Traffic Tags and Cross Platform Analysis on the Web

Workshop mit Greg Elmer (Ryerson University)

03.04.2012, 14 Uhr, Artur-Woll-Haus, Raum AE-A 102

This talk defines a new methodological framework to examine emerging forms of political networking on and across Web 2.0 platforms (i.e. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter). The proposed method seeks to identify the new strategies that make use of political texts, users, keywords, information networks and software code to spread a political communications and rally voters across distributed, and therefore seemingly unmanageable spheres of online communication. In particular, we pay attention to the new materiality of the Web 2.0 as constituted by shared objects that circulate across modular platforms. In this presentation we develop an object-centered method through the concept of traffic tags – unique identifiers that by enabling the circulation of web objects across platforms organize political activity online. By tracing the circulation of traffic tags, we can map different sets of relationships among uploaded and shared web objects (text, images, videos, etc), political actors (online partisans, political institutions, bloggers, etc), and web based platforms (social network sites, search engines, political websites, blogs, etc).