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The next speaker at AoIR 2019 is Amelia Johns, who focusses on private group chats on WhatsApp, especially in the Malaysian context. Malaysia’s political climate has led young adult Malaysian-Chinese political activists to organise through this platform, and WhatsApp is now the second most popular platform in Malaysia (after Facebook). It is also used especially for discussing news and politics, partly due to its use of end-to-end encryption.

Such encryption is especially important because of sedition and media laws in Malaysia, which have created a chilling effect on the public expression of criticism of the monarchy or government …

The next AoIR 2019 session I’m attending is on WhatsApp, and starts with Natalie Pang. She begins by noting the significant popularity of this platform in Asian countries, as well as outlining its particular features of large-scale group broadcasting of messages and end-to-end encryption – which is especially interesting to users discussing sensitive political topics in these countries.

Natalie’s project identified scholarly articles discussing WhatsApp and its uses, and examined 40 such publications that discussed the use of the platform for political or civic engagement; of these, eleven focussed on cases in Europe, ten on Africa, nine on various …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

Arnt’s project conducted surveys and interviews with professionals in the Norwegian music industry. Almost half of the survey respondents use music metrics in their jobs, but such use is …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is my colleague Kim Osman, presenting outcomes from our research project in collaboration with The Conversation and the Cooperative Research Centres Association in Australia. We are interested in assessments of the public value and impact of scholarly work, which are also increasingly demanded by the governments that fund scholarly research. Slides here:

Increasingly, platforms like The Conversation as well as social media are also critical to the engagement with and impact of scholarly research, and there has been a rise in the development of scholarly …

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

Our key question here is whether journalism metrics are trustworthy enough to be used in editorial decision-making. This is part of a larger project on the future of journalism in a post-journalism …

It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.

Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme …

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …