I’m chairing the next session at this AoIR 2024 conference, which is on the intersections (or collision) between journalism and AI. We start with Sangeet Kumar, who notes the long history of complex interactions between digital media platforms and news publishers; news is just a type of content for platforms, while for news producers it is a mission and vocation. There is a substantial amount of traffic coming from digital search and social media platforms to journalistic sites, and therefore a substantial level of dependency.
This has led to some controversial government interventions like the Australian News Media Bargaining Code …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Keara Caitlyn Martina Quadros, whose interest is youth activism for climate action online. Her focus is especially on TikTok, where many pro- and anti-climate action activists and influencers are posting to hashtags like #climatechange. Such content also overlaps with what is posted on other platforms, of course.
What role does the TikTok app and platform play in all of this, in terms of the app infrastructure, affordances, and affect? This project conducted an app walkthrough, engaging with the TikTok app like a first-time user and observing the experience of doing …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Luigi Arminio, whose interest is in the sociolinguistic patterns of polarisation on climate change on Facebook (this approach carries on from the previous presentation). Such patterns may also represent socioeconomic differences: people with lower socioeconomic status tend to be more open to climate change-denialist rhetoric, and such groups also differ from others in their overall communication styles. Can such differences be identified in climate discourse, marking the proponents and opponents of climate activism? Do they influence audience responses?
The project compiled some 10,000 posts from 250 public pro- and anti-climate …
Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Luca Rossi, whose interest is in visual communication strategies in climate change debates. Online debate on these topics tends to be highly polarised between those who do and do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change; it is also difficult to discuss in the abstract, so that visual representations become especially important in these debates.
How do specific images feed into the political narrative on climate change, then: are they used to debate objective facts (e.g. through data visualisations), or in a more polarising way to represent group …
The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures. There are also the Carbon Free Energy initiative; Frontier, an initiative of the online payment company Stripe, which provides carbon removal and sequestration credits; and some emerging approaches to make generative AI platforms more carbon-neutral.
It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?
What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of …
