlant, 1997; Livingstone, 2005; Warner, 2002). While these theoretical debates are not within the scope of this paper itself, they do produce significant caveats for our findings and further methodological challenges, which we return to in the limitations and conclusions sections. We define issues as: a. matters of shared concern; that b. involve uncertainty and/or disagreement—but that are not necessarily binary debates, and can be multi- sided. Such issues range from environmental contestation around land use to everyday experiences of gender and race. Many such issues impact directly on our everyday lives; we share and consume news stories about them and personal media representations of our engagements with them via our everyday social media use, as well as explicitly discussing or deliberating upon them. Issue publics therefore leave behind plentiful traces as rich, multimedia social media data, opening up powerful new opportunities for digital media research, and presenting significant challenges both to theories of publics and to empirical orthodoxies for studying them. Among these challenges is the need not only to take into account the material politics of the platforms and devices via which all this occurs (Gillespie, 2014; Marres, 2015; Massanari, 2015); but also—as we demonstrate in this paper—to understand the role of social media objects (photographs, videos, hashtags) as key mediators in issue publics. Issue publics are animated by acute controversies which are of a different ontological order to issues: they are discrete and identifiable sites of uncertainty and creativity (as well as disagreement) around a given issue (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barth, 2001). In the digital media environment controversies are given an extra boost of energy by algorithmic curation models (Gillespie, 2014) like ‘trending
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