Internet Technologies

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.

The final speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos and Lucia Mesquita, who are working with the concept of philanthrocapitalism to examine the funding of journalism in the Global South. This philanthrocapitalism represents an evolution of funding models in recent decades: a substantial number of private organisations, including major digital platforms, with a strong focus on capitalist business efficiency are now providing a great deal of the available funding.

The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to content forms and formats, to audience and engagement, and other aspects.

But there was a lack of a critical stance – while researchers lamented journalism’s difficulty in adapting to the new Internet technologies now available, a critical stance towards the impact of these technologies on journalism was often missing. This applies for instance to the mental health consequences for journalists of the competitive metrification of journalism engagement measures via social media metrics, or of the increasing targetting of journalists representing minorities with abuse on social media. Journalism research instead adopted the discourse of platform companies, without questioning its biases.

The next speakers in this final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Elizaveta Kusnetsova and Martha Stolze, whose focus is on computational propaganda and the broader relationship between algorithmic systems and mis- and disinformation. This has been highlighted especially by the use of algorithmic tools by the Russian propaganda machine, particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. This continues a long-standing tradition of Soviet and Russian propaganda by using new technologies.

The second presenter in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Runxuan Tua, and her focus is on gender and body metaphors in digital fitness platforms in China. Such platforms have become immensely popular in China in recent times, but also contribute to the disciplining of beauty standards and the commodification of fitness. This can be read through a Foucauldian paradigm of discipline.

The second session this morning at IAMCR 2023 is on cyberactivism, and starts with Dongwook Song. His interest is in the financialisation of daily life through stock market apps. He notes that Korean young adults were in a stressed social situation before the pandemic, and after COVID-19 there was a boom in investments, cryptocurrency and stock market speculation, and other financial activities in order to get ahead – everyday life has been financialised.