And the second keynote at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by the great Crystal Abidin. She begins by introducing herself as an anthropologist of Internet cultures, building especially also on standpoint theory and triangulation as a methodological framework. Her work has focussed especially on longitudinal ethnographies of Internet celebrity and social media pop cultures; she is best known, of course, for her work on influencer ecologies and economies.
This addresses communities and culture, functions and sociality, and structures and politics; over its several iterations, this work has examined influencers as a job description and culture of practice, as a concept …
The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Venessa Paech and Jennifer Beckett, whose focus is on the re-decentralisation of online community governance in the wake of recent changes to online environments. Many creators and community managers are now starting ‘cozy’ communities online, away from the major platforms; this project seeks to understand how and why they are doing this.
To do this, we must first understand digital sociality: investigating how we socialise in online spaces, and what it means to be a genuine online community. Platforms, follower bases, and audiences are not communities by default …
The second speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ziying Meng, whose focus is on self-governance in creator cultures in western and Chinese contexts. There still are considerable differences between the US-dominated western and Chinese platform ecologies, in spite of the rise of TikTok as a global platform; this represents a kind of parallel universe of platforms, with differing governance frameworks.
Chinese platforms are governed by Chinese state policies, while US-based platforms operate under western capitalist conditions; nonetheless there is also a global creator culture, which must arrange itself with these parallel ecologies. Ziying engaged in cross-platform …
The second day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a paper session on platform governance, and the first speaker is Brooke Ann Coco. Digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives, and digital platforms tend to centralise power – how might this be reversed to put power back into the hands of communities through Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI)? Brooke’s focus here is on the Metagov community, which is pursuing these goals.
Metagov faces a knowledge management challenge: it is working across several collaborative platforms, which fragments communication and information management. There may be a role for AI systems here: AI tools …
The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Merja Myllylahti, whose interest is in changes to how ongoing changes to search engines well beyond AI are changing Web traffic to news outlets. This takes a broader view of audience behaviours in relation to search, and of structural conditions in the search marketplace.
There have been significant concerns about a decline in traffic to news sites; however, the evidence for this decline remains limited at present. Comparing 2018 and 2025 traffic patterns for New Zealand, for instance, traffic from search seems fairly stable; it is the traffic …
My QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, focussing on how search engines respond to searches about conspiracy theories. Search engines are a common pathway towards conspiracist information; they have the potential to affect their users’ understanding of such information. What people see when they search for such content also depends directly on how the query itself is formulated, so query variations also need to be studied systematically. Our Australian Search Experience 2.0 project within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society explores the impact of such query …
The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.
How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …
And the final presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Gabrielle Princessa Wulaningatri, who returns us to the analysis of polarisation in Australian news media coverage. Ideological polarisation in the general population tends to correlate with attitudes towards climate action; such public polarisation is likely to also be reflected at least to some extent in news coverage of this topic.
The key focus here is on value framing in news media coverage; different values (from self-determination to traditionalism) also tend to be aligned with different ideological positionings. The study examined the presence of such values in the …
Next up in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is the great Rowan Wilken, presenting a longitudinal study of news reports about dust storms in Victoria between 1992 and 2024. Dust storms are not uncommon in Australia, and exacerbated by periods of drought in arid and semi-arid areas; major storms are frequently covered by Australian news media. The focus of this paper is especially on dust storms in the Mallee, in northwestern Victoria.
What are the patterns that emerge in such news coverage, then; are there fixed formats for there coverage, or are there seasonal patterns to the journalistic …
The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague (and freshly minted DECRA Fellow) Katharina Esau, whose interest is especially in patterns of polarisation within the media coverage of climate change. She begins by noting that polarisation remains a poorly defined concept, which includes notions of issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, value-based, and other forms of polarisation.
News media are usually perceived as polarised, too, but there is no robust way of assessing biases in and polarisation between different media outlets. This project, therefore, gathered data from some 26 Australian mainstream and fringe media outlets …
