Internet Technologies

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, focussing especially on political advertising during the 2025 Australian federal election. This work is also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Computational advertising is ephemeral and targeted, individually personalised to the social media user; it is difficult to study these processes at scale. While platforms purport to provide some ad transparency libraries, these are limited, and can be enhanced through other approaches.

Some such approaches include data donations via browser plugins that capture the ads encountered by …

The second day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a paper session on platform governance, and the first speaker is Brooke Ann Coco. Digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives, and digital platforms tend to centralise power – how might this be reversed to put power back into the hands of communities through Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI)? Brooke’s focus here is on the Metagov community, which is pursuing these goals.

Metagov faces a knowledge management challenge: it is working across several collaborative platforms, which fragments communication and information management. There may be a role for AI systems here: AI tools …

The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.

How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …

The next speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Udo Göttlich and Felix Krell, whose focus is on interaction and representation in digital media use. Interaction theory has traditionally focussed on social interactions in offline worlds between co-present social actors, coordinating and negotiating their shared social situation, but this does not apply directly to online social interactions where there is no physical co-presence; such theory has been translated to such environments by emphasising shared the affect and intensity of online interactions, and considerations of temporality and immediacy.

Differences between synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and …

The final speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Annekatrin Bock and Dan Verständig, whose focus is on programmed futures in education. We use complex technological systems everyday, but must be aware of when they are dysfunctional; as routines break and crises happen, this is when education happens. The promise of education is to address and enable us to navigate uncertainty, but what education provides also serves to negate certain possibilities.

Uncertainty is the starting-point for pedagogical action: it requires such action. But it is also an outcome of such action: education opens up …

The next session I’m attending at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is on digital imaginaries, and starts with a paper by Peter Gentzel. His approach centres on mapping: digital maps are a form of media that envision futures, showing aspects of our social and cultural life that are not quite visual, and seek to empower us to do and see things that are mostly hidden, and thereby provide for a better future.

Such maps include services like Google Maps, which focusses on providing consumption options, curated online maps of cultural options (like street art across a given city) …

The second day at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with a keynote by Nick Couldry, focussing on the corporatisation of media and everything. He notes a number of key changes over the past twenty years: datafication – the transformation of everyday life into data, and its exploitation by business and government, thereby producing the social for capital; social media – shifting the exploitation of social data to produce attention and shape consumer and citizen action; and artificial intelligence – the corporate capture of the human mind itself, which automates cognitive production and transforms what we value.

This …

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 …

After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …

The next day at the the AoIR 2025 conference starts for me with a panel on AI imaginaries that begins with a paper by Giuliana Frascaria, whose interest is in cyborg imaginaries of the form that have been promoted by people like Mark Zuckerberg for some time. She has previously reviewed the literature and studied public attitudes towards these technologies, but this is limited by the fact that so few of these technologies already exist in the wild; this means that four the most part they remain futuristic imaginaries.

There are only some transhumanist pioneer communities that are early adopters …