Interrupting practices that want to matter: The making, shaping and reproduction of environmental information online

Emerging practices for managing user misconduct in online news media comments sections

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to bridge a gap in knowledge on the professional information practices of a group of people whose daily work of managing user-generated content online exposes them to users whom they perceive as acting aggressively or otherwise offensively online.

Design/methodology/approach

Journalists’ narratives of practices for managing and responding to user comments perceived as offensive are analysed qualitatively. For this purpose, ten interviews with journalists from nine different news organisations in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Canada were conducted.

Findings

The study finds that the environment in which the journalists work plays a vital role in the evolution of the practices. Practices, indissolubly tied to the contexts or sites in which people’s activities take place, are conditioned by moral values, traditions and collective experiences which journalists enact through the practice they engage in when they are dealing with user posts online. The site, conceived as an information landscape, is that of the newsroom. Practices for managing users online evolve through actors participating in a process of learning and their ability to adopt the cultural norms and values of their environment.

Originality/value

This study sheds light on the mechanisms behind the evolution of practices for handling user-generated content online and it reports on the importance of properties such as norms, values and emotions for how things are done in the information landscape of news journalism.

A practice-based exploration of the enactment of information literacy among PhD students in an interdisciplinary research field

Purpose

– The study aims to explore the interaction between the students, the material objects surrounding them, and their social site. The purpose of this paper is to identify and elucidate information literacy as it is being enacted within a complex and heterogeneous community of PhD students.

Design/methodology/approach

– The study is conducted from a practice-based perspective, according to which information literacy is conceived as learnt through interaction within the socio-material practice where the learner is active. In order to produce empirical material, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten doctoral students in an interdisciplinary research network, and their workplaces were visited.

Findings

– The PhD students in this interdisciplinary network are more or less constantly engaged in the enactment of information literacy. It takes place in dialogue with others who can be both co-located and distantly located, and occurs through discussions about work in progress, through processes of evaluation and assessment of texts and authors, and through mundane everyday activities such as participating in meetings, which offer insights into how to navigate, in the broadest sense, the world of academia. A crucial part of the enactment of information literacy, which in practice is inseparable from interaction with others, is to pay attention to physical surroundings and material objects.

Practical implications

– The findings have implications for prospective PhD students in interdisciplinary fields, for their supervisors, and potentially also for librarians who are supposed to serve these groups.

Originality/value

– Research on the information literacies of PhD students in interdisciplinary fields is scarce. The practice-based approach applied in this study offers an extended and deepened understanding of the enactment of information literacy among PhD students in one interdisciplinary research practice.

Taking the environment online

Purpose

– This paper aims to explore the construction and configuration of environmentally friendly living through making visible the link networks that surround personal greener living blogs. The following questions guide the exploration: which types of organisations/actors structure the issue network of green living blogs as it emerges through links? How do these links contribute to carving out thematic areas as particularly influential for the construction of what greener living is seen to mean?

Design/methodology/approach

– Mixed method, a link and co-link analysis of 46 personal blogs carried out with the IssueCrawler tool, is backed up by a qualitative textual analysis of central personal green living blogs to contextualise the resulting networks.

Findings

– The resulting network shows an issue space that is divided in two halves: one half where green living is largely an issue of relating outwards (e.g. by broaching consumption) and another half which is inwards oriented (e.g. beauty products, personal well-being). A large integrative centre of mainly personal blogs functions as a hub for different notions of greener living, structured around pleasure vs a problem focus, and along inwards vs outwards orientation.

Research limitations/implications

– The empirical material consists of a sample of Swedish language blogs, which has implications for the outcome of the study.

Practical implications

– The study intends to contribute to laying the ground for developing adequately targeted and multi-faceted (online) information campaigns to inform about environmentally friendly living.

Originality/value

– The results can contribute to expand understanding of environmentally friendly living as it is represented online and thereby add value to comprehend and target parts of society. This paper contributes to the area of environmental information, which is an important and topical yet under-researched area in information studies. The IssueCrawler tool is used in a concrete empirical study in information studies.