As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

A month ago I was able to present the themes of my latest book Gatewatching and News Curation at the University of Sydney, as part of its Media@Sydney series of talks – my sincere thanks to Francesco Bailo, Gerard Goggin, and everyone else who made this possible. The M@S team also posted video and audio recordings of the talk, which I’m sharing below; in case the presentation is difficult to make out in the video, I’ve also included the slides themselves.

Speaking on the day of Australia’s latest partyroom spill for the Prime Ministership, this was a timely opportunity to reflect on the intersections between journalism, social media, and the public sphere, and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions after the presentation – many thanks to everyone who came along.

More information about the new book is here: Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere.