Papers by Stefania Barina
So far the democratic function of social media has been framed through two opposite paradigms: a ... more So far the democratic function of social media has been framed through two opposite paradigms: a cyber-utopian one and a cyber-dystopian one. The former conceives of the Internet as a new Haberamsian public sphere, that is an open space in which people can freely discuss and deliberate about political issues. The latter deems the Internet as a fragmented and individualized space, which, by definition, destroys any possibility of collective deliberation and discussion. However few scholars have systematically examined the empirical relation between politics and social media. Through a quantitative-qualitative analysis, grounded on the digital methods paradigms and based on a dataset of 181085 tweets collected during the Primarie of Centro Sinistra 2012, we would like to show how Twitter can be conceived of as a "civic device" that permits a specific political discourse and new forms of political association to be materialized - both entities that would remain unseen otherwise. In the end we suggest that it is possible to construct a new theory of the digital public sphere starting from the Tardian notion of "public".
This paper addresses crowd-based dynamics of value creation in participatory culture. Based on a ... more This paper addresses crowd-based dynamics of value creation in participatory culture. Based on a corpus of 114,931 tweets associated with One Direction and similar boy bands, we draw on recent theories of crowd-based organization in digital media as well as classical crowd theory to build a theoretical model of collective value creation. In our model, the achievement of value in the form of trending and individual microcelebrity is based on affectively driven processes of imitation, rather than on rational evaluation and deliberation. We contrast this model with established accounts of microcelebrity and draw out implications for theories of crowd-based organization in digital media and for theories of participatory culture and collaborative value creation in general.
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Papers by Stefania Barina