Contextual Analysis of Digital Information Practices – APINC

This research project focuses on Internet users’ information practices and aims to position them in a larger economy of media, political and symbolic experiences. The objective is twofold: on the one hand, to better think the articulation between "online" and "off-line" media practices, and on the other hand to situate these practices both socially and politically. This research also intends to move away from a normative posture discriminating information practices - with on the one hand practices deemed “dangerous” (sharing of fake news and conspiracy theories, etc.) opposed, on the other hand, to “virtuous” practices (consulting legitimate sources, resorting to fact checking, etc.) - to better understand the meaning Internet users give to their practices, without prejudging their consistency or meaning. This proposal therefore is an invitation to shift the focus away from fake news alone, in order to better understand the information logics through the prism of social class, level of education, gender and place of life of Internet users.
To do this, the aim will be to build an innovative multi-method research design, articulating a big data approach of the Twitter social network with a survey and focus group survey. The first part of the research plans to identify and characterize account communities on the social network, via clustering techniques. The second part plans to create a focus group, with the members of each cluster. The objective will be to better understand the meaning of the practices observed online. Finally, the third part carries out a survey among a sample of the French population, in order to analyze to what extent the results observed online are representative of more global trends. This project ultimately aims to analyze new information practices from a sociological prism, using big data techniques.