DiSCourse Seminar with Andreas Eckhardt
19 January 2024, 12:00 (CET), hybrid
Digital Science Center, Innrain 15, 1st floor, Open Space Area or Big Blue Button
DiSCourse - The Digital Science Seminar Series on:
Visual Audience Gatekeeping on Social Media Platforms: A Critical Investigation on Visual Information Diffusion Before and During the Russo–Ukrainian War
Historically, gatekeepers, like elites and institutions, controlled visual information to serve their agendas. However, the rise of social media has given rise to ‘visual audience gatekeeping’, where users shape information flow. This evolution offers empowerment but is not without risks, as visual content's persuasive nature can be exploited for persuasion and manipulation. We scrutinize visual audience gatekeeping in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, focusing on a Russia-related Reddit subforum. As audience gatekeepers, users disseminate visual content that aligns with their embraced social reality. The outcome is a visual echo chamber’ characterized by limited information diversity, thereby corroborating but seldom interrogating the worldviews of audience gatekeepers. Amid heightened tension, this cycle intensifies, increasing the potential for radical visual narratives to gain ground. The study culminates in a novel theoretical model of visual audience gatekeeping, offering broad implications for the fields of visual communication, gatekeeping theory and social media platforms.
Andreas Eckhardt, University of Innsbruck, Department of Information Systems, Production and Logistics Management and associated scholar at DiSC
Andreas Eckhardt is Professor of Information Systems at the University of Innsbruck. In particular, his research focuses on the impact of social media on opinion polarization and the spread of misinformation and disinformation, external and internal threats to organizational cybersecurity, and decentralized open forms of organizing based on blockchain technology.