Internet Technologies

The final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Yohanes Adven Sarbani, whose focus is on the Tular Malar (‘Contagious Reasoning’) project, which provides digital literacy for the elderly in Indonesia. The Indonesian population is aging, and this increases the need for such literacy interventions in order to decrease the digital gap and especially also protect the elderly from falling prey to disinformation.

This study used mixed methods to engage with some 1,300 participants involved in the Tular Malar digital literacy training, in person and via WhatsApp. The gained knowledge about search engines, social media, and chat technologies, through a …

And the final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Setio Budi H. Hutomo, whose interest is in the digitisation of local television in Indonesia, and its impact on democratic processes. This system was affected by the 2002 broadcasting bill, which introduced private, community, and subscription broadcasting in addition to public service media. This has an impact especially also on local media, including local television.

There is a limited number of major media groups in Indonesia, which also dominate the TV advertising market. Local TV does not capture much of this spending, and the more than 300 local television stations …

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the …

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies. Such legal frameworks also often lack a concrete commitment to normative goals. And, of course, the platforms are also able to exercise …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media. Yet there may be other challenges for community-driven, federated social media like Mastodon – indeed, there are a number of other platforms that now build on the ActivityPub protocol that is best-known for underpinning Mastodon.

For …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Eviane Leidig, whose interest is in content moderation. She notes the focus on the decision-making by platforms in content moderation studies; this usually fails to intersect with studies of counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremism online. Approaches to CT and CVE tend to encapsulate specific ideological positionings, too, that need to be better acknowledged.

Online CT and CVE approaches were shaped especially in a post-9/11 world and represent the power dynamics of their industry; platform moderation that addresses such phenomena is informed by a larger ecosystem of governance that occupies a disproportionate area …

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.

The project began by mapping the digital infrastructures of news by examining the technology stacks used by different news organisations; this was done through interviews and observations, trade conferences, Stackshare, and methods identifying third-party tools on Websites. This distinguished production and publishing technologies; distribution technologies; and …

The final speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos and Lucia Mesquita, who are working with the concept of philanthrocapitalism to examine the funding of journalism in the Global South. This philanthrocapitalism represents an evolution of funding models in recent decades: a substantial number of private organisations, including major digital platforms, with a strong focus on capitalist business efficiency are now providing a great deal of the available funding.

An example for this is the Google News Innovation Challenge, providing grants to smaller and larger journalism organisations. How does this affect the …

The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.

This project began by mapping ownership of such infrastructure in Norway: while unusually, only one sub-sea Internet cable is privately owned, content delivery networks and data centres are overwhelmingly privately owned. This private ownership of content delivery networks (an example is a …

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to …