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The final session at ANZCA 2017 is on 'fake news' and opens with a paper by with Margaret van Heekeren, who begins by highlighting the long history of false news through the ages, as well as of legislative attempts to curtail 'fake news' and mitigate its impacts. At the same time, since the late 1800s news publishers have also actively opposed such laws, regarding them as an inappropriate restriction of their ability to report the news.

Cases of 'fake news' through the ages have also been associated with new communication technologies, including newspapers and the telegraph; such 'fake news' stories …

The next speaker at ANZCA 2017 is Mary Simpson, who discusses the perspective of ethics review panels in addressing approvals for social media research projects. Ethics committees often remain poorly informed about social media research, and have little practical experience in such research themselves. Traditional approaches to participant engagement and consent are not necessarily well suited to research approaches that utilise APIs for data gathering.

In decision-making processes about the appropriate ethical approaches to dealing with social media data, there is instead a need to consider the likely expectations of the social media user about their privacy or visibility. It …

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2017 session is Kim Barbour, whose focus is on ethical engagement with research participants in social media research. Social media research can be understood as human subjects research, yet we often do not have direct contact with the people whom we study: their communicative activities are being gathered through automated means, and the subjects are not usually even aware of this fact.

Yet this approach is often poorly addressed by conventional ethics approval processes at universities, which assume such direct contact and default to a historically informed preference for the anonymity of research subjects …

The next session at ANZCA 2017 deals with social media and ethics, and starts with Jonathon Hutchinson. This needs to be tackled from a number of different perspectives. For instance, what ethical choices are being made as publishers approve or reject the comments being posted in response to their articles? What are the implications of these choices, for public debate in general and for specific groups and individuals being vilified in particular?

This highlights the role of publishers, platform providers, moderators, content editors, and others as intermediaries in public communication via social media and related platforms. Social visibility is being …

Coming up next at ANZCA 2017 is Lyell Durkin, who shifts our interest to the media representations of skateboarding (now also an official sport of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games). There are many different views of skateboarding, but skateboarders themselves are regarding their practices as an art and a lifestyle; this view is also represented in the skate media emerging from the community itself.

Skateboarding media centrally include videos and photos that represent and memorialise tricks and moves; this is because many such moves are a great deal more difficult to describe than they are to capture in visual form …

Next up at ANZCA 2017 is Chris Chesher, who begins by pointing out the increasing role of real estate agents as media producers. Agents selling homes produce public representations of private spaces, portraying the home to be sold as personal and family space, and offering it up for (mediated as well as in-person) inspection. In Australia this occurs mainly through one or both of the duopoly sites Domain and RealEstate.com.au.

The search interfaces of these sites – already highly image-centric – become the first point of entry for prospective home buyers; eye-tracking shows that users almost always begin by …

The next ANZCA 2017 speaker is Glen Fuller, who begins from a focus on cycling cultures. Cycling spans a number of research areas from transport and urban planning to cultural studies and health; there have been a series of national cycling strategies, which always aim to increase the number of people actively engaged in cycling, but these rarely achieve their lofty aims, and it is therefore necessary to further explore the reasons for the present stagnation.

Cycling has been cast as a form of politics, transport, business, leisure, environmental activism, and culture, and is seen both as a problem and …

After a great opening panel at ANZCA 2017 (which I didn't blog because discussion panels are generally too difficult to blog) I'm now in the first paper session, which starts with Pip Shea's paper on maker spaces. She presents a number of case studies from around the world, including the cross-sectarian Temple project from Northern Ireland; these create local civic communication worlds.

Others, though, focus on global civic communication worlds, addressing major transnational issues such as climate change and sustainability and working to create global knowledge bases. These also interface to globally connected grassroots initiatives.

Some maker spaces take this …

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.

Routledge Companion

Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen, eds. The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2016.

The year began with the release …