Our retroV team (which studies the topic of information virality) will present in the IPP 2010 conference (Internet, Politics, Policy) held in Oxford. This conference is a great opportunity to enjoy the growing number of scholars who study the topic of information politics.
Our paper, Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Place of Blogs in the Life Cycle of Viral Political Information addresses the dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere, and is interested in empirically understanding how blogs play a role in the virality process. More specifically, we developed a new methodology that creates a map of the 'life cycle' of blogs posting links to viral information. Our dataset focused on the linking practices of blogs to the most significant viral videos of the 2008 US presidential election. To do so, we gathered data on all blogs (n=9,765) and their posts (n=13,173) linking to 65 of the top US presidential election videos that became viral on the Internet during the period between March 2007 and June 2009. Among other things, our findings illuminated the importance of different types of blogs: elite, top-political, top-general and tail blogs. We also found that while elite and top-general blogs create political information, they drive and sustain the viral process, whereas top-political and tail blogs act as followers in the process. [I will probably write a separated post about our paper].
Andrea Calderaro Digital Politics Divide: does the Digital Divide still matter?
Rosa Borge, Ana Sofía Cardenal Surfing the Net: a pathway to political participation without motivation?
Satyan Ramlal E-government in the global South – Machine politics as usual?