'Big Data'

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 third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Giulia Frascaria, whose interest is in human augmentation technologies. These have been in the news recently, with new developments like ‘mind-reading chips’ being used in human trials. Such cyborgisation is part of broader digitalisation trends, and the industries exploring it are growing. It is likely to influence broader communication processes too.

In Switzerland, for instance, there is moderate interest in such technologies, but most respondents are also very aware of the risks inherent in them; fewer than 9% of respondents are interested in using such non-medical …

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 …

The final session of the Bots Building Bridges workshop project in Bielefeld starts with Gabriella Lapesa and Julia Romberg, whose focus is on e-deliberation as a digitally augmented version of direct democracy. This is said to have huge potential, but as yet does not scale up effectively: quality declines as scale increases. One solution to this is moderation, but human moderation is time-consuming and therefore costly.

Moderators must first decide whether an action must be taken to intervene in the discussion, and if so what type of intervention – policing, quality control, fact-checking, mediation, new idea introductions, summarisation – should …

The workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld continues with a final session for today, which starts with Christian Grimme. His focus is on the role of AI in creating as well as fighting artificial communication. Artificial agents – bots – are not new, of course: there were email bots, Twitter bots, and there are many other forms of social bots, which are now also increasingly integrated with and driven by Large Language Models. There are also prosocial bots which are used to counter more problematic bots.

Automation can mean various things, though. Closed-loop systems use feedback mechanisms …

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is David Wegmann, who returns us to the Danish YouTube data donation study we discussed earlier: his work is to make sense of these data, with a particular focus on extracting features from the YouTube videos encountered by participating users.

Collectively, these users watched some 18 million videos; some 3 million of those are advertisements inserted into organic YouTube videos, though. This leaves some 7 million unique videos, indicating a typical long-tail distribution of user attention to these videos.

Details about what types of videos these data represent are more …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is the great Jessica Walter, presenting a large data donation study involving YouTube users in Denmark. Such data donations are increasingly prominent in light of the decline of social media data APIs; they are enabled in Europe also by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enables users to claim a copy of their digital data from the platforms they engage with.

These data packages can then be donated to researchers, and provide considerable detail about user activities and experiences on such platforms; the insights they provide are also skewed somewhat by …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Valentin Ihßen, whose focus is on the use of metrics in digital political campaigning. The focus here is especially on digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns, which exist in various national settings from democracies to autocracies. Such organisations use the digital media toolkit for online and offline campaigns, and draw centrally on digital data and metrics to determine whether and how they should pursue their campaigns.

At the backstage of these campaigns there are some fairly sophisticated metrics dashboards, therefore – these include opening and click-through rates for campaign mail-outs, for instance, and such …