Internet Technologies

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Yannick Fernholz, whose focus is on smart cities. Urban environments are being rapidly digitalised, and this also results in massive data collection; such smart cities promise increased efficiency, quality of life, security, and sustainability, but also result in a techno-deterministic top-down governance of citizens and the exclusion of non-digital populations rather than true engagement. What is missing is ethically grounded technology design.

What human values should be translated into the design principles for smart city technologies, then? What do the different stakeholder groups think, and how do their values conflict with …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Alexander Wilke, whose interest is in motivating users to care about their online security. Younger users – so-called ‘digital natives’ – often fall victim to cybercrime; they have low risk awareness, and lack fundamental knowledge about protecting themselves online.

Some studies show promising results from dedicated training in phishing detection, and gamified and interactive training models; but much more work needs to be done to understand effective means of delivering training and motivating users to protect themselves more actively. Protection motivation theory can help here: it shows that both the perception …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Victoria Vziatysheva; she begins by noting that pre-existing beliefs affect what information we engage with – this is selective exposure. But studies have also shown that the use of search engines can reduce selective exposure; whether this is the case also depends on the way search queries are formulated in the first place, however.

Victoria’s project explored this in the context of a Swiss referendum on a responsible economy within the planet’s limits (which was ultimately rejected); this connected voting intentions on this referendum with search queries that reflected attitudes for …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Joanne Gray, whose focus is on trends in Big Tech, with a particular focus on virtual reality (including Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and Apple’s Vision Pro, but also many more mature projects in augmented reality and immersive technology). Much of this has been described as extended reality, or XR, and policy to govern this is gradually emerging.

Such policy – in Japan, Europe, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, China – largely treats XR as an economic opportunity; but what do we actually know about the technologies underlying such XR developments? First, many …

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 final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Bernadette Hyland-Wood, whose interest is in the co-design of an Indigenous client-centric, community-focussed project. This builds on her background in advocacy and development for open data sharing initiatives.

The project works with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Health Service (ATSICHS) in Brisbane to develop an insights platform that fosters agency amongst clients of the service; this, therefore, centrally draws on Indigenous data – that is, data collected both on, from, and by Indigenous people, whether collected intentionally or not. It works towards Indigenous data sovereignty …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kyle Moore, whose focus is on food delivery apps. These serve as an example of the gig economy, which enables irregular work structures and task-based activities by workers who usually provide all of their own equipment for their tasks. The workers themselves are also one category of app users, in fact, and exist in a liminal legal state between employees and freelancers.

Workers are required to be online and available around peak usage times, then, and this leads to a kind of power chronography that relates to the temporal rhythms …

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 …