Professional Information

Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Previously, he has been an ARC Future Fellow, a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and a Senior Researcher in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre. He served as Vice President, President, and Past President of the Association of Internet Researchers from 2015-21.

His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019), Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014).

Bruns's current work focusses on the study of public communication in digital and social media enviroments, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information, and their implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere; his work draws especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the paradigm shift towards user-led forms of collaborative content creation in media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself; and developed the concept of gatewatching to describe the processes by which bloggers and social media users interact with and curate the news, and he continues to investigate alternative and emerging forms of journalistic practice and news engagement.

Bruns's research interests are media, communication, journalism, and the computational social sciences. He has published a variety of articles in these fields, many of which can be found at snurb.info and Produsage.org. He tweets as @snurb_dot_info.

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C – Media and Culture, which publishes M/C Journal, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. In 2000, he co-founded dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing with Donna Lee Brien and Philip Neilsen from QUT's Creative Writing and Cultural Studies discipline. He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism, the Journal of Media Innovations, and the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.