OII – Page 2 – Political Turbulence

Computational social science: A new social physics

Taha Yasseri is talking about how the data from digital technology we use everyday can be used in Computational Social Science. This talk is part of the University of Aberdeen's Festival of Social Science and Science in the Quad Season 3, Institute of Physics in Scotland. Here is the blurb of the talk: As digital technologies, the Internet, and social media become increasingly integrated into society, our daily lives generate unprecedented quantities of digital data. These data provide opportunities to study complex social systems in frameworks similar to those of the natural sciences. We will discuss these new opportunities and [...]

26th October 2015

The role of “others” in social media activism

Taha Yasseri is talking about online activism at the Royal Academy of Arts' programme Digital (Dis)connections: Ai Weiwei Late on Saturday 24th October. Here is a blurb of his talk: Humans are self-determining. Or are they? How much are we influenced by social pressure and influence from our peers and how do they affect the decisions that we make "on our own"? What's the role of the Internet and specifically social media when it comes to our participation in online political (and nonpolitical) activities? Are social media only new tools and environments for the same type of pre-Internet political activities or they [...]

21st October 2015

Helen Margetts on Start the Week

Lead author, Helen Margetts, discussed Political Turbulence on BBC Radio 4 in October 2015. Listen to the interview or download an MP3 from the BBC website. On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the American writer Jonathan Franzen about his latest novel, Purity. One of Franzen's characters compares the Internet with the East German Republic and he satirises the utopian ideas of the apparatchik web-users. The head of the Oxford Internet Institute, Helen Margetts, counters with her research on the success and failure of political action via social media. The artist Tacita Dean laments the ubiquity of digital at [...]

5th October 2015

Publication: Leadership without Leaders?

Our journal article entitled Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action has been published in Political Studies. The Internet has been ascribed a prominent role in collective action, particularly with widespread use of social media. But most mobilisations fail. We investigate the characteristics of those few mobilisations that succeed and hypothesise that the presence of ‘starters’ with low thresholds for joining will determine whether a mobilisation achieves success, as suggested by threshold models. We use experimental data from public good games to identify personality types associated with willingness to start in collective action. We find a significant [...]

5th June 2015

Social information and voting

A key feature of many online platforms is social information, which is information about what other people are doing. We recreated this form of social influence in an experiment we conducted at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. A description of the experiment and preliminary results are reported in the blog post linked below. Thank you to everyone who participated in our experiment on the effects social information in the Gillray ‘Love Bites’ exhibition on Friday night. Here we explain the background to the experiment, and present the results. Research shows that when we know that other people like something, it [...]

18th May 2015