It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.
Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme is Trust in the System, and this is especially relevant also to Indigenous users of digital and social media platforms. How might Indigenous users understand ‘trust in the system’? Trust is a contentious term that embodies and disembodies Indigenous experience in the last 250 years; trust in data, online archives, and information on Indigenous peoples is not guaranteed, and many such technologies, online as well as offline, have been used historically to harm Indigenous peoples.