Social Media

It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States.

It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.

Power in the media and cultural industries is located in their cultural distribution systems (from development through production, distribution, and exhibition, to audiences, and thence repeating the cycle. This is true for all major platforms, including for example Netflix and other streaming services, which are often integrated with the major production studios to create a Hollywood-style streaming studio system (if not yet as well established).

The creators involved in these processes usually have no right of ownership over their creations; this is especially problematic for women and minority groups, and does not tend to produce diverse content. Minorities also remain underrepresented at the executive producer level. This also produces various other harms to them, for instance at personal, physical, and psychological levels; it also results in reductive storytelling that privileges a handful of major and often simplistic narratives.

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides:

The second day at Future of Journalism 2023 conference in Cardiff begins with a pre-recorded keynote by my former QUT colleague John Hartley, and John is also standing by for the Q&A later. He begins with the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia in 1935 – after whom a memorial travelling scholarship at the University of Wales is named.

Is Jones the ideal type of the fearless truth warrior in journalism, though, or a pawn in the Great Game of imperialist powers? The existence of a scholarship and the rhetoric around it suggests the former; he was seen as a passionate seeker of the truth in foreign lands, who took risks under difficult circumstances to uncover atrocities, and there are various books, films, and TV series about his exploits. His father was a headmaster in Barry, Wales, while his mother spent time in the late 1800s as a tutor in Hughesovka or Yuzovka, now part of Donetsk, Ukraine.

The final session on this first day of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference begins with Jaume Suau, whose interest is in the role of news organisations in the spread of mis- and disinformation. What is the impact of disinformation, and how might we study it? Jaume is focussing here first on foreign-sponsored disinformation, whose main objective is to diminish societal trust and increase polarisation; Howe can we assess whether these campaigns have been successful?

The second presenter in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Svenja Boberg. She begins by noting that crisis reporting seems to be the new normal in journalistic reporting of the current permacrisis, from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war and beyond. But journalism is not necessarily prepared for this, and the quality of its reporting especially on war crimes and other critical matters is sometimes problematic and insufficiently thought-through.

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to content forms and formats, to audience and engagement, and other aspects.

But there was a lack of a critical stance – while researchers lamented journalism’s difficulty in adapting to the new Internet technologies now available, a critical stance towards the impact of these technologies on journalism was often missing. This applies for instance to the mental health consequences for journalists of the competitive metrification of journalism engagement measures via social media metrics, or of the increasing targetting of journalists representing minorities with abuse on social media. Journalism research instead adopted the discourse of platform companies, without questioning its biases.