Authority from networks ? Mapping online music criticism in France


The ability of journalists to defend their professional authority in the public sphere has been challenged in many ways by the growing importance of social networks and various forms of « para— » or « ambiant » journalism produced by amateurs on platforms such as Twitter (Hermida, 2010). Cultural journalism is particularly subject to this issue as more and more people can be identified as « cultural intermediaries » (Maguire and Matthews, 2012) in the new media ecosystem driven by social networks.

This challenge has yet mostly been studied as a matter of professional and cultural autonomy for journalists. Rhetorical aspects have been widely studied such as the problem of judgement and expertise among various groups involved in the mediatisation of a given issue or the boundary work performed among traditional intermediaries to secure their jurisdiction over those issues.

In this project I provide a morphological approach of this question, attempting at a) measuring the weight of the journalistic voice as opposed to other voices dealing with the news ; b) measuring the influence and authority of that journalistic voice in the flux of interrelated people and texts that circulate on social networks.

The case study is based on a collection of +/- 200.000 tweets sent during 35 music festivals in France during the 2018 summer (covering various kinds of music : classical, jazz, pop, rock, electronic). Approximately 90.000 Twitter users have commented on those festivals during the studied period and their activity has generated more than 500.000 links on the social network (either mentions or retweets).