Social Media

And the second keynote at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by the great Crystal Abidin. She begins by introducing herself as an anthropologist of Internet cultures, building especially also on standpoint theory and triangulation as a methodological framework. Her work has focussed especially on longitudinal ethnographies of Internet celebrity and social media pop cultures; she is best known, of course, for her work on influencer ecologies and economies.

This addresses communities and culture, functions and sociality, and structures and politics; over its several iterations, this work has examined influencers as a job description and culture of practice, as a concept …

The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Venessa Paech and Jennifer Beckett, whose focus is on the re-decentralisation of online community governance in the wake of recent changes to online environments. Many creators and community managers are now starting ‘cozy’ communities online, away from the major platforms; this project seeks to understand how and why they are doing this.

To do this, we must first understand digital sociality: investigating how we socialise in online spaces, and what it means to be a genuine online community. Platforms, follower bases, and audiences are not communities by default …

The second speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ziying Meng, whose focus is on self-governance in creator cultures in western and Chinese contexts. There still are considerable differences between the US-dominated western and Chinese platform ecologies, in spite of the rise of TikTok as a global platform; this represents a kind of parallel universe of platforms, with differing governance frameworks.

Chinese platforms are governed by Chinese state policies, while US-based platforms operate under western capitalist conditions; nonetheless there is also a global creator culture, which must arrange itself with these parallel ecologies. Ziying engaged in cross-platform …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.

Our slides are below:

The third speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Natasha van Antwerpen, whose focus is also on the 2025 Australian federal election. Her interest is in the role of mis- and disinformation during the election. This connects with overall concerns about the effects of mis- and disinformation on societal cohesion, trust in institutions, moral decline, antisocial and harmful behaviours, etc.

Her project examined what mis- and disinformation individuals encountered during the election campaign. This was done through an experience survey: participants installed an app on their phones that would regularly ask them to report on their experiences …

I’ll present in the first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, but we start with Kevin Tan, whose focus is on digital media strategies and voter engagement during the 2025 elections in Singapore and Australia. There is continued strong investment in digital communication by political parties, but in Australia in 2025 record ad spending coincided with declining digital engagement; in Singapore, opposition parties enjoyed strong digital momentum but this did not translate into editorial success.

Online attention tells one story, then, but the ballot box tells quite another: online signals are not reliable predictors of election outcomes. What exactly …

For my last conference of the year, I’ve made the short trip up to the Sunshine Coast to attend the AANZCA 2025 conference. I’ll present some work later today, but we start with a keynote by the great Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who begins by introducing the idea of boutique media, as a new form of small-scale news organisations that responds to the decline of mainstream news media.

Boutique media represent a form of post-industrial journalism: as existing news organisations lose revenue and market share, the industry itself is changing substantially; this creative destruction leads to a restructuring of every organisational aspect …

The next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with Alessia Pensabene’s paper on feminist content creators on Instagram in Italy, and the way they are redefining political engagement for the digital age. These creators are usually not traditional activists, but ordinary users who have gained a large number of followers on Instagram and discuss feminist topics from personal experience – as women, as mothers, as survivors of gender-based violence.

Some such creators have more followers than official accounts of feminist organisations; this also affords them considerable influence as promoters of feminist books and other content, participants …

The next speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Johanna Wahl, whose interest is in visual political communication on social media. How do the mediatisation and circulation of political images reshape protest forms; how can hybrid and algorithmically conditioned protest practices be analysed through their online visual representation?

Johanna focusses here on protest as a communicative action, and posting, sharing, liking online translates this to the digital environment. Images are important to this: they are embedded into digital media environments that shape communication and meaning, and protest collectives are therefore also increasingly focussing on …