Tag Archives: social media

Running for president in the digital age has brought a new requirement to the job: knowing how to work the Twittersphere.

Dr. Janet Johnson

That is the analysis of Dr. Janet Johnson, who teaches in the Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) program at UT Dallas. Johnson has recently published an article in the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric about the role of social media in presidential campaigns.

Johnson says that in 2008, President Barack Obama revolutionized the digital campaign with Twitter and blogs.

“Obama created a social networking website that allowed supporters and potential voters to participate in creating content as well as communicate with the campaign and with each other. Obama’s campaign helped the audience members feel like they produced change by participating in the election.”

To combat a digitally savvy incumbent Democrat, Republican candidate Mitt Romney spearheaded a comprehensive social media campaign. Johnson studied all of Romney’s 161 tweets from Feb. 1 to May 31, 2012, to evaluate how effective his Twitter campaign has been.

“Romney’s tweets referred to Obama 55 times, and tweeted expression of thanks to the audience 20 times. Most tweets included a link back to the campaign site, and to infographics about U.S. citizens, videos, or a written speech or opinion editorial submitted to a national newspaper,” she wrote.

Johnson discusses the different rhetorical tools, situations and motivations behind specific tweets. She examines how tweets correlate with national news stories and how Romney aims to build credibility with undecided voters.

The Romney and Obama campaigns both have made extensive use of Twitter and other social media in their campaigns.

In the article, Johnson also cites the overall importance of using what she calls “Twitter bites.”

“The candidates who use Twitter, Facebook, and blog can expand sound bites and ensure that the sound bites are accurate presentations of what the candidates want to present.

“Using Twitter bites rather than sound bites chosen by the media middleman allows politicians to give their readers a first-hand experience that other media cannot accomplish.”

In addition to Twitter, Johnson is working on a new study about Facebook and how people feel about the 2012 candidates’ Facebook pages. She’s named the study Exposure or Rhetoric: Fan Politics on Facebook.

Johnson has a master’s degree in journalism and a PhD in rhetoric.  Her dissertation was titled Blogs and Dialogism in the 2008 United States Presidential Campaign.

A new Facebook application developed by a team in the UT Dallas Emerging Media and Communications program allows users to now list enemies as opposed to just friends.

EnemyGraph, an app that explores social dissonance on Facebook, is the creation of EMAC faculty Dean Terry, developed by Emerging Media and Communications graduate student Bradley Griffith, with invaluable help from undergraduate Harrison Massey.

“When I saw the first friends list at the beginning of the social media era, I thought where’s the enemies list?” said Dean Terry.

EnemyGraph is an attempt to further define relationships between users and other entities across Facebook’s social graph.

“In a way, EnemyGraph is a social media blasphemy. Because we’re suggesting that you share differences you have with people or talk about the things you don’t like,” Terry said.

Users of EnemyGraph aren't limited to making enemies of people -- any object, place or thing that has a Facebook page can be an enemy.

“Most social networks attempt to connect people based on affinities. But people are also connected and motivated by things they dislike.”

Users of EnemyGraph aren’t limited to making enemies of people — any object, place or thing that has a Facebook page can be an enemy. “You can have an entire list with no people on it at all,” Terry said. “In a way we are misusing the word ‘enemy’ just as much as Facebook and others have misused ‘friend.’”

One early user described EnemyGraph as a way to “interact with friends over common enemies … creating alliances based on shared animosities.”

Dean Terry writes on his blog, “We look at EnemyGraph as a test to learn from for the new project we are about to start on for this semester. Because these kinds of tools have not been available previously we are interested to see how they are used. We plan to take what we learn and apply it to a site outside of Facebook that explores similar territory, but in a broader fashion.”

Terry recently shared his thoughts about EnemyGraphy in an interview on Outriders, a program dedicated to exploring the frontiers of the web from BBC Radio 5 live. Listen to the audio of the program below.

Try out EnemyGraph on Facebook.

The EMAC program once again received monies from the Dallas Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association for a $2000 scholarship to be awarded to an undergraduate student who plans to pursue a career in marketing. The application requires students to write two short essays, one discussing how the EMAC program has made an impact on their educational experience, and one which highlights and critiques a current social media marketing campaign. Last year’s recipient Megan Edwards is currently working with Click Here, the digital marketing division of Dallas based The Richards Group. She is also the creator of The Single Plate — a single person’s guide to grocery shopping, cooking, and eating well.

The scholarship is open to current EMAC sophomores, juniors, and seniors with a 3.0 GPA or higher. All applications are due by October 31st, 2011. Students interested in applying can find additional information on the UT Dallas Financial Aid Website.

If you have any questions about the DFWIMA scholarship, or would like to find out how you or your company can provide monies for a future scholarship, please contact Julie Larsen, Assistant Director of Emerging Media and Communication, julie.larsen@utdallas.edu.

Social media didn’t lead to the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, but this new system of communication certainly played a role in the process of the revolt.

Protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square had to organize without Internet communication after the Egyptian government crackdown. (Photograph by Ramy Raoof)

Dr. David Parry, assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas, argues that anInternet-equipped public is substantially different from a non-Internet-enabled one, and that while we haven’t been deluded by the Internet’s possibilities, we ought to be careful not to overestimate them.

“What happened in Egypt and Tunisia would have looked much different, played out differently if the ‘how’ of the revolution had been different, if social media had not been one of the tools used as a means of communication,” Parry stated.

Parry homed in specifically on the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down citizen access to the Internet. The government also cut mobile phone service, forcing protesters to rely on more traditional means of communication.

“While other countries have ‘pulled the plug’ on the Internet, namely Burma in 2007 and Nepal in 2005, this is the first time that a country with such a large Internet penetration had entirely shut off access. But while the Egyptian government could shut down the hardware of the Internet, it could not shut down the social effects of the digital network.

“In the same way a public is fundamentally changed by the existence of print technology, a public is fundamentally altered by access to the digital network,” Parry said. “This is what makes the situation in Egypt different from Burma and Nepal – in the latter cases the government was shutting down access to information from the outside and controlling the flow of news; but Egypt was shutting down the way that a substantial portion of their populace was communicating.”

“In the same way a public is fundamentally changed by the existence of print technology, a public is fundamentally altered by access to the digital network,” Dr. David Parry said.

Parry also cites China as an example of an authoritarian government that can shut off access to the Internet at any time. Internet censorship in China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations, and is considered more extensive and more advanced than in any other country in the world, Parry said. The regime not only blocks website content but also monitors the Internet access of individuals.

However, Parry argues that the situation in China differs from that in Egypt because the Chinese people use Chinese-based Internet services, and remain largely unaffected when Western sites such as Facebook or even Google are shut down. The Egyptians were much more reliant on Western services, and therefore felt the effects and demanded change.

Parry takes issue with the belief that social media produces a revolution in and of itself, but also acknowledges that the tools we use alter our means of communication. Social media is able to give a voice to those who previously had none – dissidents, anarchists, and even the average everyman – and in the case of Egypt, that voice appears to have been heard and answered.

But Parry warns potential copycats hoping for a similar outcome: “A digitally networked public can just as easily be used for social ill as for social justice; nothing guarantees that civic engagement yields civic progress. But it does guarantee that a public with the Internet has a substantially different relation to its government than a public without the Internet.”

Project Documents History Prof’s Use of Popular Service as a Teaching Tool

An Arts and Technology student’s video account of a professor’s classroom experiment with Twitter is making waves on the World Wide Web, capturing thousands of viewers on YouTube and prompting an article in U.S. News & World Report.

“I have gotten several direct messages from people saying that they were more ‘traditional’ and would not have considered using the social networking and micro-blogging tools in this way, but opened their minds after seeing the video.” Kim Smith, creator of "The Twitter Experiment"

UT Dallas graduate student Kim Smith’s video, “The Twitter Experiment,” shows how Dr. Monica Rankin, assistant professor of history in the School of Arts and Humanities, uses Twitter to engage her 90-student history class in discussion.  The communication application helps overcome the logistical issues involved in having scores of students interact in a short time span and encourages shy students to participate in the course.

“The video is a living example of what my Content Creation and Collaboration course with Dan Langendorf was all about: using emerging media technologies as a tool for education, collaboration with other fields, and documenting the experience for everyone to have access to,” said Smith.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets, in short posts of 140 characters or less.   The Twitter video was a course project for Smith’s digital video class.

The video, which took roughly 20 hours to record and edit, was shot during two class periods, one at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. Classmate Joe Chuang helped with the video and editing.

The collaboration of Smith and Rankin began when Smith documented a class trip to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2008. They kept in touch via Facebook, and developed the idea of using Twitter in the classroom at the beginning of the Spring 2009 semester.

Smith worked out details on Twitter with Emerging Media and Communication (EMAC) faculty members Dr. Dave Parry and Dean Terry, who referred her to individuals who had done similar experiments.  To get students comfortable with using Twitter in a classroom setting, Smith created a simple how-to video and attended class to help Rankin introduce the idea to her students.

The video was first released on Facebook; Terry and Parry both tweeted about it on Twitter and it went global within 48 hours.  New-media icon Howard Rheingold tweeted about it, which helped it further circulate in the “Twitterverse.”

“I have gotten several direct messages from people saying that they were more ‘traditional’ and would not have considered using the social networking and micro-blogging tools in this way, but opened their minds after seeing the video,” said Smith.

A few weeks later Smith posted the video on YouTube, and an entirely different wave of viewers picked up on it.  On Monday, June 1, “The Twitter Experiment” registered 500 views in a few hours. Read Write Web and other popular blogs had picked up the video, causing views to skyrocket.

“I love my classes and experience at UT Dallas and want to master how to use what I learn in EMAC to help professors like Dr. Rankin, who are willing to consider new technologies intelligently and experiment with what they offer,” said Smith.