Idag ska vi få bekanta oss med Aleksi Suuronen och hans roll i projektet, samt få boktips inom två vitt skilda områden: fantasy och statistik. Eller kanske de inte är så olika varandra trots allt, ibland kan nog statistik kännas som om det vore både magiskt och från en annan värld.
Vad handlar din forskning om? Vilka är dina forskningsintressen?
My research has evolved quite a bit from the time I started working on my Ph.D. thesis, but has stayed in the rough field of political social media use. At first, I started investigating what role social media plays in the Finnish elections and to what degree different candidates actually gain votes from the post that they published on various platforms. But then Cambridge Analytics -scandal and GDPR happened, which made it drastically more difficult to gather data for research purposes.
Hence, I switched my focus to studying why voters become followers of politicians and what benefits and/or pains they give to the political figures that they follow. But this focus area quickly evolved into to what degree social media use creates informational environments that are often named filter bubbles or echo chambers and whether or not these environments can work as incubators where affective polarization has room to grow and become more intense. The interplay between social media use and various forms of political polarization is my current main research focus.
Vilken är din roll i projektet?
My current role in this project can perhaps best be described as a consultant. My previous work and somewhat haphazard research journey have given me some insights into how affective polarization and filter bubbles / echo chambers have been studied in the past. I do my best to inform the team of what has been done before and help us to find good ways to measure these difficult phenomena within our specific context. I also greatly enjoy using various quantitative methods to find patterns from a pile of survey responses. I hope that this enjoyment has given me enough actual competence which allows me to give useful answers to our research questions without making too much damage in the process.
Vad skulle du jobba med om du inte var forskare?
Probably a trekking guide in Lapland or in some other remote location. I have always enjoyed hiking and being in nature. If someone would pay me to be in the nature more often, I would think of it as a pretty good deal. Minus the increased contact with mosquitoes, of course.
Ge läsarna ett tips på en bok, film, serie, podd eller liknande
If you are a fantasy reader, I would highly recommend Joe Abercrombie and his First Law series. The guy is just phenomenal at writing realistic and interesting characters whose motivations you always understand even though they can easily be seen as “evil”.
If you like boring real-life factual books or, even worse, books that involve math, then I would highly recommend Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan and Mastering Metrics by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. Both of them do an excellent job showing why statistics can be so useful and just plain cool! They require no prior familiarity with the underlying mathematical concepts and focus more on the intuition behind the concepts rather than on getting the equations right.
If you are more of a listener than a reader, then on the podcast side I would give Reply All a try. It focuses on investigative journalism with a big focus on all of the strange things that happens on the internet. For reference, in one episode they tracked down the origin of this well-circulated picture of a guy who is duct-taped to the roof in some random LAN-party:
Projektet ”Ett polariserat samhällsklimat i Svenskfinland? – Omfattning, orsaker och lösningar” (2022–2025) tar sig an uppgiften att systematiskt studera den samhälleliga polariseringen i Svenskfinland. Projektet finansieras av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland och genomförs vid Institutet för samhällsforskning (Samforsk) vid Åbo Akademi.