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For this first morning of ECREA 2022 proper, I’m starting with a session that explores the idea of the Spiral of Silence, and we start with a paper by Christiane Eilders. She begins by noting the importance of public opinion expression as a prerequisite to the public deliberation. Spiral of Silence theory then asks under what conditions people fall silent and refrain from expressing their opinions, and how that affects public opinion; the point here is not actually silence, though, but the expression of other opinions that lead people to believe that their own views will be unpopular.

So what …

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Aarhus, and I’m at the ECREA pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, organised by the DigiWorld research network. Today, my QUT DMRC colleague Dan Angus and I presented our paper with Ehsan Dehghan, Nadia Jude, and Phoebe Matich on the use of social media during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. Here are the slides:

The sessions at this Norwegian Media Researcher Conference are organised in the form of particularly constructive feedback on work-in-progress papers – which is great as a format, but doesn’t lend itself particularly well to liveblogging. So, I’ll skip forward right to the next keynote by Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on the datafication of everyday life. This is something of a departure from his previous work on the gamification of the news.

He begins by outlining the datafication of the mundane: the way people’s social action – as well as non-human action, in fact – is being transformed into quantifiable …

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even …

I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.

On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this …

Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.

On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk …

I’ve not yet had the chance to write much about one of the major new projects I’m involved with: the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), a large-scale, multi-institutional, seven-year research centre that investigates the impact of automated decision-making technologies (including algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other such technologies) on all aspects of our personal and professional lives. In particular, for the first year of the Centre I’ve led the News & Media Focus Area, which recently held its inaugural symposium to take stock of current research projects and plan for the future. (This was …