I'm about to head off on a brief trip to Germany for a series of conferences and presentations, so this seems like a good moment for another update on recent developments. First off, I'm delighted to finally have a first publication out in the great Social Media + Society journal that introduces our new methodological approach of practice mapping. I've teased this in a few past posts and presentations already, not least in my keynote at the ACSPRI conference in November 2024, but together with my great QUT colleagues Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden I've now outlined our conceptual and practical approach in detail:
Axel Bruns, Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. “Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks.” Social Media + Society 11.2 (2025). DOI: 10.1177/20563051251331748.
In brief, practice mapping moves beyond merely using available interactions data to map social (media) networks: such interaction networks were a key tool for studying Twitter, in particular, but other platforms (e.g. Facebook) never provided enough data that could be used in such a way in the first place. Practice mapping therefore considers all the datapoints about an account's actions and interactions that are available to us from a given platform, and builds networks between accounts based on the similarity or dissimilarity of their activities – in other words, it is able to map networks of similarity, likemindedness, discursive alignment, and so on even where there are no direct interaction data available.
Our Social Media + Society article outlines this approach in detail, and even provides some basic Google BigQuery code to illustrate the approach; and while peer review is often a struggle, in this case I genuinely want to thank the reviewers as well as the SM+S editorial team for their feedback on the draft article as it genuinely helped us develop the final version.
In addition to the ACSPRI keynote last year, I've already presented some early analyses using the practice mapping approach at recent conferences: we conducted a first analysis of the Voice to Parliament referendum debate on Facebook for AANZCA 2024, and compared it with the Aotearoa New Zealand treaty debate for AoIR 2024 (and there's more to come on those topics); in my presentations in Germany over the next couple of weeks I'll continue to spread the word about the new method.
Meanwhile, we are also already extending the practice mapping approach further, with particular emphasis on the temporal dynamics of collective online practices. On 4-5 June, I'll be at the annual conference of the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, where I will present a first glimpse of that work: a paper on “Shifting Discursive Alliances: A Longitudinal Analysis of Australian Climate Change Discourses on Facebook through Practice Mapping”, co-developed with my QUT colleagues Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, Tariq Choucair, Laura Vodden, and Ehsan Dehghan, will outline work in progress on a large dataset of climate-related discussions on Facebook in Australia. From a large practice map of this overall dataset we extracted the key structures and then traced how individual actors moved through this map over time, pointing to shifting interests and attitudes over the course of several years.
In the following week, I'll be at a workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld on 11-12 June, where I'll outline the practice mapping approach and its utility in detecting the symptoms of destructive polarisation. In fact, the conceptual work on the symptoms of destructive polarisation that my Australian Laureate Fellowship team and I have undertaken was one of the key drivers for our development of the practice mapping method: having outlined those symptoms, we needed the tools to detect them, and practice mapping is a key step towards this.
I'll have more updates on these conferences in the coming weeks, including some liveblogging, and will also share my presentations here as usual, of course.
Other Publications
In addition to this work, some other new publications have also finally come out. First, with my wonderful Italian friends Giovanni Boccia Artieri and Laura Iannelli and my QUT colleague Ehsan Dehghan I edited a special issue of the leading Italian journal Comunicazione Politica, on the topic of 'fringe democracy' (or perhaps more generally, the fringes of democracy). We've got some excellent contributions from around the world in this issue (with all articles in English), but also published our own editorial which does a great deal more than just introduce these articles; instead, it critically considers the intersections between fringe democratic and antidemocratic activities, the platformisation of the public sphere, and the limits of free speech in some detail:
Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Axel Bruns, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Iannelli. “Fringe Democracy and the Platformization of the Public Sphere.” Comunicazione Politica 1 (2025): 3-21. DOI: 10.3270/116607.
In addition to this, the great Kylie Jarrett also invited me to respond to an article in the journal Dialoges in Digital Society, which she edits; true to its title, this journal regularly features invited responses to the articles it publishes. In this case, I was invited to engage with the work of Alessandro Gandini, Silvia Keeling, and Urbano Reviglio, who had published a fascinating piece on “Conceptualising the ‘Algorithmic Public Opinion’: Public Opinion Formation in the Digital Age” that is very much worth reading in its own right.
That said, I do think it overshoots its mark somewhat by proposing the concept of 'algorithmic public opinion', which seems to negate the agency that users have in engaging with platform algorithms, so in my response I'm pushing back gently against the idea that algorithms are gatekeepers that determine what content and ideas we encounter, and instead propose that they constitute yet another form of (automated, in this case) gatewatchers which shape and channel but do not completely control information flows. Opinion formation, in the end, still remains a human rather than algorithmic process:
Axel Bruns. “Algorithmic Gatewatching and Its Implications.” Dialogues on Digital Society. DOI: 10.1177/29768640251336597.
And that's it for now – more soon as I cover those conference in Germany and present our team's work there. After that, it's back to Brisbane for the annual symposium of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and the tenth anniversary celebrations of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre where I work – and then on to the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore in July where, amongst other things, I'll present another update on our dynamic practice mapping work...
