Internet Technologies

The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.

This project began by mapping ownership of such infrastructure in Norway: while unusually, only one sub-sea Internet cable is privately owned, content delivery networks and data centres are overwhelmingly privately owned. This private ownership of content delivery networks (an example is a …

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to …

The next speakers in this final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Elizaveta Kusnetsova and Martha Stolze, whose focus is on computational propaganda and the broader relationship between algorithmic systems and mis- and disinformation. This has been highlighted especially by the use of algorithmic tools by the Russian propaganda machine, particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. This continues a long-standing tradition of Soviet and Russian propaganda by using new technologies.

The present study focusses on the ‘US biolabs in Ukraine’ disinformation story, and is interested in what information sources search engines provide in response to this …

The second presenter in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Runxuan Tua, and her focus is on gender and body metaphors in digital fitness platforms in China. Such platforms have become immensely popular in China in recent times, but also contribute to the disciplining of beauty standards and the commodification of fitness. This can be read through a Foucauldian paradigm of discipline.

This process is also gendered, with mass media promoting different body ideals for men and women. Online digital fitness platforms become a means for individuals to engage with and negotiate these body ideals, as well as receive social …

The second session this morning at IAMCR 2023 is on cyberactivism, and starts with Dongwook Song. His interest is in the financialisation of daily life through stock market apps. He notes that Korean young adults were in a stressed social situation before the pandemic, and after COVID-19 there was a boom in investments, cryptocurrency and stock market speculation, and other financial activities in order to get ahead – everyday life has been financialised.

Dongwook investigated these developments by focussing on the Stockplus investment app, operated by the cryptocurrency exchange Upbit which is itself owned by a social messaging platform. He …

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Benedetta Brevini, reflecting on the Australian experience with its News Media Bargaining Code. This was prompted by the crisis of journalism (and journalism funding) in the country, producing news deserts especially at local levels outside the largest cities. Some 5,000 news jobs were lost over the past two decades.

The NMBC was an attempt to address this through policy intervention, and in line with other moves towards rebalancing bargaining powers between Big Tech and news organisations – for instance also at the EU level. The NMBC was introduced in late …

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2023 session are Mandy Tröger and Hendrik Theine, who continue to address those concerns about media environment capture. They begin by noting that most of the debates here are limited to national or regional contexts, and influenced by the specific and idiosyncratic settings found there, without taking a more general, overall perspective informed by theory. Such a perspective can build on the concept of media capture by developing it into the idea of media environment capture, in particular.

Media capture itself has been used by political economists to describe capture by either governments exercising …

The third full day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a panel on the political economy of Big Tech platform funding. We start with Natalie Fenton, whose focus is on the demise of local journalism in the UK, and the work of the Media Reform Coalition there. Local journalism in the UK has declined over time, with cutbacks and newsroom consolidation as part of the move to digital, while of course retaining news organisations’ profit margins.

But there has also been a public response to this that has agitated for better support for local journalism, and the UK government and parliamentary …

And the final speaker for this session and this day at IAMCR 2023 is Aline Duelen, whose focus is on the use of AI in combatting disinformation. Disinformation is a major problem in online communication spaces today, of course, and there is some existing research that identifies factors that play a role in detecting disinformation – but these cannot easily be automated, as their application usually requires the application of critical thinking skills. The development of more automated systems therefore requires citizen co-creation approaches.

The present project undertook such a workshop with 26 Belgian citizens. It first explored their news …

The third presentation in this hot IAMCR 2023 session is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on the discussion of generative visual AI (e.g. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) and its relationship to artists. There is a veritable media panic, but also a genuine discussion about how such generative AI tools are drawing on existing, copyrighted art for their creations.

Artists have reacted to this spreading of digital creation with some degree of concern: it challenges their role in society, their opportunity to earn a living from their art, and their authorship of creative works; many artists see the use of their …