Social Media

I’ll present in the first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, but we start with Kevin Tan, whose focus is on digital media strategies and voter engagement during the 2025 elections in Singapore and Australia. There is continued strong investment in digital communication by political parties, but in Australia in 2025 record ad spending coincided with declining digital engagement; in Singapore, opposition parties enjoyed strong digital momentum but this did not translate into editorial success.

Online attention tells one story, then, but the ballot box tells quite another: online signals are not reliable predictors of election outcomes. What exactly …

For my last conference of the year, I’ve made the short trip up to the Sunshine Coast to attend the AANZCA 2025 conference. I’ll present some work later today, but we start with a keynote by the great Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who begins by introducing the idea of boutique media, as a new form of small-scale news organisations that responds to the decline of mainstream news media.

Boutique media represent a form of post-industrial journalism: as existing news organisations lose revenue and market share, the industry itself is changing substantially; this creative destruction leads to a restructuring of every organisational aspect …

The next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with Alessia Pensabene’s paper on feminist content creators on Instagram in Italy, and the way they are redefining political engagement for the digital age. These creators are usually not traditional activists, but ordinary users who have gained a large number of followers on Instagram and discuss feminist topics from personal experience – as women, as mothers, as survivors of gender-based violence.

Some such creators have more followers than official accounts of feminist organisations; this also affords them considerable influence as promoters of feminist books and other content, participants …

The next speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Johanna Wahl, whose interest is in visual political communication on social media. How do the mediatisation and circulation of political images reshape protest forms; how can hybrid and algorithmically conditioned protest practices be analysed through their online visual representation?

Johanna focusses here on protest as a communicative action, and posting, sharing, liking online translates this to the digital environment. Images are important to this: they are embedded into digital media environments that shape communication and meaning, and protest collectives are therefore also increasingly focussing on …

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’m attending is on digital publics, and starts with Maria Grub and Antonia Wurm, focussing on Twitch as a platform for political discussion in Germany. Twitch, of course, is usually known as a gaming platform which enables people to livestream their gaming sessions while viewers communicate in real-time through a live chat. This can also be monetised, with streamers making money and gaining access to early game releases.

However, users also encounter political content on the platform, at least incidentally; this seems to especially favour right-wing content, and …

And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.

In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …

I was next at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, presenting our practice mapping approach to the study of destructive polarisation in public communication. Here are the slides, and I’ve linked to the relevant articles here too:

I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.

The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Hossein Derakhshan, whose focus is on AI and algorithm studies. He begins by noting an ontological crisis in media studies: the field has looked at the production of, audiences for, and texts of media, but the rise of algorithmic platforms in particular has meant that the media texts, in particular, have now been destabilised – users of media no longer necessarily encounter the same texts in the same forms, formats, and combinations.

Instagram posts and stories, TikTok feeds, Spotify playlists, Meta ads, AI chats are …

The next speaker at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, reflecting on the relationship between audiences and media productions. Audiences experience such media productions as atmospheres: media reconfigure the organisation of space, and this affects the actions of those present; our engagement in such atmospheric spaces relies on our tuning into such atmosphere.

The concept of atmosphere is a common concept in ordinary language; we perceive the quality of the atmospheres in various social settings all the time, even though it is inherently ephemeral and intangible. How do media stage an atmosphere, then, and how do audiences perceive these …