Government

The first session after the keynote at ANZCA 2023 is on media, truth, and democracy, and starts with John Budarick. He begins by highlighting the considerable challenges to liberal media and democracies, from a range of interconnected crises; but from a different perspective journalism is constantly in crisis as it deals with the changing environments within which it operates.

Democracy itself is founded on a set of abstract positions that privilege the rational and ignore structural inequalities and power relations in society, and democracy’s ills are often attributed to bad-faith actors and the rise of illiberalism – but we might …

It’s a Wednesday in November and I’m in Wellington for ANZCA 2023, my final conference for this year, where I’ll also present a keynote tomorrow morning. We start today with the first of the conference keynotes, however, by Maria Bargh, who begins with the customary acknowledgments of the peoples, places, and more-than-human aspects of the lands upon which we meet – and this is also related to the theme of the conference, ka mua, ka muri, or ‘walking backwards into the future’. This refers to the way we are out of balance with each other and with the …

The next speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Claudia Severesia, whose focus is on the 2024 elections in Indonesia (for the president and parliament in February, and for governors and local assemblies in November). This will see increasing participation from younger generations (including millennials and Generation Z voters), and political parties will need to find ways of addressing these groups.

Generation Z voters, in particular, will have no previous voting experience, and are highly influenced by information from social media; but they remain highly underresearched in Indonesia, especially with respect to their communication and political participation. They also grew up during …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

This paper focusses on political branding ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Indonesia, focussing on the presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo; a hashtag related to him, #ganjarpresiden2024, has emerged as the most prominent …

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

Different political figures have very divergent approaches to communication even on the same platforms; this paper focusses on …

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies. Such legal frameworks also often lack a concrete commitment to normative goals. And, of course, the platforms are also able to exercise …

And we’ve reached the final day at AoIR 2023, and the session on networks that I’m in starts with Dmitry Kuznetsov, whose interest is in the community practices found in /r/hongkong during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These reacted against the gradual takeover by the People’s Republic of China, and were a transformative time for Hong Kong – but it is important to avoid a feel-good interpretation of these protests.

The protests shared time, place, and distinctive interactions, but on Reddit also unfolded in very platform-specific, bounded ways, in part because of the specific mixed Web 1.0/Web2.0 affordances …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is the excellent Adriana Amaral, whose interest is in fan practices surrounding the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Her project examined social media data from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube related to COVID-19 in Brazil, and through this work also identified the strong politicisation of vaccines especially under and by the leadership of Bolsonaro. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on COVID-19 in Brazil (CPI da COVID) also emerged as a key player in these debates.

The CPI was formed by the federal senate, and broadcast on TV, symbolically replacing Big Brother Brazil …

The early morning session this Friday at AoIR 2023 that I’m in starts with a paper by my QUT DMRC colleague Sebastian Svegaard. He presents a case study of what happens when politicians behave badly – and how their political fan bases respond to this. This connects with a larger body of work which connects fandom and political research, and positions politics as fandom.

The case study focusses on Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen, who has been in the office since 2019 and therefore through the COVID-19 pandemic. She leads a minority Social Democrat government – an unusual setup in …