Two More Presentations from 2021

Before we launch properly into 2022 and the new Australian Laureate Fellowship that will be the main focus of my year, I need to close the loop on two more talks I presented just before my summer holidays in December, and which are now online as videos.

On 26 November 2021, I had the pleasure to present some thoughts on Facebook’s week-long blanket ban of news content in Australia in an invited presentation at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy. My sincere thanks to Max Grömping and the rest of the CGPP team for hosting me. The talk, available below, also gave me an opportunity to speak more generally about the continued challenges of researching social media platforms and their activities, and to outline some of the work that my colleagues and I in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society are doing to address these issues. The audio on the recording is a little soft, but I hope the overall discussion comes through clearly enough; slides and further details are linked below.

Axel Bruns. “Facebook's Australian News Ban and Its Implications for Critical Platform Studies.” Invited presentation at the Griffith Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Brisbane, 26 Nov. 2021.

A few days later I gave a talk to the Social Media Data Science Group at the University of Sydney – many thanks to Monika Bednarek for the invitation. This was a great opportunity for me to step through a number of different, related concepts from groups through communities to publics, and organise some thoughts on how to distinguish these broadly similar but nonetheless distinct formations from one another. This is important especially in the context of network analysis, which all too often jumps to calling collections of similar entities a ‘community’ without paying sufficient attention to the specific meaning of that term: not every cluster is necessarily a community in the proper sense of the word.

I don’t claim that my definitions for these various terms are necessarily definitive, but it was really good to put together some thoughts on how they’re different from each other, and how we might be able to harness those differences in social media analysis. I hope the video of the talk might be useful, perhaps even as a discussion starter in teaching these methods. Links to further material are embedded in the slides.

Axel Bruns. “Online Communities and Where to Find Them: Conceptual and Analytical Frameworks.” Invited presentation to the Social Media Data Science Group at the University of Sydney, 30 Nov. 2021.