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GenAI & Creative Practices: Past, Present and Future, Day 2

a hand holding a guitar pick

Fishbowl 3.1: When “open” isn’t: open-washing and the politics of openness in the age of Generative AI. Anna-Maria Sichani, Marina Markellou, Douglas McCarthy

Open Source has demonstrated that massive benefits accrue to everyone after removing the barriers to learning, using, sharing and improving software systems. These benefits are the result of using licenses that adhere to the Open Source Definition. For AI, society needs at least the same essential freedoms of Open Source to enable AI developers, deployers and end users to enjoy those same benefits: autonomy, transparency, frictionless reuse and collaborative improvement.

Research & Education

Claudia Montanaro – What ‘Meaning’ Means in LLMs’ Research: An Interdisciplinary Conceptual Map

  • LLMs outputs meaningful ideas
  • Can LLMs make sense? Can they represent meaning? Noam Chomsky interview and his answer is “It’s like asking whether submarines swim”
  • Hemran Cappelen – it can make language make sense
  • Difficulty in borrowing terms. Key terms are borrowed from human cognition and are ill-defined
  • Method: dataset of academic articles , used ATLAS.ti
  • Identified six clusters
  • Three main themes: meaning is measurable, meaning as emergent property, meaning as something to be understood
  • Meaning and understanding in LLMs is
  • The call for scholars from a rnage of fields ot understna

Q: Can you explain the terms a litter further? unpack the network map how does that relate to the table?


Maede Mirsonbol – Learning with GenAI Images: Supporting Higher Education Students’ Reflection on Inclusive Education

  • AI literacy in in higher education, we need different frameworks to introduce to students
  • Relational Pedagogy – Concept and Contest Teacher <-> Learner <-> Content
  • Where to place AI?
  • Leaning on UNESCO guideline on AI and Education
  • Student <-> Teacher <-> Text <-> AI, Student learning model
  • Two case studies, Lancaster University, England, and University of Tartu, Esrtonia
  • Groups learning using a semiosis-based method to learn with images
  • 5 Steps of inclusive as diversity education: exploration (what is AI education?), co-creation (groups prompting),
  • Then they create images of inclusivity (race, gender, access/communication)

Q: what is the take up of this research like in higher ed? Did participants understand diversity within the four categories demographic, communication, species, nature/material/place?

Berk Alkoç – Generative AI in Design Bootcamps: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogy, Dependency, and Creative Practice

  • Figma and Make Design, prompt with an idea and it will make an app, borrowing the Apple version/platform/tool
  • Bootcamp and education – Careerfoundary UX Design bootcamp
  • Discourse analysis of marketing and and advertising of a number (10?) UX design bootcamp – a determinism built in of ‘if you don’t know AI, you won’t get a job”
  • How to create a persona in 5 minutes – this demonstrates a ‘frictionless’ process, where the process is more important than the outcome
  • Are they training designers or AI operators?
  • Reference to Hooked
  • Design fixation – pre-existing solution and restricts creative thinking
  • PLatform deactivation very similar to the API reliability of platforms
  • Should we go backwards and ignore the algorithm? (can we though? we’ve ‘drunk the Koolaide’)

Q: what does the industry want/what does the environment look like? Is this quick turnaround what is needed as we build design expertise? what does a co-designer model look like?

Panel 5.8: Creative Work

Nirvi Maru, Vivian H. H. Chen – A Human-AI collaboration approach to creative workflow

  • A GenAI inflection point – democratisation vs. diminishment (erosion of human agency, homogenization), to be understood not as a binary
  • Literature approaches this as a discrete problem to be solved
  • scoping review – 216 papers
  • Conceptual fragmentation – collaboration, teaming, autonomy, etc.
  • Trust-calibration
  • Erosion of human agency – skill degradation,
  • task collaboration misalignment – poor fit between AI capabilities and workflow
  • Reframing Human-AI Creative Collaboration (HAIC): interdependence, hidden costs, navigation tensions
  • Agency Automation Tension – tension needs to be managed not solved
  • Principle 1 – ROle Design as Creative Act: we negotiate the ‘role’ within HAIC
  • Principle 2 & 3: Transparency and Human Experience. As a creative uses more AI, they trade off the critical aspects of design. Human experience should be centred.

