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The final day at AoIR 2019 begins for me with a panel on social media bots, and the first speakers are Felix Münch and Ben Thies who present a paper that I have also contributed to; the slides are below. Social bots have become quite prominent in media coverage of social media in recent times, with particular focus on platforms like Twitter, but it is difficult to assess just how prevalent they are on such platforms, partly also because it is difficult to get a sense of the make-up of larger social media populations.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Kaye Hare, who introduces us to the idea of sensorial litter. This builds on the realisation of how embodied experiences affect the ethnographic research process, which also requires a close sensory attunement to the researcher’s own sensorial context.

This is because experiences of embodiment can be intense (and even overly intense, out of control); they create sensorial litter, and in principle that litter can be picked up – as a product of the research – and processed subsequently. But where does such litter go, and where can it then be picked …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the excellent Nik John, presenting a paper co-authored with Aysha Agbarya. Their focus is on Facebookunfriending practices between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. From past studies, we already know that it is especially people with strong political views who unfriend, and such unfriending severs weak ties especially frequently; it also results from encountering unwanted group communication styles or online propaganda, and is used to manage one’s own personal public sphere in social networks.

But how do power relationships affect online tie-breaking practices? Are there …

I’ve spent all morning with AoIR business (and moved into my role as Past President), but this afternoon I’m finally attending another AoIR 2019 session, starting with the fabulous Luca Rossi. His focus is on the digital practices of migrants as they navigate the European border regime, especially in the context of the 2015/16 migration crisis.

The project has been using interviews and observations in migrant camps for part of its work, but another component of it has focussed on migrants’ uses of Facebook. t studied some 179 pages, containing 75,000 posts and 2.1 million comments, over a period …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Emma Baulch, who shifts our focus to Indonesian activist uses of WhatsApp. She focusses on ‘buzzers’: content creators who work especially in the context of Indonesian election campaigns and promote specific political candidates across various social media platforms.

Such buzzers produce and promote political memes throughout social media, and in Indonesia also especially on WhatsApp, the top messaging app in the country. This also includes political misinformation, and to address such issues WhatsApp has now placed a limit on users’ ability to share on messages to larger numbers of …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Niki Cheong, who continues our focus on the uses of WhatsApp in Malaysia and Singapore. His project investigates the weaponisation of popular culture for political issues, in particular, and drew on walkthrough and scrollback methods as well as digital ethnography, interviews, and surveys with users.

This began from the observation that the current ‘fake news’ discourse is being weaponised as a tool to suppress dissent, create fear, or scam digitally illiterate citizens, and found that memes, online personalities and influencers, and innovative content formats are being utilised in the process. Indeed …

The next speaker at AoIR 2019 is Amelia Johns, who focusses on private group chats on WhatsApp, especially in the Malaysian context. Malaysia’s political climate has led young adult Malaysian-Chinese political activists to organise through this platform, and WhatsApp is now the second most popular platform in Malaysia (after Facebook). It is also used especially for discussing news and politics, partly due to its use of end-to-end encryption.

Such encryption is especially important because of sedition and media laws in Malaysia, which have created a chilling effect on the public expression of criticism of the monarchy or government …

The next AoIR 2019 session I’m attending is on WhatsApp, and starts with Natalie Pang. She begins by noting the significant popularity of this platform in Asian countries, as well as outlining its particular features of large-scale group broadcasting of messages and end-to-end encryption – which is especially interesting to users discussing sensitive political topics in these countries.

Natalie’s project identified scholarly articles discussing WhatsApp and its uses, and examined 40 such publications that discussed the use of the platform for political or civic engagement; of these, eleven focussed on cases in Europe, ten on Africa, nine on various …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

Arnt’s project conducted surveys and interviews with professionals in the Norwegian music industry. Almost half of the survey respondents use music metrics in their jobs, but such use is …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is my colleague Kim Osman, presenting outcomes from our research project in collaboration with The Conversation and the Cooperative Research Centres Association in Australia. We are interested in assessments of the public value and impact of scholarly work, which are also increasingly demanded by the governments that fund scholarly research. Slides here:

Increasingly, platforms like The Conversation as well as social media are also critical to the engagement with and impact of scholarly research, and there has been a rise in the development of scholarly …