Internet Technologies

The third day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on digital trace data, and a paper by Kyle van Gaeveren, whose interest is in digital trace data. He notes that digital log data have always been very smartphone-dependent, and comparisons of this with laptop-derived trace data are important.

His project provided laptops to some 100 knowledge workers, and used a tool called ActivityWatch to trace which laptop and smartphone apps people were using; this tracked duration, frequency, and fragmentation, but also switching between devices and user mood. Part of the …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …

And the lucky last speaker in the final session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library in Frankfurt is the excellent Giada Marino, whose interest is the operation of data access provisions under DSA Article 40.12. The focus here is on very large online marketplace platforms and the systemic risks they pose to minors.

Article 40.12 addresses access to publicly available data from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines; this is coordinated across EU jurisdictions by the Expert Group on Access to Publicly Available Data (ECAT). The present project focusses on marketplace platforms such as …

The next speaker in the morning session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Veronica Batzendorfer, whose interest is in the Xitter-adjacent Grokipedia project as an ‘alternative’ to Wikipedia. Specifically, her focus is on semantic drift across Grokipedia’s versions, starting with material drawn in part from Wikipedia and then rewritten by LLMs.

Such semantic drift can be examined through a geometric framework. This works with two points in time and explores changes between them, across Wikipedia and Grokipedia; Wikipedia content serves as the training data for the LLM which generates articles for the Grokipedia, so …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, focussing especially on political advertising during the 2025 Australian federal election. This work is also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Computational advertising is ephemeral and targeted, individually personalised to the social media user; it is difficult to study these processes at scale. While platforms purport to provide some ad transparency libraries, these are limited, and can be enhanced through other approaches.

Some such approaches include data donations via browser plugins that capture the ads encountered by …

The second day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a paper session on platform governance, and the first speaker is Brooke Ann Coco. Digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives, and digital platforms tend to centralise power – how might this be reversed to put power back into the hands of communities through Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI)? Brooke’s focus here is on the Metagov community, which is pursuing these goals.

Metagov faces a knowledge management challenge: it is working across several collaborative platforms, which fragments communication and information management. There may be a role for AI systems here: AI tools …

The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.

How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …

The next speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Udo Göttlich and Felix Krell, whose focus is on interaction and representation in digital media use. Interaction theory has traditionally focussed on social interactions in offline worlds between co-present social actors, coordinating and negotiating their shared social situation, but this does not apply directly to online social interactions where there is no physical co-presence; such theory has been translated to such environments by emphasising shared the affect and intensity of online interactions, and considerations of temporality and immediacy.

Differences between synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and …