Blogs

The final AoIR 2024 conference panel that I’m attending today is on ambient amplification, and starts with an introduction by Marloes Annette Geboers and Elena Pilipets, who introduce foregrounding of the background, platforms and Web environments, embodiment and materiality, modulation of attention and affect, and more or less coordinated engagement as they key dimensions of such ambient amplification.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alexis de Coning, whose focus is on the men’s rights movement. Although a great deal more visible in recent years, it emerged to public visibility already in the 1960s and 1970s; but it is likely that early men’s rights ideas go back much further still.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Ian Glazman-Schillinger, who focusses in on a particular far-right site, the Liberty Bell BBS. This emerged from the Liberty Bell print magazine, which set up the BBS in the early days of the computer age. It thereby predates by some decades the more recent concerns about the substantial technological innovations made by white supremacist movements in the 2010s.

The post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference that I’m in is on historicising the far right, which clearly is a much-needed activity under current circumstances. We start with Kevan Feshami, whose interest is in white nationalism. White nationalist groups are themselves engaged in producing a narrative of their own history, in order to then be able to encourage their followers to be, or become, what they think their historical identity ought to be.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Bruns Paroni, whose focus is on information campaigns on social media in post-Bolsonaro Brazil. Her work builds on our QUT research into destructive political polarisation, which amongst others identifies a breakdown of communication as a symptom of such destructive polarisation.

The next presentation in this AoIR 2024 conference session is by Constantin Paschertz and Christian Schneider, whose focus is on populist German politics on TikTok in the Bavarian state election in 2023. The use of social media in political campaigning is not new, of course, but German parties have tended to be hesitant to use TikTok for this – out of concerns about the Chinese ownership and dubious data practices of the platform.

The second speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Sally-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in the intersection between platforms and politics. There have now been several years of critical discussion around this troubled intersection, and a growing legitimacy crisis four such platforms. Much of this is related to electoral politics, especially as platforms are now widely used to talk about election – and to intervene in electoral politics in legitimate and illegitimate ways.

The next session at this AoIR 2024 conference is on elections, and starts with a paper by Carlos Entrena Serrano, whose focus is on the use of TikTok for political and social issues content. He begins by noting that social media were initially advertised as a space for social connection, but with the move to a video-first social media experience this has shifted considerably towards the algorithmic curation of content experiences for users.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Alma Kalisky, whose focus is on ‘flat earther’ conspiracist communities. Overall, conspiracist beliefs can have significant negative consequences at the personal, social, and societal level, but also provide a ground for community formation and social connection; at the individual and communal level, we must better understand what attracts people to these conspiracy communities.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Rob Topinka, whose focus is on conspiracy theories that are promoted by reactionary ideological entrepreneurs like Russell Brand. Their rhetoric doesn’t need to make any positive propositions: all they need to do is point out things that (in their view) have ‘gone too far’, in in doing so position themselves as bold new heroes who speak for ‘the people’; this can be understood as a new and reactionary form of counter-culture.