University of Helsinki
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 19.4., Salla-Maaria Laaksonen (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Unconventional communicators in the corona crisis”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.
Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.
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Abstract:
This talk introduces an ongoing research project UnCoCo that investigates how information and stories related to Covid-19 pandemic circulate and are framed in networks of alternative communicators. Thus we are not interested in the communication by government or traditional media, but rather examine how communicators such as social media influencers or anonymous users take part in framing the pandemic. We conceptualize their discourse as legitimacy judgements targeted towards the institutions and communication of official actors such as the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).
This presentation focuses on two groups of alternative communicators: networks of alternative experts that emerged and organized online during spring 2020 and an anonymous group of accounts that perform a parody of THL and its key employees on Twitter using the vernacular modalities of online communication.
A published paper of the first case is available here, open access:
https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/19/05/JCOM_1905_2020_A10
More details about the project:
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/uncocoproject/
Author bio:
Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Docent, D.Soc.Sc., is a Postdoctoral Researcher
in the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki. Her research areas are technology, organizations, and new media, including organizational reputation and legitimacy in the hybrid media system, the organization of online social movements, and the use of data and algorithms in organizations. She is also an expert in digital and computational research methods. @jahapaula