Blog

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session is on media regulation and starts with Timothy Koskie, with a paper on news media regulation. He notes that we are in a time of permacrisis, and this is also being presented to us by contemporary news coverage; can these real or imagined catastrophes also provide us with an impulse for us to rethink news media regulation?

Specifically, should we rethink our approach to news media subsidies? The US started its first news media subsidy experiment as early as 1792, as part of building the new country; such state support is designed to foster …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Joanne Gray, whose focus is on trends in Big Tech, with a particular focus on virtual reality (including Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and Apple’s Vision Pro, but also many more mature projects in augmented reality and immersive technology). Much of this has been described as extended reality, or XR, and policy to govern this is gradually emerging.

Such policy – in Japan, Europe, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, China – largely treats XR as an economic opportunity; but what do we actually know about the technologies underlying such XR developments? First, many …

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Justine Humphry, Catherine Page Jeffery, and Jonathon Hutchinson, whose focus is on the current moral panic about young people’s uses of social media, in Australia and elsewhere. While such moral panics are not new, the current debate represents an escalation. How did we get here; what is the agenda; what role has it had in creating the conditions for regulatory change; and how does it affect norms, ideal, and expectations about childhood?

Moral panics about ‘the youth today’ are themselves far from new: the concept stems from Stanley Cohen’s work …

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a paper by Terry Flew, Agata Stepnik, and Tim Koskie, who begin by noting the changing contours of Internet governance. There is increasing nation-state regulation in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states, as well as renewed debate about the treatment of digital and social media platforms and a populist push towards greater regulation.

This regulatory turn has also been driven by significant shocks and scandals as well as growing regulatory activism, and is often directed at curbing the power of platforms, out of a general sense that governments should …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Bernadette Hyland-Wood, whose interest is in the co-design of an Indigenous client-centric, community-focussed project. This builds on her background in advocacy and development for open data sharing initiatives.

The project works with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Health Service (ATSICHS) in Brisbane to develop an insights platform that fosters agency amongst clients of the service; this, therefore, centrally draws on Indigenous data – that is, data collected both on, from, and by Indigenous people, whether collected intentionally or not. It works towards Indigenous data sovereignty …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Alanna Myers, whose focus is on Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission and the questions of truth-telling and media coverage it raises. The defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum seems to signal that Australians are not yet ready to embrace such truth-telling, yet at the same time Victoria is pushing ahead with its own truth-telling commission, which commenced here in the past week.

This has not received anywhere near the same level of coverage as the Voice referendum has received; this may be understandable given their different natures, yet must still …

The next speaker at the AANZCA 2024 conference is my excellent colleague Katharina Esau, presenting our work on news media polarisation in the Voice to Parliament coverage. Our slides are below, too.

Katharina notes that we are in a moment of polycrisis, with several crises all intersecting and influencing each other; in this, the role of news media cannot be overestimated, and Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices would be extremely valuable. But we also live in a time of polarisation, which is complicated by the many incompatible …

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 …