The Audience Polarisation stream addresses one of the major domains of polarisation and partisanship as identified by the Australian Laureate Fellowship “Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate”. The other major domains are News Polarisation and Discourse Polarisation.
The Audience stream focuses user engagement and community-building online. The sense of ‘audience’ relates to the sense of audiences receiving and engaging in news media content as analysed in the News Polarisation stream, but also further, in the context of how individuals and groups online engage, both with each other, and with content from media outlets and within affordances from social media platforms.
Two major interests of the Audience stream are in network dynamics, and in information use. To understand network dynamics, our team uses computational methods to analyse large-scale data from multiple social media platforms in multiple countries. We observe trends over time, specifically around significant events or topics, such as elections or particular social issues.
Researching how both individuals and groups online argue, or make certain discursive points, online is critical to the study of polarisation and partisanship. Certain information sources can become associated with in-groups or out-groups, and information can be dismissed by association rather than content. Further, much previous research on argument and deliberation – and of polarisation – has relied on rational models of disagreement and agreement; our research incorporates the core understanding of how affect influences social and political engagement.