Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s announcement of a knighthood for Prince Philip on Australia Day sparked both a mainstream and social media storm. But Abbott’s response to this backlash, when he casually dismissed…
There do not appear to have been any exclamations of “Je suis Torben” on social media over the last few weeks. This suggests that, in spite of the tragic and abhorrent events that have recently hit Paris…
The public response to the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner has been compared to the 1960s civil rights movement. There are many differences between what happened 50 odd years ago and today but…
Improved cybersecurity for governments and the private sector is expected to feature in US President Barack Obama’s annual State of the Union Address delivered on Tuesday night (US time) to Congress. The…
Across the world, workers in many firms have started using social networks to transform their internal communications. Now, tapping into this, Facebook has created Facebook at Work. Much like the original…
Two of Scotland’s leading politicians illustrate an interesting phenomenon on Twitter. In the wake of the Scottish National Party’s surge in popularity following the independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon…
Jean-Marie Charon, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
The shock across France at the terrorist attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the hostage situations that have followed have been met with incomprehension. The barbarity of the…
With somewhere in the region of 1.3 billion users, Facebook is the largest ever internet social engagement phenomenon. With so many people interconnected through the site, information can speedily propagate…
Facebook’s recent apology for its Year in Review feature, which had displayed to a grieving father images of his dead daughter, highlights again the tricky relationship between the social media behemoth…
Popular cab-hailing service Uber seems as accident-prone as ever, attracting criticism for quadrupling its rate to a minimum of $100 during the Sydney siege hostage situation. Having been criticised in…
It has become one of the hallmarks of the news now. Whenever there is a dramatic event, social media instantly comes alive with comment and conjecture as facts vie for attention with fiction. Alongside…
As the hostage crisis in Sydney came to a dramatic, deadly end, people were flooded with information. The siege at the building in the city’s Central Business District is over and the gunman is dead. The…
The immense popularity of social media seems to have redefined “privacy” from the sense of keeping information secret to being in control over how information is shared – among friends, colleagues, companies…
Sports journalist Daniel Taylor wrote an article highlighting questions that still needed answering about the Valley Parade stadium fire of 1985 in which 56 people died. But publishing it was just the…
On an overcast afternoon in London in May 2013, an off-duty soldier named Lee Rigby was murdered near his barracks in Woolwich, southeast London. Rigby’s killers were two young British men of Nigerian…
Controversial Liverpool striker Mario Balotelli is in hot water. Despite being the victim of online abuse, he has become a perpetrator of racist humour. Earlier in the season, the Italy forward faced a…
Behavioral scientists have seized on social media and their massive data sets as a way to quickly and cheaply figure out what people are thinking and doing. But some of those tweets and thumbs ups can…
Media technologies have operated as both a means of communicating news of a death and memorialising the deceased for a significant period of time, moving from traditional epitaphs, eulogies, wakes and…
Any verbal exchange – whether a scientific panel discussion, lovers quarrelling in a hallway, or the political hard-talk of a live interview – is a very sophisticated human activity. Besides the intricate…