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It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.

Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme …

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

Ritzau has introduced such robotic journalism tools for its financial reporting: building on predesigned story templates and standardised company earnings data, the tools will generate standard articles that report on the …

The next presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jeremy Shtern, who begins by noting that the quantification of the influence of online and social media actors is a tricky problem – but it may not be as hard to qualify such influence. It is important in this context to understand online environments as working largely on the basis of a monetisation philosophy, too.

Online influencers are individual content creators in online and social media spaces who monetise their large followings to advertise particular products and services. Such influence can also go badly wrong, however, as influencers choose the ‘wrong’ …

The next presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Elinor Carmi, whose interest is in the power behind spam, noise, and other disruptive behaviours. In most forms of creative media, there is a form of direction, often aimed at generating an emotive response from the audience. This is also true in online spaces, where we are directed by algorithmic rhythms. We might be able to understand these by borrowing concepts from sound.

The intentions of a theatre director and a social media executive are quite different, however; they seek to engender different audience responses. In social media, for instance …

The post-lunch session on this last day of IAMCR 2019 starts with Ibrahim Subeh, whose interest is in how Blockchain technologies are being framed in the Arabic Press (specifically Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE).

Blockchain is not a very intuitive technology, but it is also not necessary to understand everything about it. Much of the present research focusses on its financial applications or on the technical aspects, but the social implications of this technology should also be understood more closely. The technology is socially disruptive, and some suggest that it could eventually decentralise and replace the World Wide …

The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy …