Internet Technologies

The next day at the the AoIR 2025 conference starts for me with a panel on AI imaginaries that begins with a paper by Giuliana Frascaria, whose interest is in cyborg imaginaries of the form that have been promoted by people like Mark Zuckerberg for some time. She has previously reviewed the literature and studied public attitudes towards these technologies, but this is limited by the fact that so few of these technologies already exist in the wild; this means that four the most part they remain futuristic imaginaries.

There are only some transhumanist pioneer communities that are early adopters …

It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …

And the final speaker at the SEASON 2025 conference, very fittingly, is our host Dirk Lewandowski, presenting findings from a study commissioned by the German State Media Authorities that focussed on the transformation of online search by the introduction of artificial intelligence technologies. This is of course still in progress, so no definitive results should be expected yet. The study was conducted in May 2025, and results will be published in mid-October.

But we can already reflect on whether the introduction of AI represents a revolutionary transformation, or merely an incremental change; and on how AI-enhanced search affects the economic …

After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Peichi Chung, whose focus is on digital labour in the context of e-sports. This is a rapidly growing area of digital entertainment, with an inaugural e-sports Olympics to be held in Dubai in 2027.

Past work on e-sports has focussed on e-sports as fan-based digital labour, and linked this to emerging worker identities in the gig economy. This is further disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence and its embedding into video games, and the gamification of digital work; overall, video gaming becomes a form of …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Byron Hauck, who begins by asking whose imaginaries for artificial intelligence we are dealing with. Right now, we are being told what AI is: we are in the middle of the technological sublime – we are given a story of what it is supposed to be, what its future is supposed to be, what we are supposed to do with it.

But these visions are not empowering: they allow the current moment to be defined by a handful of capitalist tech leaders, rather than by the …

I’m starting my third day at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore with a panel on the political economy of AI, which starts with Benedetta Brevini. Attention to artificial intelligence has increased substantially in recent years, of course, and so has concern about the political economy of AI – with a growing focus also on the environmental impact of AI technologies and services. The massive environmental impact of artificial intelligence has now been recognised much more clearly.

This is a conversation that can no longer be avoided; it has produced substantial coverage in media, reports, and other documentation, and there …

The third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Giulia Frascaria, whose interest is in human augmentation technologies. These have been in the news recently, with new developments like ‘mind-reading chips’ being used in human trials. Such cyborgisation is part of broader digitalisation trends, and the industries exploring it are growing. It is likely to influence broader communication processes too.

In Switzerland, for instance, there is moderate interest in such technologies, but most respondents are also very aware of the risks inherent in them; fewer than 9% of respondents are interested in using such non-medical …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Yannick Fernholz, whose focus is on smart cities. Urban environments are being rapidly digitalised, and this also results in massive data collection; such smart cities promise increased efficiency, quality of life, security, and sustainability, but also result in a techno-deterministic top-down governance of citizens and the exclusion of non-digital populations rather than true engagement. What is missing is ethically grounded technology design.

What human values should be translated into the design principles for smart city technologies, then? What do the different stakeholder groups think, and how do their values conflict with …