Government

I’m on the road again, and in Berlin for the two-day ECREA PolCom 2023 conference. We begin with a keynote by Lance Bennett, building on his recent book Communicating the Future. His opening question is how the major political ideas that affect everyone’s lives navigate the noise of everyday communication: how do they become dominant, and can we build a conceptual model to explain this? Are those ideas that become dominant actually good ideas, and if not, how can this be changed through better communication? Underlying this is also the question of power, of course.

Current dominant ideas in the world are continuous economic growth and neoliberal globalisation, for instance; these made it difficult to control economies, also because of the minimisation of government regulation, and this has had severely damaging impacts on our planet. What better ideas are out there, and how can they gain a greater audience?

Continuing with the round-up of recent activity I began in my last few posts (covering new articles, new conference presentations, new research videos, and my lecture series on Gatewatching and News Curation), here’s an update on a few other writings and presentations for a more general audience.

Facebook News Ban Redux

Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In Australia, the NMBC resulted in Facebook blocking Australian users from accessing or posting any news on its platform for over a week, before a compromise that strongly favoured Facebook was found – and as I write this, the same is happening in Canada. I spoke to Michael about Australia’s long and tortured path towards and through the news ban, and shared our findings on what happened on Facebook during the Australian news ban (in short: live continued as usual, proving Facebook’s point that news matters a lot less to the platform than policy-makers might have thought):

Social Media Campaigning on the Voice Referendum

In other current events, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I have also begun to track the social media campaigns surrounding Australia’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which will be held in the final quarter of 2023. We’re still at an early stage of the campaign, of course, but already the PoliDashboard project (which our colleagues at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University have kindly extended to cover Australia) is picking up on the intensified advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and so is our Australian Ad Observatory operated by the Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Together with my colleague Dan Angus, I published an overview of our observations to date in The Guardian recently; subsequently, I also appeared on the Centre for Responsible Technology’s Burning Platforms podcast:

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by Mike Schäfer and Mark Eisenegger. Here, I’m returning to my long-standing interest in dragging public sphere theory kicking and screaming into the digital age, by outlining a number of the fundamental building blocks of the network of publics that has become our everyday reality, and identifying some of the empirical approaches we may use to study those building blocks and their interrelationships in situ. Written in late 2022, many of the examples I use to illustrate these approaches are still drawn from waning social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, so one of the next challenges for our field will need to be to translate these approaches to new and emerging online platforms – and that will certainly also be an important aspect of my work over the coming years.

Axel Bruns. “From ‘the’ Public Sphere to a Network of Publics: Towards an Empirically Founded Model of Contemporary Public Communication Spaces.” Communication Theory, June 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ct/qtad007.

And we end this very diverse and, given the weather, frankly very draining IAMCR 2023 with a closing keynote by Annika Egan Sjölander. She begins by reminding us of the theme of this conference, ‘Inhabiting the Planet’: how does media and communication scholarship contribute to this aim, especially in what we, and future generations of scholars, do next? How do we work towards the common good?

Annika is a scholar from Sweden, but also works in the Global South; she is based in a marginal region, in the Arctic Circle, and on Sápmi land, in a region which climate change is already transforming – all this provides context and positionality to her talk. The focus of her work is on the role that communication has in transforming our societies to become more sustainable. But ‘communication’ itself is an empty signifier: it has multiple unfixed meanings, just like ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’ and, indeed, ‘sustainability’.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Liang Lan, whose focus is on the use of moral language in climate change debate on Twitter. Such debates have long been politicised and polarised in countries like the US; the present study is interested in the different roles that participants in these debates in Twitter may assume.

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Madhavi Ravikumar, whose interest is in the way the Indian press frames environmental issues. This is against the backdrop of the severe air pollution crisis in New Delhi, and the present study builds on interviews with Indian journalists.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Donald Matheson, whose focus is on the journalistic reporting on invasive species in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, as a case study of reporting on the biodiversity crisis more generally. Globally, some half a million non-native species have been introduced to new ecosystems; this demonstrates the impact of human factors such as colonialism, globalisation, tourism, and climate change. This in turn impacts on agriculture, health, and Indigenous cultures, and drives accelerating biodiversity loss.

The second presenter in this climate change-themed session at IAMCR 2023 is Henri-Count Evans, whose interest is in South African press coverage of climate change negotiations. Climate change is a global threat, of course, but disproportionately affects poor and marginalised countries; there have been global efforts, facilitated by the UN, to address the crisis since at least 1995 and the start of the COP summits.

The final day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a paper by Hannah E. Morris, on climate journalism in the United States. There has been what seemed to be a striking shift in coverage in recent times, with the New York Times unusually highlighting the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as driving the climate crisis, for instance.

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.