After the conference is before the conference: after attending and blogging the ICA 2026 conference in Cape Town, I will be in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference next week, where I'll present a couple of papers and participate in a roundtable exploring our experiences with the Meta Content Library to date. More on those soon.
But ahead of that conference, I also have some major publication updates. Most importantly, I'm very pleased that the second edition of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics has now been published. The first edition came out in 2016, at a time when social media still played a very different and potentially more positive role in political debate, activism, and scrutiny; in 2026 things look very different, and our line-up of chapters in the collection shows this. We reflect on this in our introduction to the book, which I've also made available as a pre-print here:
Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Anders Olof Larsson, Jessica Yarin Robinson, Tanja Bosch, and Kateryna Kasianenko. Introduction. In The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics
In 2016, my chapter with Tim Highfield explored how the use of social media challenged dominant conceptions of 'the' public sphere, and of course this has continued to be a major topic in my work; my chapter in the 2026 edition connects with this too, but focusses more substantively on the way the current networked environment for public debate has been read through the flawed 'echo chamber' and 'filter bubble' metaphors. It points out that far from the disconnections and disjunctures that such phenomena are supposed to have caused, the greater challenge today is actually hyperconnectivity, and the informational and cognitive overload that this causes. A pre-print for this is now online too:
Axel Bruns. “Hyperconnectivity, Not Isolation: Why Concerns about ‘Echo Chambers’ and ‘Filter Bubbles’ Address the Wrong Problem.” In The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics
But this is only one of a total of 32 chapters, which cover concepts, challenges, policies, problems, platforms, and possibilities for the use of social media in politics at the present moment, and around the world. Do check out the full volume, and ask your local university librarian to order the book for your library!
Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Anders Olof Larsson, Jessica Yarin Robinson, Tanja Bosch, and Kateryna Kasianenko, eds. The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics
But clearly we are not the only editorial team whose work has now come to fruition. I'm also very pleased to have a chapter in the new Handbook of Social and Communication Networks, edited by Marco Bastos and Luca Rossi; here I explore the evolution of gatewatching and newssharing, with particular attention paid also to what happens when platforms deliberately disrupt such processes – as happened with the Facebook News Bans in Australia (temporarily) and Canada (permanently?).
Axel Bruns. “Networked News Publics, Disrupted: How Platform Actions Can Affect Collective Gatewatching and News-Sharing Practices.” In Handbook of Social and Communication Networks, eds. Marco Bastos and Luca Rossi. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 21–32. DOI: 10.4337/9781035325047.00009.
And finally, I'm also very pleased to see that a special issue of the Australian Journal of Political Science which was co-edited by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Katharina Esau is now out. The great John Dryzek and I were invited to provide an afterword reflecting on the articles collected in this issue, and we were very impressed by the work of these authors:
Axel Bruns and John S. Dryzek. “Afterword: Public Sphere Transformation: An Endlessly Moving Target.” Australian Journal of Political Science (2026). DOI: 10.1080/10361146.2026.2674953.
More updates again soon, with liveblogging to come from Social Media & Society - and there are a few other publications in the pipeline for the rest of the year, too...
