The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference has a strong focus on Indigenous Australians and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and starts with a paper by Lisa Waller, focussing on future visions for the post-referendum era. This explores in particular the speeches made on the night that the referendum results were announced: government speakers presented a limited agenda related to socioeconomic equality, while opposition speakers articulated a reactionary neo-assimilationist vision.
These speeches can be understood from a perspective of critical discourse analysis; these speeches occur in the context of mediatisation, as major televised statements immediately after the referendum results …
The second day at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a keynote by Ysabel Gerrard, whose focus is on youth and social media – her new book The Kids Are Online is coming out in March 2025. Her research has involved studies of mental health cultures, anonymous apps, naming cultures, digital photo editing, and tech nostalgia, and the book makes a strong case for moving beyond binary approaches to social media as either good or bad, helpful or harmful, positive or negative, and for understanding social media as both at the same time, depending on the context. This also means …
The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kyle Moore, whose focus is on food delivery apps. These serve as an example of the gig economy, which enables irregular work structures and task-based activities by workers who usually provide all of their own equipment for their tasks. The workers themselves are also one category of app users, in fact, and exist in a liminal legal state between employees and freelancers.
Workers are required to be online and available around peak usage times, then, and this leads to a kind of power chronography that relates to the temporal rhythms …
The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time. This ultimately examines the network media economy, including telecommunication and Internet infrastructure, online and traditional media services, and core Internet applications and sectors.
Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Catherine Son, whose focus is also on the agenda of News Corporation in its coverage of the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Such coverage also exerts influence on other media, of course, through an intermedia agenda-setting process. The present project examined content from a number of NewsCorp publications on the Voice, and the focus in this presentation is especially on coverage in week 9 of the campaign, when claims were made that prominent Yes campaigner Marcia Langton called No supporters ‘racist’ and ‘stupid’.
The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Victoria Fielding, whose new book Media Inequality addresses the structural power inequalities experienced by marginalised groups in society as they are covered in the news. She notes that western democracies largely hold a liberal pluralist view of the news, where news frames compete in a marketplace of ideas and gradually trickle down to the public; this is too simplistic, however.
Instead, this contest of frames is affected by the master narratives that are seen as legitimate by the journalists covering public debates; such perspectives are also affected by the editorial …
The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is my great QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, whose focus is on the Australian far-right news channel Sky News Australia, which he characterises here as a populist media channel. Populism is a current buzzword, but is also widely understood as a thin-centred ideology that can attach itself to various political values; it centrally pits ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’, but the term is perhaps most often used – problematically – to specifically describe ‘far-right’ populism.
Media have an ambiguous role in relation to populism: media are themselves criticised for being part …
The first speaker in the post-lunch session at AANZCA 2024 conference is Ian Anderson, who is interested in the emergence of socialist counterpublics in the present context. Such counterpublics are in a conflicted space: they are fundamentally sceptical about social media (and especially Twitter, even pre-Musk) but also acknowledge social media’s importance for message amplification and community connection; for this reason they combine social media work with more conventional activist practices, such as doorknocking.
Social media thus serve as a kind of unavoidable frame for politics, whether they are fetishised as a utopian communicative space or not. The Victorian Socialists …
The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)
Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …
