Software and the struggle to signify: theories, tools and techniques for reading Twitter- enabled communication during the 2011 UK Riots A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Philip Pond BA Hons, MA, MSc School of Media & Communication College of Design and Social Context RMIT University January 2016 Declaration I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. Philip Pond 4 April 2016 Software and the struggle to signify theories, tools and techniques for reading Twitter-enabled communication during the 2011 UK Riots. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere thanks to Dr France Cheong and Dr Chris Cheong for making available their data for this thesis. For a social scientist, with little knowledge or experience of social media data scraping and processing, their generous advice and commitment to collaboration were invaluable in getting this thesis launched. Thank you to Professor Angelina Russo and Professor Peter Horsfield for their wise council. Both are senior colleagues for whom time is valuable and limited. I want to express my gratitude for humouring me during conversations that both informed my thesis and encouraged me greatly. I would also like to thank the many colleagues who have provided advice, offered helpful comments and seen me through various milestone events: Professor Cathy Greenfield, Associate Professor Chris Hudson, Associate Professor Marta Poblet Balcell, Dr Judy Lawry and Tim Strom. Thank you also to Dr John Postill, my secondary supervisor. Thank you to Bruce Webster for his fabulous proof reading and editing. My love and gratitude to Alex, Derek, Kathleen, Susie, James, Amelia, Oscar and to Hilary. Thank you to Kirsten. Without her, there would be no thesis. Finally, I owe special thanks to Professor Jeff Lewis, my supervisor, mentor and friend. Nothing I can write here will acknowledge sufficiently the transformative influence that Jeff has had on my research, my thinking, my politics and my ii enthusiasm for the academy. For four years, Jeff has listened patiently, with great generosity and insight, guided gently and sparked my intellectual and critical curiosity. I am very fortunate that he agreed to be my supervisor. iii SUMMARY This thesis analyses communication on the micro-blogging service Twitter during the 2011 UK riots. It examines the complex constructive relationship between software and collective meaning-making during a period of acute social crisis and asks whether Twitter’s software-structures facilitated productive, democratic discourse. It seeks to advance the social study of software, to reconcile cultural and digital theory and to develop an innovative methodology for the empirical observation of discursive semiotic practices. The UK riots began in London in August 2011. The shooting of Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) sparked material and social destruction. Within a few days the riots were finished, but there followed a period of vociferous public debate and extraordinary state recalcitrance. Thousands of rioters were arrested, tried in specially convened courts and incarcerated at an unprecedented rate. While politicians rushed to impose ‘Victorian’ condemnation on the moral failings of rioters and their families (Bridges 2012), the broadcast and print media delivered commentary that was reductive, politicised and polemical (Kelsey 2012). These concerns, combined with an absence of rigorous, critical oversight, suggest a failing of the public sphere. Several theorists have argued that Internet media – websites, blogs, social media sites – should be capable of fulfilling the normative-democratic role seemingly vacated by ‘established’ corporate media (Dutton and Dubois 2015). The 2011 iv riots were one of the first public-political events in the UK to be extensively mediated by Internet technology. A thorough review of existing literature suggests that analyses of ‘acute events’ have been undermined by insufficient empirical rigour, invalid theoretical assumptions and a lack of comprehension or specificity about digital technological. Consequently, an analysis of Twitter discourse during the riots requires precise technological definitions, a thorough understanding of relevant software (form and function) and a rigorous theoretical framework for interpreting the relationship between software and social-political action. The framework defines technology in terms of its software-constructed affordances, which shape communicative conditions: fields of exchange, symbolic and representational practices and interfaces for information retrieval and processing. This framing emphasises the temporal and spatial dynamics of these conditions. There is a growing consensus that the temporality of Internet-enabled communication may undermine democratic expectations, because the rapidity of information flow stresses the deliberative period (Barber 2006, Hassan 2012, Buchstein 2002). The conceptual framework identifies several ‘logics’ by which the software-constructed temporality of communication should interact with the normative requirements of deliberative exchange. These logics frame the development of an empirical methodology. Software is observed via its communicative structures; democracy is evaluated using an interpretation of communicative action (Jacobson and Pan 2008). v The methodology is applied to a sample of several thousand tweets collected during the riot period. Within that sample, several riot-specific hashtags (collectively, the riot public) are identified. Tweets containing these hashtags are extracted and submitted to thematic and deliberative content analysis. Temporality is assessed at each of Twitter’s structural communication layers (Bruns and Moe 2014) using proprietary analytics. The interaction between time-space and discourse is then considered comparatively. Analysis of thematic content, deliberative potential and the constructive influence of Twitter time-space in the riot public produces the following key findings. 1. The most dominant thematic concerns reflect closely discourse in the wider mediasphere. Twitter users strive to explain the riots, seeking and analysing socio-structural causes. They attempt to define the rioters; often this involves locating rioters as outside the social, cultural and moral collective. Some users seek to implicate society more widely in the riot culture, particularly the political and professional classes who are charged with looting during the parliamentary expenses scandal and the financial crisis. 2. There is clear evidence of a relationship between software-structures and discourse. Twitter’s hashtag syntax supports thematically and deliberatively discreet discourse streams. Social complexity arguments tend to concentrate in the #UKRiots hashtag stream, which contains a higher percentage of adjunctive discussion tweets and is judged more productive. ‘Rioter as other’ tweets tend to concentrate in streams where adjunctive discussion is more emotional. vi 3. Deliberative tweets also concentrate in the #UKRiots stream, suggesting that there may be discreet hashtag cultures on Twitter – communities that are shaped by (or themselves shape) structural identifiers and are committed to a certain type of discourse. While such hashtag cultures suggest coordination, the effect may be illusory. By enabling different discourses to circulate independently, Twitter permits different langues that discourage deliberation. Analysis across the structural layers finds little evidence of ideal speech conditions, suggesting that Twitter’s algorithmic engines are doing little to coordinate discourse streams for deliberation. 4. Twitter is clearly deeply embedded in wider media systems. The majority of tweets contain links to external media, and this has implications both for the deliberative potential of tweets but also for the temporality of Twitter. In terms of deliberation, the logic of hyperlinking defers meaning in complex ways: analysis includes the primary destination of any hyperlink in any evaluation of thematic content or deliberative potential, but webs of hyperlinks extend digital texts through the network. Locating and restricting meaning is thus extremely difficult. 5. There is some evidence that the temporality of hashtag streams may reveal something about the dynamics of discourse coordination. As stream density increases, communicative reasoning may become more difficult: the situational efficacy of a hashtag is inversely proportional to the density of discourse flow. However, hyperlinking challenges the temporal unity of the tweet object and the notion of linear Twitter time may be unhelpful. Twitter time is a complex assemblage of relative flows in different structural and textual layers. vii These findings suggest some important conclusions about the democratic potential of Twitter discourse and some priorities for future research. Principal among these is a call for greater dialogue between the computing, statistical and social sciences. viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: A map showing the distribution of all geo-tagged tweets