Journalism

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even they might be aware are far removed from any objective truth.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am. My stay here also involves a couple of teaching roles: I’m teaching an undergraduate course that builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (and I’m hoping to make those lecture recordings available publicly at some point, in case they’re of use in other teaching) and a Masters seminar that explores the many concepts for what has now replaced ‘the’ public sphere (and I’m hoping to convert those ideas and discussions into some new writing eventually, too). Plus, there are plenty of opportunities for future collaborations between the IKMZ and my home institution, the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.

But while I’m here in the centre of Europe I’m also taking the opportunity to connect with a number of key colleagues and communities in my field. Next week, on 13-14 October 2022, I’ll be at the Norwegian Media Research Conference in Stavanger, where I’ve been invited to present one of the keynotes and will outline some of the ideas that are also animating my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation.

Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.

On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk, available below, also gave me an opportunity to speak more generally about the continued challenges of researching social media platforms and their activities, and to outline some of the work that my colleagues and I in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are doing to address these issues. The audio on the recording is a little soft, but I hope the overall discussion comes through clearly enough; slides and further details are linked below.

Axel Bruns. “Facebook's Australian News Ban and Its Implications for Critical Platform Studies.” Invited presentation at the Griffith Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Brisbane, 26 Nov. 2021.

A few days later I gave a talk to the Social Media Data Science Group at the University of Sydney – many thanks to Monika Bednarek for the invitation. This was a great opportunity for me to step through a number of different, related concepts from groups through communities to publics, and organise some thoughts on how to distinguish these broadly similar but nonetheless distinct formations from one another. This is important especially in the context of network analysis, which all too often jumps to calling collections of similar entities a ‘community’ without paying sufficient attention to the specific meaning of that term: not every cluster is necessarily a community in the proper sense of the word.

In July 2021, I was exceptionally honoured to be awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship: a five-year, A$3.5 million research grant that represents the highest level of individual recognition by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Laureate Fellowships are exceedingly rare – no more than 17 are awarded each year, and they go very predominantly to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; indeed, as far as I can tell, mine was the first awarded to a researcher from the Media and Communication field in the 13 years of the scheme’s existence.

Most importantly, the Laureate Fellowship enables me to build a team of four Postdoctoral Research Associates (five-year, full-time postdoctoral positions) and four PhD researchers (three-year PhD scholarships) starting in early 2022, plus another four PhD positions to follow mid-project, in 2024. The whole team will be based with me and our excellent community of research staff and students at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane, Australia. If these positions are of interest to you, read on (and if you know of others who might be interested, please share this information with them)…

Commencing formally in February 2022, my Laureate project addresses the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation in online communication. It continues a trajectory of recent work that began with my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, which in turn sparked the 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real? that examined in some more detail whether there was any evidence for the claims that ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ were increasingly enclosing us all in ideologically pure information environments on digital and social media platforms. (Spoiler: there wasn’t.)

I ended that book with a call to action: if the problem wasn’t simply technological (‘social media create filter bubbles’), then what is driving the increase in hyperpartisanship and polarisation that we seem to be experiencing in many countries around the world? Indeed, stepping back a little further  from that premise, is polarisation actually increasing? Can we use digital trace data to assess this, and systematically compare such assessments over time (to measure the speed of change) and across national contexts (to examine whether some political and media systems are more resilient than others)?

I’ve also outlined my path towards these questions, and the Laureate Fellowship, in my recent QUTeX talk during the ADM+S News & Media Symposium – I hope this provides a useful introduction to these concerns, and overview of my research agenda from here (there’s also a follow-up post on the QUTeX blog):