Journalism

Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:

What are the major challenges in Internet research?

The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even two years ago as they are now. This necessarily means that research methods, approaches, frameworks, and concepts must change with them, and that the toolkits we used to understand a particular phenomenon a few years ago may no longer produce meaningful results today. But at the same time we must beware a sense of ahistoricity: 'fake news', for example, does have precedents that reach back to way before the digital age, and we can certainly still learn a lot from the research that studied propaganda and misinformation in past decades and centuries.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Catherine Maggs, whose focus is on WikiLeaks. When it first emerged to mainstream media attention, the site was a spectacle, collaborating with some mainstream media at first but also already receiving substantial criticism from many established media organisations for its conduct.

The next speaker at AoIR 2017 is Catherine Son, who examines the role of digital publics in Australian print media practices. In 1996, for instance, when the Port Arthur massacre took place, many of the digital publics that were in evidence during the 2015 Lindt Café siege in Sydney, and a review of these two events of national significance serves to highlight the evolution of the Australian media ecology over these twenty years.

The last day at AoIR 2017 starts with Marita Lüders, who begin by highlighting the crucial role of the news media in democracy, and also of citizen trust in the news media as a requirement for the media to exercise that crucial role. But such trust has declined, while citizen choices of older and newer news media have multiplied, with a growth especially in lower-credibility news channels.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session on 'fake news' is Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on the discussion and dissemination of fake medical news on Facebook. In January 2016, the Italian public affairs TV show Presa Diretta covered alternative cancer treatments in a highly critical way, and further discussed these matters on its Facebook page; the present project examined the debate that ensued. This ties to broader concerns about public distrust in conventional medicine, and the online promotion of alternative treatments.

The third speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Kirsten Gollatz, whose focus is on the institutionalisation of the 'fake news' controversy in Germany. The debate on 'fake news' there continues, and the term itself is controversial; it has now entered the German dictionary, but nonetheless remains ill-defined. There is an ongoing renegotiation of the norms, rules, and responsibilities of the various relevant actors in this context.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Johan Farkas, whose focus is on 'fake news' in Denmark. he begins by suggesting that we are now entering a hyper-factual era: digital media are transforming our definition of news, and political leaders have been capitalising on this by creating their own definitions of news. This has also been described as an era of 'post-truth', but at the same time we have rarely talked more about what is 'true' and what is 'false' than we do today.

The next session at AoIR 2017 is a panel on 'fake news', and begins with Giorgio Bertolin, from NATO (!). 'Fake news' is also an issue for NATO as a military alliance, of course, and NATO is about to publish a report on the issue that is called Digital Hydra. The focus is on exploring activities across different platforms, examining the role of blogs, and studying 'fake news' sites.

The second presenter in this AoIR 2017 session is Adrian Rauchfleisch, who begins by highlighting the highly combative and complex nature of the 2016 U.S. election campaign. Counterpublics played an important role here, too; new actors – especially on the right – were able to make their voices heard during the campaign, through some more established actors (Fox News, and Trump himself) also claimed not to be part of the mainstream.

The first keynote at AoIR 2017 is by Andrew Chadwick, who explores what the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign means for our understanding of the hybrid media system. Political communication is in the middle of a chaotic transitional period, due in good part to the disruptions brought by newer, digital media; some older media have also been renewed by integrating the logics of newer media. This then represents a systemic perspective that examines forces while they are in flow.

The hybrid media system is built on the interactions of older and newer media logics in the reflexively connected field of media and politics. Actors in this field tap and steer information flows in ways that suit their goals, enable or disable the agency of others, across various older and newer media settings. 'Hybrid' here shifts our conceptualisation from 'either/or' to 'not only, but also'; it foregrounds complexity, interdependence and transition. We pay more attention to boundaries, flux, and liminal spaces, where practices intermeshing and co-evolve.