Internet Technologies

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 …

The final speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Annekatrin Bock and Dan Verständig, whose focus is on programmed futures in education. We use complex technological systems everyday, but must be aware of when they are dysfunctional; as routines break and crises happen, this is when education happens. The promise of education is to address and enable us to navigate uncertainty, but what education provides also serves to negate certain possibilities.

Uncertainty is the starting-point for pedagogical action: it requires such action. But it is also an outcome of such action: education opens up …

The next session I’m attending at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is on digital imaginaries, and starts with a paper by Peter Gentzel. His approach centres on mapping: digital maps are a form of media that envision futures, showing aspects of our social and cultural life that are not quite visual, and seek to empower us to do and see things that are mostly hidden, and thereby provide for a better future.

Such maps include services like Google Maps, which focusses on providing consumption options, curated online maps of cultural options (like street art across a given city) …

The second day at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with a keynote by Nick Couldry, focussing on the corporatisation of media and everything. He notes a number of key changes over the past twenty years: datafication – the transformation of everyday life into data, and its exploitation by business and government, thereby producing the social for capital; social media – shifting the exploitation of social data to produce attention and shape consumer and citizen action; and artificial intelligence – the corporate capture of the human mind itself, which automates cognitive production and transforms what we value.

This …

The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’ve chosen is on the digital society, and begins with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and a paper on actionable research. Universities are under great political and financial pressure around the world at the moment, and this has led to an increased emphasis on knowledge transfer, open science, and public engagement for scholarly work, but such emphases are not well-aligned with internal reward structures in academia at this stage.

While society is understood to be deeply in need of our expertise, this enshrines a pattern where knowledge is produced within …

After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …

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 …