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Snurb — Thursday 3 October 2019 09:26

Do Journalists Trust Journalistic Metrics?

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | AoIR 2019 |

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

Trust in Journalism Metrics from aljosha

Our key question here is whether journalism metrics are trustworthy enough to be used in editorial decision-making. This is part of a larger project on the future of journalism in a post-journalism …

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Snurb — Wednesday 2 October 2019 18:50

Trust in the System for Indigenous Social Media Users?

Politics | Social Media | AoIR 2019 |

It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.

Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme …

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Snurb — Monday 26 August 2019 10:59

Some Questions about Filter Bubbles, Polarisation, and the APIcalypse

Politics | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:

1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?

The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean …

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Snurb — Wednesday 31 July 2019 09:01

Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: Debunking the Myths

Politics | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

(Crossposted from the Polity blog.)

Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.

But these metaphors are built on very …

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Snurb — Tuesday 16 July 2019 13:30

A Round-Up of Some Recent Publications

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of …

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Snurb — Friday 12 July 2019 00:52

Towards Social Journalism: Rediscovering the Conversation

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Online Publishing | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 23:04

The Introduction of Robotic Journalism at the Danish News Agency Ritzau

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | IAMCR 2019 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

Ritzau has introduced such robotic journalism tools for its financial reporting: building on predesigned story templates and standardised company earnings data, the tools will generate standard articles that report on the …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 22:53

Online Influencers and the Long History of Paid Promotional Content

Produsage in Business | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The next presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jeremy Shtern, who begins by noting that the quantification of the influence of online and social media actors is a tricky problem – but it may not be as hard to qualify such influence. It is important in this context to understand online environments as working largely on the basis of a monetisation philosophy, too.

Online influencers are individual content creators in online and social media spaces who monetise their large followings to advertise particular products and services. Such influence can also go badly wrong, however, as influencers choose the ‘wrong’ …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 22:36

Understanding the Rhythms of Social Media Platforms

Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The next presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Elinor Carmi, whose interest is in the power behind spam, noise, and other disruptive behaviours. In most forms of creative media, there is a form of direction, often aimed at generating an emotive response from the audience. This is also true in online spaces, where we are directed by algorithmic rhythms. We might be able to understand these by borrowing concepts from sound.

The intentions of a theatre director and a social media executive are quite different, however; they seek to engender different audience responses. In social media, for instance …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 22:18

Blockchain as a Technological Imaginary in the Arab World

Internet Technologies | IAMCR 2019 |

The post-lunch session on this last day of IAMCR 2019 starts with Ibrahim Subeh, whose interest is in how Blockchain technologies are being framed in the Arabic Press (specifically Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE).

Blockchain is not a very intuitive technology, but it is also not necessary to understand everything about it. Much of the present research focusses on its financial applications or on the technical aspects, but the social implications of this technology should also be understood more closely. The technology is socially disruptive, and some suggest that it could eventually decentralise and replace the World Wide …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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