Two New Journal Articles on Nation-Branding & US 2012 Elections

Two articles I have written have just come out.

The first, @Sweden: Curating a Nation on Twitter is a critical analysis of the Twitter-based @Sweden nation-branding project published in Popular Communication. This paper is OPEN ACCESS UNTIL THE END OF JUNE 2013. You can access it by clicking on the link above. Here is the abstract:

On December 10, 2011, the first tweet was sent out from the @Sweden Twitter account, a nation-branding project financed by the Swedish government through the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden. Trumpeted by the media both in Sweden and internationally as an exercise in “transparent” and “democratic” nation-branding via the use of Twitter, the @Sweden account is “given” to a new Swede every week, and, supposedly, these curators are given free rein to tweet what they like, when they like. The use of a popular communication channel by the Swedish government—in this case, Twitter—provides an illuminating example of the carefully planned and managed promotion and nation-branding of Sweden, presented under the guise of a “transparent” and “democratic” selection and editorial processes. The @Sweden project will be addressed in light of “liberation technology” (Diamond, 2010) and “technology discourse” (Fisher, 2010) perspectives, within which a correlation between access to, and use of, technology and proactive change is postulated. These theoretical perspectives are particularly valuable when heeding Kaneva’s (2011) call for a more critical, communications-based understanding of nation-branding.

The second paper, Wave-Riding and Hashtag-Jumping: Twitter, Minority “Third Parties” and the 2012 US Elections is a study on the use of Twitter by smaller political parties in the run-up to the 2012 elections published in Information, Communication & Society. The abstract:

With the description of the 2012 election as the ‘most tweeted’ political event in US history in mind, considering the relative media invisibility of the so-called ‘third-party’ presidential candidates in the US election process, and utilizing the understanding of retweeting as conversational practice, the purpose of this paper is to examine the use of Twitter by the four main ‘third-party’ US presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election in order to better understand (1) the volume of tweets produced by the candidates; (2) the level of interaction by followers in the form of retweeting candidate/party tweets; and, (3), the subject and content of the tweets most retweeted by followers of the respective parties. The ultimate goal of the paper is to generate a broader picture of how Twitter was utilized by minority party candidates, as well as identifying the issues which led followers (and their respective followers) to engage in the ‘conversational’ act of retweeting.