It’s a Wednesday in Germany, and I’m in Bielefeld for a workshop of the Bots Building Bridges (3B) project. We start with an overview of the project’s activities to date, with Florian Muhle, Ole Pütz, Rob Ackland, and Matthias Orlikowski. The project focusses on online political discourse, and the dysfunctions in such discourse that are apparent in social media environments. This also addresses the questions of ‘echo chambers’, of polarisation, and of impacts on democratic discourse. Social media are not solely to blame for this: it may also be possible to support productive political discourse through social media, given the …
The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Marko Skoric, who begins by drawing parallels between the early cable TV and late social media eras: cable TV, in its early days, was similarly social and diverse in its programming.
Social media, though, can also enable the gathering of like-minded groups, as well as the unsocial exclusion of others whose interests do not match our own; but there is also a shift from networked to clustered publics, where members of the same cluster no longer necessarily know or are even aware of each other. These taste-based clusters maximise …
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 disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:
And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiaohao He, whose interest is in ‘news finds me’ perceptions and its relationship with news efficacy perceptions. She begins, unfortunately, by highlighting the now debunked concept of ‘echo chambers’, and points out that existing studies of this often neglect news consumption practices – not least, the process of passive news consumption where individuals do not actively seek news, but instead rely on peers and algorithms for their information. Individuals with higher levels of passivity in news engagement tend to be more likely to believe in disinformation and have lower level …
It is an unseasonably cold Thursday morning in Hamburg, and after a great opening session last night with Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, and Jing Zeng we are now starting the first full day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium. I’m presenting the morning keynote, on our current work assessing the news and social media debate around Australia’s failed Voice to Parliament referendum as a possible case of destructive polarisation.More on this as the research develops, but for now my slides are here:
The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference that I’m attending is on polarisation, so of course I had to check it out; it starts with Mel Bunce and her colleagues’ study of the Media Freedom Coalition. However, they’ve asked for this study not to be tweeted at this stage, so I shall also not blog about it for now.
The second speakers in this session, then, are Jannie Møller Hartley and Elisabetta Petrucci, whose interest is in diversity in news recommender systems. Such systems may involve content filtering (based on the content of news articles) and collaborative filtering …
