Snurb's blog

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

It’s Wednesday, I think, so I’m in Dublin for the first face-to-face AoIR conference since AoIR 2019 in Brisbane. It’s genuinely delightful to be amongst this wonderful community again at last. As usual, the conference starts with the conference keynote by Nanjala Nyabola, addressing the conference theme of Decolonising the Internet. She begins by noting that the vast majority of people experience the Internet in a foreign tongue; and it is appropriate to address this issue in Ireland, which has had its own history of having its national identity and language suppressed for so long.

Nanjala’s keynote is based on research which worked to translate keywords from Internet research into Kisuaheli, and the assumption from others has always been that this was an AI and natural language processing project; but it was not, and the real question is what it means to be human in the digital age. This was also her first academic paper in Kisuaheli; it was a project in decolonisation. How does this even happen? Ultimately, as so often, the story begins with the arrival of the British: the colonisers. And too many people in the world still don’t know what it means to be colonised – the damaging, scarring disruption of history and culture; one of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in human history that reorganised societies for the economic benefits of imperial power, and a form of bureaucratised murder, systematised rape, and legitimised robbery.

In Kenya this lasted less than a century, but in the last decade of colonisation alone tens of thousands were killed, often simply for speaking out against oppression. In addition, lives were disrupted by introduced pests and diseases. This form of structural violence was documented in the files of the occupiers, but the larger loss of culture is less measurable, and the patterns of colonial administration often still continue. And the intention of the violence was to reorganise society to make money; to create ideal labourers – including by rooting out local languages by force in schools. That legacy still endures, and the trophies of this violence still remain in British museums, while culture is still being reclaimed and relearned.

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

In a parallel session that morning, I presented a paper led by Aljosha Karim Schapals on the way that journalists perceive the challenge of ‘fake news’ rhetoric as a delegitimising force. This work has now also been published in an article in the journal Media and Communication:

The final speaker in this last ECREA 2022 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on the far right in Portugal and Spain. Until a few years ago, these countries had no major far-right parties, but the Catalan independence struggle led to the emergence of Vox as a successful far-right party in Spain in 2017, and Chega followed in Portugal a couple of years later.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Judith Goetz, whose focus is on the Austrian Identitarian movement. This movement has been an effort to restore far-right language and and ideas into German-language discourse, not least by exploiting certain weaknesses and opportunities in centre-right discourses. This has pushed the boundaries of what can be said with impunity further and further to the right, and has established far-right views in the mainstream media and everyday life.

It’s the final session at ECREA 2022 already, and what an excellent conference it’s been – so good to be back away from Zoom and amongst the people. This final session is on the extreme right, and begins with a paper by Bart Cammaerts on the appropriation and normalisation of fascist, extreme-right discourses by more mainstream right-wing politicians. In the process, struggles for social justice are being abnormalised in turn.

The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2022 this week is Gary Younge, a former editor-at-large for The Guardian. He begins by playing a promotional video from his exploration of whiteness in America, from his perspective as a black man from the UK, which intended to flip the script on white journalists’ explorations of black lives in the US or UK. The clip went viral and Gary has kept getting recognised for it, even if the full documentary was perhaps not watched anywhere near as often.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, focussing on the relations between professional alternative media as an indication of boundaries in the journalistic field. This connects with a long history of research into field theory and boundary work in journalism.