Snurb's blog

I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media.

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Dom Carlon, whose focus is on governance of bots by bots, and inter-bot communication more broadly, on Reddit. Bots are often understood based on how they communicate with humans, and there are often seen as a problem or nuisance, but bots have always also communicated with other bots; this is sometimes by design and sometimes by chance (as bots have unplanned encounters with other bots online).

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.

The final day at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference begins with a paper by Wujiong Ren, who begins by highlighting the role of social media in accompanying international conflicts. He suggests that the Russian war against Ukraine is the first to fully combine physical and cyberwarfare.

And the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 panel is Steven Gamble, who begins by pointing the appropriation of Black American culture in contemporary music; his focus is especially on Ariana Grande as a multiply constructed pop persona who presents a racial ambiguity.

The second speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 panel is Ed Katrak Spencer, whose focus is on the clickbait conspiracism surrounding Britney Spears. There is a continuous refuelling of speculative Spears discourse: music-related online controversy is a continuous rhythm rather than singular event, and online conspiracism is itself becoming a quasi-musical vibe.

For the final Social Media & Society 2024 session today I’m in a panel on online music cultures, which starts with Jenessa Williams, whose interest is in how fans decide to continue or discontinue their fandom for artists accused of sexual misconduct, especially also in the context of changing music consumption habits. The focus here is on smaller, genre-specific cases rather than widely publicised allegations against superstars.

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.