Extracting Communication Networks (E1) - Bail 2017

[HyunkuKwon]

Post questions about the following exemplary reading here:

Bail, Christopher .A. 2012. “The fringe effect: Civil society organizations and the evolution of media discourse about Islam since the September 11th attacks.” American Sociological Review 77(6):855-879.

[chiayunc]

I am pretty much convinced by the information ecology described by the paper. However, I am curious that if the conclusion is then suggesting that we are facing a failed or struggling journalism industry and the public sphere where both is susceptible to the intended audiences' already existing understanding of the matter and neither can really sustain or push a discourse that purely reflects content provider's original intent. Is our information market a failure? I think it would also be interesting to explain the generative process behind the network in addition to illustrating the network.

[jcvotava]

I found the theoretical framing and the thoughtful controls included in this paper to be rich. However, I was fundamentally unconvinced by the centerpiece of the methodology: use of """plagiarism detection software""" which replaced words with synonyms and looked for overlap of 4 words within 6-word strings.

How do we know that the civil society organizations influenced media reports based on this word overlap? Why couldn't language overlap occur because of common ideology between organizations describing the same event? In other words, I feel like a conservative American writer describing a terror attack is likely to use similar language within the discourse no matter what rather than being "influenced" by a particular civil society organization competing for attention within my discursive space. What evidence do the authors give to support their interpretation of the direction and causality of the relationship?

[RobertoBarrosoLuque]

This is very interesting work. This work uses graph-theory and network science to understand the evolution of media discourse and its coverage of previously considered "fringe" and "mainstream" opinions in the wake of defining events. I wonder if there is any similar but more recent work that incorporates the role of social media platforms to understand the dynamics between "fringe" and "mainstream" ideas and their popularity in society?

[toecn]

I found this article to be fascinating. Yet, I wasn't fully persuaded about the causal statement, driven mainly by the regression models. I think there might be an omitted variable that is driving both effects (media and orgs becoming central in the field). For instance, right-wing political activism could have promoted a negative view on Islam after 9/11. This activism could have influenced media through many other different channels (different from civil society organizations). Yet, this might be explained better in Bail's book, where he extends this work. I did find the network analysis particularly interesting and better evidence for his central argument.

[dtanoglidis]

This is a very interesting article. I'm wondering if the conclusions can also explain the prevalence of fake vs real news in social media or the spread of conspiracy theories.