Government

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a paper by Terry Flew, Agata Stepnik, and Tim Koskie, who begin by noting the changing contours of Internet governance. There is increasing nation-state regulation in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states, as well as renewed debate about the treatment of digital and social media platforms and a populist push towards greater regulation.

This regulatory turn has also been driven by significant shocks and scandals as well as growing regulatory activism, and is often directed at curbing the power of platforms, out of a general sense that governments should …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Alanna Myers, whose focus is on Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission and the questions of truth-telling and media coverage it raises. The defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum seems to signal that Australians are not yet ready to embrace such truth-telling, yet at the same time Victoria is pushing ahead with its own truth-telling commission, which commenced here in the past week.

This has not received anywhere near the same level of coverage as the Voice referendum has received; this may be understandable given their different natures, yet must still …

The next speaker at the AANZCA 2024 conference is my excellent colleague Katharina Esau, presenting our work on news media polarisation in the Voice to Parliament coverage. Our slides are below, too.

Katharina notes that we are in a moment of polycrisis, with several crises all intersecting and influencing each other; in this, the role of news media cannot be overestimated, and Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices would be extremely valuable. But we also live in a time of polarisation, which is complicated by the many incompatible …

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference has a strong focus on Indigenous Australians and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and starts with a paper by Lisa Waller, focussing on future visions for the post-referendum era. This explores in particular the speeches made on the night that the referendum results were announced: government speakers presented a limited agenda related to socioeconomic equality, while opposition speakers articulated a reactionary neo-assimilationist vision.

These speeches can be understood from a perspective of critical discourse analysis; these speeches occur in the context of mediatisation, as major televised statements immediately after the referendum results …

The second day at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a keynote by Ysabel Gerrard, whose focus is on youth and social media – her new book The Kids Are Online is coming out in March 2025. Her research has involved studies of mental health cultures, anonymous apps, naming cultures, digital photo editing, and tech nostalgia, and the book makes a strong case for moving beyond binary approaches to social media as either good or bad, helpful or harmful, positive or negative, and for understanding social media as both at the same time, depending on the context. This also means …

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time. This ultimately examines the network media economy, including telecommunication and Internet infrastructure, online and traditional media services, and core Internet applications and sectors.

This integrated approach better reflects the …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …

Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Agata Stepnik, whose interest is in stakeholder perspectives on the sustainability of commercial and publicly-funded news production in Australia. Her project is engaging in interviews with stakeholder groups – publishers, policy-makers, journalists, advertisers, and platform operators – and explores how they have conceptualised news media’s digital transformation since the emergence of Web publishing in the 1990s, and what futures for news production they envisage.

Across all these interviews there was a strong recognition of the social and institutional value of news to democracy; however, news was also strongly positioned as a …

The first paper session I’m attending at the AANZCA 2024 conference is a panel on democracy in crisis, and starts with my QUT colleague Stephen Harrington. His focus is on ‘dark political communication’, as a way of moving past the overemphasis on mis- and disinformation and recognising that such practices are just one part of a much broader range of communicative dysfunctions in contemporary political systems.

This then also incorporates a greater focus on recent changes in political PR: political PR has been a growing focus in the study of politics in recent decades, with attention paid to its arrangements …

It’s late in November, and I’m at my penultimate conference for the year: we’re about to begin the AANZCA 2024 conference with a remote keynote by the great Pablo Boczkowski. He starts by sharing two selfies: one, entering the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which nominated the Harris/Walz presidential ticket; that event addressed several internal and external publics, including journalists, influencers, delegates, voters, and the general public. It was characterised by an atmosphere of expectation and enthusiasm, choreographed to lead up to the actual nomination itself.

The second selfie is from fieldwork in Buenos Aires, which has the highest concentration of …