Panel Report: Networked Revolution and Consumption

© Jakub Plíhal

Chair: Jakub Macek, Masaryk university, Czech Republic

Speakers

Immanuel Benz, Christian Schäfer, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

Dzmitry Yuran, Natalie Manayeva, Univesity of Tennessee, U.S.A

Mato Brautovič, University of Dubrovník, Croatia

Georgeta Drula, University of Bucharest, Romania

Presentations about social networking were started by Immanuel Benz and Christian Schäfer who talked about technological innovations  - precisely about innovators and their productivity. They asked whether innovators are influenced by family (are the later born siblings more innovative?) or biology (does younger means more productive?).  "There are generaly more later born siblings in the world, and also higher age doesn't have negative effect. Also marriage and fatherhood can be excluded as decisive." Neither of that had major influence, they concluded.

© Jakub Plíhal

Natalie Manayeva continued with her description of "Revolution through social networks" in Belarus. Economic crisis caused protests against the government in Belarus. Although the protests were peaceful, more than hundred people were arrested. Protesters meant to gather using social networks, but there were so many of them using it, that they did not succeeded. "Only younger and more educated people were using these platforms." Later in discussion, Manayeva mentioned that "...in Belarus, independent media almost doen't exist, government controls them." 

Mato Brautovič continued on the same topic. "Social networks are great for activists - they can spred their ideas and call themselves together and so on. Examples from other countries like Iran and Egypt show us that social networks can be very helpful during protests and revolutions." His research examined profiles of croatian activists on Twitter. Many activists started their profiles about two years before the protests, didn’t start it because of them. They are not publishing their bios or links to their other pages, also not give their detailed names. They had many followers. The more followers they had, more messages (tweets) they published. Activists were mostly only disseminating messages. Only several thousands of people were using Twitter in that moment in Croatia, so it didn't have huge effect.

Innovations of media products, more specifically Facebook, was the topic of presentation of Georgeta Drula. "Assumption here is that users can influence developement of Facebook through their behavior - what they publish and how often." She used content analysis of Facebook to get results. "Interesting and not understable for me are findings that users used more links to Youtube than to their own content," she mentioned.