[Air-L] CCDS Presents a talk with Anders Olof Larsson, Thursday, November 18th.

[Jeff Hemsley]

The Center for Computational and Data Sciences presents Virtual Research Talk with Dr. Anders Olof Larsson, Thursday Nov 18th, 12 PM, titled, "Win a sweater with the PM's face on it" - A longitudinal study of Norwegian party Facebook engagement strategies.
This talk is free and open to the public. Please do use the link below to register for the event.

https://forms.gle/iCUyjUdew6xrwRCNA



"Win a sweater with the PM's face on it" - A longitudinal study of Norwegian party Facebook engagement strategies

Receiving Facebook post engagement - such as likes, comments and shares - is crucial in order to succeed online, perhaps especially for political actors. However, online engagement can also be hazardous, as it potentially strips the original poster of control over their messages. Previous work has shown that political actors have been rather unwilling to encourage interaction from their online supporters. However, research has also indicated a need to assess the influence of Facebook in this regard. The study presented here details what is referred to as Facebook engagement strategies among Norwegian political parties on Facebook between 2009 and 2019. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to compare party and follower activity in relation to the aforementioned engagement varieties, the main findings indicate that parties and followers do not necessarily seek to interact at the same time. Furthermore, tendencies towards gamification, where parties direct user attention towards online quizzes and raffles instead of towards deliberation and political discussion, can be discerned.



Anders Olof Larsson (PhD, Uppsala University, 2012) is Professor at the Department of Communication, Kristiania University College. Larsson was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Social media and Agenda-Setting in election campaigns project at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. During his PhD work, which was funded by The Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology, Larsson took part in the 2011 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme. His PhD thesis - "Doing Things in Relation to Machines - Studies on Online Interactivity" (pdf) - was awarded the 2012 Börje Langefors award (for best Swedish thesis within the field of Informatics) and the 2012 FSMK Doctoral Dissertation award (for best Swedish thesis within the field of media and communication studies). Anders Olof Larsson's research interests include the use of online interactivity and social media by societal institutions and their audiences, journalism studies, political communication and methodology, especially quantitative and computational methods. As of July 2021, Larsson's work has been cited 3812 times, resulting in an h-index of 32 and an i10-index of 54. In June of 2017, Larsson was ranked as among the top 100 most productive researchers in Norway. In October 2020, Larsson was the only communication & media studies scholar with a Norwegian affiliation ranked among the top 2 % in his field worldwide following a ranking from Stanford University (full [very large] list here).