Social Media

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jinzhuo Liu, whose focus is on affective polarisation in online discussions about Chinese traditional medicine. Is this reduced by shared national identity? The mechanism to explain such a tendency would be the Common In-group Identity Model.

Affective polarisation between opinion-based groups results in the formation or identification of in- and out-groups, treating each other in hostile ways. This is often also observed in online engagement between such groups. Such groups nonetheless foster cross-cutting discussions online; such exposure to opposing views may only increase polarisation between them …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.

Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Tanmay Samanta, whose focus is on digital greenwashing. Social media, and especially influencers on social media platforms, are critical to promoting sustainable consumerism; influencer marketing is also a key element of greenwashing, however.

Their style of storytelling is central to their success, and considerable effort goes into this. Greenwashing, in particular, purposefully creates false, favourable opinions about a product, service, or company’s efforts to be environmentally friendly. Tanmay explored this especially for social media influencers in India, examining their influence, their use of sustainability or greenwashing …

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.

I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.

Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in …

And the final speaker in this early session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jaime Riccio, whose focus is on digital identities and the techno-self from a critical cultural perspective. Very early theories about communication built on the Shannon-Weaver model of encoding and decoding, while early cyborg theories built on Norbert Wiener’s emphasis on feedback loops; but this also raises the question of power – it enables the development of a technocracy.

Ordinary populations might feel oppressed by these developments; technopolitical developments create the potential for a panopticon that is driven by big tech and biopolitics. Cyborgs embody …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jiayi Ge, presenting the algorithmic kaleidoscope framework to explore the algorithmic self of digital media users. Various other metaphors being used for this – the ‘algorithmic mirror’, and others – are problematic, as the algorithmic self does not simply reflect the user’s ‘real’ self; rather, there are various selves (actual, ideal, intended) which are variously represented by the algorithmic self.

How do users perceive this discrepancy, and how do they respond to it? The present study explored this through some 23 interviews with users in Singapore …

The first full session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts for me with a session on algorithmic media, which kicks off with Susanne Eichner. She notes the impact of digitisation on the fragmentation, individualisation, personalisation, and automation of media and users; this has led to research in critical data studies (focussing on the datafication of users and the surveillance capitalism that results from it), as well as in more user-oriented approaches that also acknowledge users’ datafied agency and resistance to such datafication.

How might we bridge these two seemingly opposed logics that variously see audiences as helpless or …

It’s mid-July and comfortably warm outside, so I must be in Singapore for the IAMCR 2025 conference. After some very warm welcomes, including from a Chinese lion dance troupe, we begin with a keynote by Ang Peng Hwa, addressing the theme of climate change which is central to this conference. He notes the increasingly obvious impact of climate change on countries in this region – less predictable weather, more severe weather events, and conflicting ideas about solutions. Climate change in this sense is a wicked problem – and one of the characteristics of such wicked problems is organised irresponsibility.

Singapore …