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The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Giovanna Mascheroni, whose focus is on discussions with communicative AI systems about controversial and polarising political issues. This was explored by the use of serious games, with ChatGPT performing the role of a political journalist arguing first against and then for the radical Last Generation climate protest group. The switch from one position to the other was made once ChatGPT’s arguments for started to repeat themselves. Students then did the same, and also interacted with ChatGPT as they did so, and a jury judged who …

The third speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on the role of journalism in fuelling discursive polarisation. He begins by referencing controversial public debates about radical climate protests, which usually evidence some level of discursive polarisation. Such polarisation may be ideological and/or affective, and and become destructive for public debate.

This contrasts with democratic transformative communication, which enables societies to address such conflicts productively. Literature has identified a number of factors that may polarise or depolarise; interestingly, exposure to dissonant views is often seen as polarising, but this …

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 …

The next speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Hendrik Heuer, whose focus is on co-creating social media. This responds to the current substantial transformation of the social media environment, which prompts the question of what we might want social media platforms to look like in ten years or so. There have been longitudinal shifts from public to private, and creation to consumption, over the past years; this is driven in past by changing social media ecologies, by different use practices, different economic conditions, and other factors.

What content types, interaction paradigms, and user …

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’ve chosen is on the digital society, and begins with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and a paper on actionable research. Universities are under great political and financial pressure around the world at the moment, and this has led to an increased emphasis on knowledge transfer, open science, and public engagement for scholarly work, but such emphases are not well-aligned with internal reward structures in academia at this stage.

While society is understood to be deeply in need of our expertise, this enshrines a pattern where knowledge is produced within …

The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Stef Aupers, focussing on online conspiracy theories. These are not individual, but collectively shared, discussed, and shaped on social media. Existing research often focusses on platforms conspiracism, emphasising the role of technological features and platform affordances; what is much less frequently examined are the active and collective meaning-making practices through which groups of conspiracy theorists construct their online social identities.

This represents a participatory conspiracy culture which enables the social construction of identity; it performs boundary work through which conspiracist communities define and policy the …

The second presentation in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is by Ruth Garland, with a focus on disinformation and the people. How, in particular, can governments communicate effectively in an age of disinformation? What if governments themselves embrace the tools of disinformation for branding and propaganda via their social media channels?

Ruth’s focus here is especially on former UK Chancellor and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s personal branding strategies via official government social media accounts; this contradicts past conventions of impartiality, and takes place in an environment of increasingly partisan media outlets in the UK and …