Government

It’s a Wednesday in November and I’m in Wellington for ANZCA 2023, my final conference for this year, where I’ll also present a keynote tomorrow morning. We start today with the first of the conference keynotes, however, by Maria Bargh, who begins with the customary acknowledgments of the peoples, places, and more-than-human aspects of the lands upon which we meet – and this is also related to the theme of the conference, ka mua, ka muri, or ‘walking backwards into the future’. This refers to the way we are out of balance with each other and with the planet – in our use of resources, in our perspectives on history and politics. This is a difficult predicament that needs to be confronted – ideally through shared ownership and collaborative governance models.

Maria suggests that there are several examples that provide pointers to solutions for this. One draws on Whanaungatanga – kinships and relationships: one collective in the South Island of New Zealand have a 500-year plan for land, resources, and community, for instance, and this governs the sustainable operation of their enterprises; these provide for participating families and sustain traditional practices (in farming and other fields) as well as reconnecting people to each other and the land and forcing them to look to the future.

A second example are projects for bioremediation, addressing the industrial contamination of lands – but without removing the contaminated soil altogether and by instead using longer-term in situ remediation approaches that draw on a range of fungi and tree species that are especially efficient at removing toxins from the soil. This represents a more caring relationship with the land, combining Māori and Wwestern scientific approaches.

The next speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Claudia Severesia, whose focus is on the 2024 elections in Indonesia (for the president and parliament in February, and for governors and local assemblies in November). This will see increasing participation from younger generations (including millennials and Generation Z voters), and political parties will need to find ways of addressing these groups.

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

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.

And we’ve reached the final day at AoIR 2023, and the session on networks that I’m in starts with Dmitry Kuznetsov, whose interest is in the community practices found in /r/hongkong during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These reacted against the gradual takeover by the People’s Republic of China, and were a transformative time for Hong Kong – but it is important to avoid a feel-good interpretation of these protests.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Adriana Amaral, whose interest is in fan practices surrounding the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Her project examined social media data from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube related to COVID-19 in Brazil, and through this work also identified the strong politicisation of vaccines especially under and by the leadership of Bolsonaro. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on COVID-19 in Brazil (CPI da COVID) also emerged as a key player in these debates.

The early morning session this Friday at AoIR 2023 that I’m in starts with a paper by my QUT DMRC colleague Sebastian Svegaard. He presents a case study of what happens when politicians behave badly – and how their political fan bases respond to this. This connects with a larger body of work which connects fandom and political research, and positions politics as fandom.

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.