After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yiming Liu, whose focus is on the role of moralised content in online communication. This is often linked to moral contagion theory, but existing research on this is overreliant on observations from English-language studies, which may not translate well to other languages and cultures with their own cultural norms.

This study, therefore, uses the concept of ‘moral circle’: a boundary delimiting who or what deserves moral concern. This represents a series of expanding circles from the self, intimate relationships, the family, the social group, one’s own …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Peichi Chung, whose focus is on digital labour in the context of e-sports. This is a rapidly growing area of digital entertainment, with an inaugural e-sports Olympics to be held in Dubai in 2027.

Past work on e-sports has focussed on e-sports as fan-based digital labour, and linked this to emerging worker identities in the gig economy. This is further disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence and its embedding into video games, and the gamification of digital work; overall, video gaming becomes a form of …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Byron Hauck, who begins by asking whose imaginaries for artificial intelligence we are dealing with. Right now, we are being told what AI is: we are in the middle of the technological sublime – we are given a story of what it is supposed to be, what its future is supposed to be, what we are supposed to do with it.

But these visions are not empowering: they allow the current moment to be defined by a handful of capitalist tech leaders, rather than by the …

And the final speaker in this early session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jaime Riccio, whose focus is on digital identities and the techno-self from a critical cultural perspective. Very early theories about communication built on the Shannon-Weaver model of encoding and decoding, while early cyborg theories built on Norbert Wiener’s emphasis on feedback loops; but this also raises the question of power – it enables the development of a technocracy.

Ordinary populations might feel oppressed by these developments; technopolitical developments create the potential for a panopticon that is driven by big tech and biopolitics. Cyborgs embody …

The third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Giulia Frascaria, whose interest is in human augmentation technologies. These have been in the news recently, with new developments like ‘mind-reading chips’ being used in human trials. Such cyborgisation is part of broader digitalisation trends, and the industries exploring it are growing. It is likely to influence broader communication processes too.

In Switzerland, for instance, there is moderate interest in such technologies, but most respondents are also very aware of the risks inherent in them; fewer than 9% of respondents are interested in using such non-medical …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jiayi Ge, presenting the algorithmic kaleidoscope framework to explore the algorithmic self of digital media users. Various other metaphors being used for this – the ‘algorithmic mirror’, and others – are problematic, as the algorithmic self does not simply reflect the user’s ‘real’ self; rather, there are various selves (actual, ideal, intended) which are variously represented by the algorithmic self.

How do users perceive this discrepancy, and how do they respond to it? The present study explored this through some 23 interviews with users in Singapore …

The first full session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts for me with a session on algorithmic media, which kicks off with Susanne Eichner. She notes the impact of digitisation on the fragmentation, individualisation, personalisation, and automation of media and users; this has led to research in critical data studies (focussing on the datafication of users and the surveillance capitalism that results from it), as well as in more user-oriented approaches that also acknowledge users’ datafied agency and resistance to such datafication.

How might we bridge these two seemingly opposed logics that variously see audiences as helpless or …