Government

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The slides alone may not do it justice, but there’s a huge amount of work behind this analysis of a broad range of affective signalling by lead election candidates in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú, and the patterns that are emerging from this are fascinating. Still more work to do in analysing and processing this, but expect more insights from this research at a conference near you soon…

Sebastian Svegaard, Tariq Choucair, Kate O'Connor Farfan, and Axel Bruns. “Affective Polarisation in Political Leaders' Discourses: A Comparison between Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 preconference Comparative Digital Political Communication: Comparisons across Countries, Platforms, and Time, Toronto, 25 May 2023.

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and German) in-house at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. My sincere thanks especially to my excellent colleague Sofya Glazunova for leading this project.

Sofya Glazunova, Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Souleymane Coulibaly, and Abdul K. Obeid. “Soft Power, Sharp Power? Exploring RT’s Dual Role in Russia’s Diplomatic Toolkit.” Information, Communication & Society, 21 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2155485.

Just a few days earlier, a new article about the social media amplification of articles in The Conversation that referred to preprint content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic also came out, in Media International Australia. But I have to stress that I only had limited involvement with this work – most of the heavy lifting was done by DMRC Visiting Scholar Alice Fleerackers (usually of Simon Fraser University) and my DMRC colleague Michelle Riedlinger.

Alice Fleerackers, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. “Academic Explanatory Journalism and Emerging COVID-19 Science: How Social Media Accounts Amplify The Conversation’s Preprint Coverage.” Media International Australia, 19 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221145022.

A few months ago my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals and I also published a new article in Media and Communication that explores how journalists have perceived and reacted to the challenge of ‘fake news’. This was based on Aljosha’s extensive interviews with newsworkers in Australia, the UK, and Germany, and provides some fascinating insights into the journalistic mindset in relation to this critical challenge.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Ailea Grace Merriam-Pigg, whose focus is on references to co-morbidities in discussions of COVID-19: much of the rhetoric here implied that the death of some disabled people as a result of COVID-19 was simply a fact of life that was to be accepted. Disability studies have long shown that disability is often stigmatised as a form of abnormality; this is tied to capitalist logics, and often leads to the marginalisation and infantilisation of disability – positioning disability a as form of deviancy.

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Tuomas Heikkilä and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in pseudoanonymous communicators during the COVID-19 crisis. These users use semi-stable pseudonyms, so they are neither identifiable nor fully anonymous, and the present study explored their role in political debate around the pandemic. This builds on the theory of connective action: organised communication without the presence of a central organisation coordinating activities. This can be more personal, more scalable, and more rapid.

The next session at AoIR 2022 that I’m attending is on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we start with Hossein Kermani, whose focus is on the situation in Iran (and he begins with a shoutout to the people who are currently fighting their brutal regime in the streets – and online spaces – of Iran). He notes that there is plenty of research on intermedia agenda-setting, but questions about the mutual influence between traditional and social media in non-democratic countries have yet to be properly addressed.

The next session at AoIR 2022 is on data infrastructures, and begins with Jonas Breuer, whose interest is in data protection in smart cities. Smart cities collect a substantial volume of often personal data all of the time, and the implementation of these data technologies needs to be thought through carefully; this project explored these issues through data walks in Belgian cities.