Yunus Emre Öztaş – How Creative Workers Make Do with GenAI in Visual Media Production

  • Critical creative labour studies, mostly in cultural and creative industries – high value in autonomy within an environment of augmentation-replacement binary
  • A spectrum of GenAI use model (in iterative development): Human Creative Agency Dominant (task related use) <-> Machine agency dominated (task-agnostic use)
  • Modes of use are embedded in agency

Tolulope Oke, Robert Prey, Femke de Rijk – Beyond the Global North: Generative AI and the Future of Musicians’ Work in Nigeria

  • Based in Nigeria Music Market, growing rapidly (three times larger than the rest of the world’s music industry)
  • There is a talented yet unstructured market (copyright and infrastructures are lacking)
  • Futures of the industry which is usually dominatd by the Global North, where GenAI becomes a crucial infrastructure
  • Africanfuturism – visions of the future, not concerned with what could have been but what is possible/what is the future
  • Decolonial AI: extends beyond data colonialism and into all material aspects of data generation (check this)
  • Future reference about Phillips Olajide, First African trained AI music generator
  • Korin AI – social-technical artefact that reflects and shapes how Nigerians imagine and navigate AI Futures
  • Jamai Fabuyi and legal contracts in Africa – interview here
  • Conclusions: opportunity to restructure global industries. It’s not about if it’s changing it’s about how it’s changing.

Closing Panel with invited speakers – Pei Sze Chow, Maximilian Schich, Naureen Mahmood

Pei Sze Chow

  • Specificity & pluralism across the variety of talks across the past few days. Contractual obligations and the sorts of creative work and their ecologies.
  • Skills. De-skilling. Up-skilling. the ways in which creatives are adopting new skills, retool a skill-set, etc.
  • (my thought – can we stop with the ‘democratisation’ as waves of media technologies emerge. We saw this in Web 2.0, social media, and in some respect through platformisation, and we know this is never the case)

Naureen Mahmood

  • Meshcapade (swing this to Rangi and see what he thinks)
  • Job displacement – everytime a technology revolution, it’s never a loss but a change. “how we let that happen is up to us”
  • Fear around AI and how others are using it (i.e. Governments especially). This community has a lot to offer in terms of understanding what it actually is and the kinds of applications that are possible.

Maximilian Schich

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GenAI & Creative Practices: Past, Present and Future – Day 1

black and white abstract painting

Keynote Session 1 – Baptiste Caramiaux. ‘Steering the Unknown’

  • What can an artist control and what can they not control during the creative practice?
  • Vera Molnár as an example to opne the discussion
  • Induction – a system to infer behaviour. Example of ocean scenes and how AI uses LLM to find a similar structure (an abstract space – model or manifold). Output to latent space (abstract dimension). Form the model, one can pick a point and have a generated version based on teh original input.
  • The abstract (output) becomes a new form of expression
  • Inductive practice: gesturing as a menas of creativiity based on LLMs
  • Using LLMs to create movement in work – Anna Ridler, ‘Tulips’, crafting the output but also creating the model that the artwork was trained on. THis is an important aspect of ‘Induction’
  • Mario Klingemann – moving image artist mixing modalities
  • Terence Broad, exploring the concept of the gaze
  • Forms of agency – new design material, new modalities, “induction enables many practices, generation is only one of them”
  • Drifting Agencies – Ai expands the unknown much faster than our ability to steer it
  • Sean Michaels – “Do you remember being born?”
  • Documenting the undocumented? New narraives, new meanings – integrating AI with people to understand our histories. Could this push our agency (Lenny Martinez undertakgin PhD here)
  • Disempowerment: Reducing agency, most of the practice is through platforms- we cannot change them, we cannot train them, we may be able to calibrate them. Normative behaviours, the ways in which stories are represented. Narratives how the scale impacts the ways in whcih we understand the creativity aspect of AI.
  • Induction as a design material – this is the tool or the skill of GenAI, not simply the application of the existing models (bigger is not better).
  • Creative AI is a power structure – think through moral, cultural and structural dimensions. W way to understand the agency and centralisation of labor. Narrative representation. Norms and identities, accountability, authorship.
  • The Future is Collective – creative agency is through collective organisation (this is increasingly difficult in our current political and economic ecologies).

Parallel Session 1 – Deepfakes, Clones & Imposters

Creative Violence in the Age of AI: Deepfakes, Misogyny, and Community-Based Response in Mexico, Payal Arora,

Ana Miranda Mora

  • Increased mysogonistic content, mostly porn, in AI spaces – this project partnered with Google to examine
  • NCII – (Non-consensual intimate image) also known as Image-based Sexual Abuse (IBSA),
  • Mapping the system, working on the language that is used
  • Reputational harm, financial harm, mental health harms
  • A social way to connect with these activities is through the language used, revenge or sextortion gains traction, whereas NCII does not
  • Deepfake porn in Mexico is not used, it is digital violence and intensifies sexual harassment, 10 million women in the last year have experienced this
  • 13 in depth interviews, survivor sample young women between 20 and 4, middle class, educated in urban areas,
  • Face-swap technologies, AI-generated nudes
  • Community based responses: Olimpia Red de apoyd digital.

Deepfakes under Strict Government Regulation: The Role of Social Influence and Perceived Playfulness on Chinese Centennials’ Intention to Use AI-Generated Media – John Maina Karanja

  • Missing in action

Roundtable 2.2: Global Perspectives on GenAI & Cultural Production

Thomas Poell, Neha Bhatia, Godwin Simon, Lorena Caminhas, Tom Divon

Thomas Poell:

  • The project has begun, but it is very much rooted in Western languages/concepts. The mission of today is to expand on this to better understand from a post-colonial perspective
  • Much of the non-Western literature emerges from China, which is demonstrable of the ways in which the ‘theory follows the money’ – can we provincialise the field of cultural production

Godwin Simon

  • Field production in Nigeria: how it works, & precarity
  • Cultural competence in cultural production: ways to express through co-creation that reflects the authenticity of the industry

Neha Bhatia

  • GenAI in Indian production and background: creativity, precarity and experiences of GenAI production
  • Dispute around if GenAI is at all original – however, GenAI is trained and produces something novel
  • What is creativity and how is it undertaken? (New, novel and somethimg surprising)
  • The value of creativity is decreasing because it is rapid and fast-turnaround

Sin Melata

  • GenAI is used as a tool within the cultural production process
  • Ethical and moral issues emerge when the timeframe of the production cycle becomes tight
  • ChatGPT being used as a writing tool within India

Lorena Caminhas

  • Brazilian influencer industry
  • Deeply shaped by platform logics – not a new thing, an extension of this type of cultural production
  • It’s creativity and brand identity that creates authenticity
  • The takeaway is that users can be seen as more authentic through the use of AI
  • AI in Brazil is enabling greater creativity – this is presenting an opportunity to make a living in the content creation space, but this doesn’t change the impact of the influencer industry (brand deals, management etc.)

Tom Divon

  • Recalling a pre conference from Brazil that brings to the fore things like regulation, labour, and restructing of systems
  • Conditions under which creativity takes place, GenAI in the process, and then the political economy that enables/inhibits, this is where the decision making point sits
  • Imaginaries as a way to understand the whole system together
  • Resistance is often not through refusal, but rather renegotiating, positioning – these are systems that users cannot just move out of.

Thomas’ latest article here.

Q: data sovereignty: what about a third way and how that might integrate with the other countries in this project? Align with Vietnam

Thought process/book idea: Induction sovereignty – can cultural production be possible without induction sovereignty? If we are using GenAI as a production tool, we are already using a model that has been designed, trained and learned through a LLM training process. At best, it can only be calibrated to include localised nuances. Is this where PSM values become important?

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AANZCA 2025 Conference – Day 3

*Yep. Image by AI and, I think, nailed the summary of the day into the prompt.

For You: Understanding Australian TikTok Culture

Patrik Wikström1, Jean Burgess1, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez3, Joanne Gray2, Jonathon Hutchinson2, Jiaru Tang1, Tian Wen2, Michelle Nidoy1, Billie Wilcox2, 1: Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology; 2: University of Sydney, Australia; 3: University College Dublin

This was our panel coming from the DP. First, I’m reminded of how amazing our research team is – a great range of skill and experience which brings the sharpest of perspectives with openness for innovative approaches. Second, the synergy between our three streams is impressive and I can see how this will invoke the next phases of collaborative research. From the Creator Stream perspective, this is super helpful as we enter our next phase of appreciative enquiry. Third, great audience questions: is there another name for the ‘baseline’ (benchmark?); how do creators refer to themselves; what are the creator income streams; what does ‘advertising’ include.

Rethinking the Field: Participatory Models and Narrative Turns in Communication

Yes, let’s revisit participation in media. Don’t mind if I do…

Turning the Tide: Exploring a Participant Model of Human Communication [Zoom]

David Paterno, Minot State University, United States of America

  • Bold claims here – keep in our own lane (communication), all communication is with audiences
  • Seemed a bit narrow, but maybe i missed something here.

The Absence of “Online” in Researching on the Affect through Online Discourse: Critical Literature Review (Zoom)

Duming Wang, Massey University, New Zealand

  • Relationship between affect and discourse (public sentiment, public discourse)
  • What is affect? important for social research, “affective turn” (Clough, 2007), the impact of emotion on politics, debate etc.
  • affect is automatic, discourse is constructed – they are intertwined, thus affect can be studied through discourse
  • Examine Affect-discursive practice of new zealand national day (Waitangi Day) in newspapers
  • The moment of immediate response becomes an affective trigger – when person A does this, person B does that
  • Q: what about neurodivergent people? Immediate response just isn’t the case. Does this impact broader populations?

Narrating the Field of Communication: Charting the Tides

Steven Maras, The University of Western Australia, Australia

  • Typically flows, paradigms, turns. Instead mete-theoretical approach. What about when we narrate an academic field?
  • Waisbord ref
  • Why? Value purpose, politics of knowledge production, field as boundary-object
  • Boundary object – are we talking about academically or industrially? Star and Griesmer (1989) reference
  • Topic fields or discipline fields? Empirical example of AANZCA and the topics of last few years
  • Fields – Bourdieu and how to speak across several fields
  • ‘Fixing’ the field – Bourdieu and how to fix the field, ‘creative industries and the way to fix a field’
  • Waisbord: ‘communication studies is held together by an institutional architecture pf professionals organisations, academic units and journals” (2019: p.123-124)
  • Q: how does communication/media studies’ grow?
  • Post-disciplinarily – enables scholars to transcend many divides

Communicating through Community: Leveraging local engagement for environmental change in the Hunter Valley, NSW.

Chloe Killen1, Phillip McIntyre1, Kerrie Foxwell-Norton2, Matthew Hayward1, Luke Foster3, Aaron Mulcahy3, Lucinda Ransom3, Tara Dever4, 1: University of Newcastle, Australia; 2: Griffith University, Australia; 3: Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water; 4: Mindaribba Local Aboriginal Land Council

  • Cessnock focused
  • Threatened species
  • Grid mapping the area
  • Identified and mapped the users of the area
  • Incorporating the communication channels to talk with them

Navigating ‘Academic Listening Practices’ – Reframing ‘Listening’ as a qualitative research methodology [Zoom]

Diana Kreemers, UNSW Sydney

  • Academic listening, draws on Couldry, Drejher and Macnamara in terms of a variety of listening (cultural, political, marketing)

“Just Asking Questions”: Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots [Zoom]

Katherine M. FitzGerald, Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, Daniel Angus

Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

  • GenAI chatbots, psychological impact, etc.
  • What guardrails protect, what ways to chatbots promote casually conspiracist conversations
  • Used Sofia’s policy step-through method
  • Engaged a range of conspiracy theories (chemtrails, 9/11), including older and newer (Hurricane Milton,Trump Assassination, rigged election)
  • Prompted chatbots: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexisity, Grok
  • Vast difference between chatbots, Grok is terribly, terribly bad.
  • Some guardrails present, older theories with more open-mindedness,

From Rabbit Holes to the Multiverse: How Far-Right Groups Weaponise Conspiracy and Crisis through Metapolitics

Milica Stilinovic, University of Sydney, Australia

  • I’m just so proud to watch Dr Stilinovic deliver her first post-PhD seminar, based on her research
  • Conspiracies as cultural artefacts – carrying ideology through networks
  • Thematic analysis through two groups – both presenting as churches
  • Crises are good for the right, it disrupts and sends peopl looking for something better

Nguyen Do Doan Hahn (?) QUT, DMRC – “Reinterpreting Masculinity through a Vietnamese Influencer: A textual analysis of “Thó Báy Māu”

  • Minh, 2023 – cultural influence of Confuucian
  • Kim Ngoc, 2022 – commercial brands thorugh AI-generated personas. characters include En, DAM, LAY, CHI CHI EM EM, and THO BAY MAU
  • THO BAY MAU is a character across social meida that is playful and ironic story to challenge the lifestyle of Vietnamese people
  • 4.4 million followers here: https://www.facebook.com/ThoBayMau
  • Popular with youth culture
  • Challenging masculinities
  • co-creative process with other audience members

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AANZCA 2025 Conference – Day 2

*Image generated by WordPress AI – I guess it makes sense?

Tidal Forces – Risk of Drowning: Aotearoa/New Zealand’s network media economy 2019-2022

Peter A Thompson1, Cameron McTernan2, 1: Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand; 2: The University of South Australia, Australia

  • Have media industries become more or less concentrated overtime?
  • Media concentration matters because share of voices, new entries into markets, revenue matter: this is how operators control markets
  • Method: HHI – sum of the share of market concentration (unconcentrated, moderately concentrated, highly concentrated)
  • Q: expand on how the data was collected?
  • mobile players highlight the impact that Google, Meta, etc. has across media concentration
  • NZ Aotearoa, mergers and takeovers: five significant mergers (refer slides)
  • Siloing in sectors, i.e. radio and newspapers, intense competiton across the value chain (TV, FTA)
  • Stuff LTD and Mediaworks sale

The Digital Demise of National Television Drama: A New Policy Paradigm?

Marion McCutcheon1, Anna Potter2, 1: University of Canberra, Australia; 2: Queensland University of Technology, Australia

  • Broadcasting Services Act 1992 – analogue broadcasting, different local content rules, the n digitisation meant unlimited bandwidth (multichanneling – increased costs with no additional revenue)
  • PSM has no quota for local content but instead has its Charters
  • Subscription TV has dramatically dropped in drama delivery in recent years (’23, ’24)
  • Streaming services have surpassed the commercial and public broadcasters
  • Streaming are behind paywalls – to access all Oz dramas would require 8 service subscriptions
  • [insert picture here of offset slide – amazingly and astonishingly informative]

Re-Discovering Australian Screen Audiences

Maura Edmond, Olivia Khoo, Verity Trott, Claire Perkins, Monash University, Australia

  • Embedded in the ‘cultures of use’ of watching television
  • Case study: mum with two autistic children, issues with the body corporate removing access to FTA TV, needs to go through local ISP which also brings issues,
  • Case study 2: primary school child, high school child, can relate to the kids viewing habits :), children have pins to log into whatever,
  • Case study 3: mother of two young children, Netflix is default, she uses the kids accounts because if she’s watching TV its with the kids, or with husband and then they use his account, Netflix knows her history which is her kids history,

From Digital Originals to Skip Ahead: Online Content and Web Series Policy Rationales in Australia

Mark Ryan, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

  • Web series, grass roots and independent online series AND short online series associated with anchor TV series commissioned by the network
  • Screen Australia continue to fund multiplatform production (web series)
  • Tensions between cultural and economic support within Australia, tensions around the production of international movies, currently less around ‘Australian stories’
  • Multiplatform fund launched in 2012, changes in 2015 if you had produced, you could apply (established TV producers to creators working outside of the industry, ‘Fresh Blood’ ABC
  • 2023, specific development fund was created, content creation and games,
  • Now focus is on talent development – creators looking to crossover, and those who want to stay in the online space

Two Sides of the Exchange: Researching Trauma, Journalists and Communities

Fay Anderson1, Deb Anderson1, Stephanie Brookes1, Alexandra Wake2, 1: Monash University, Australia; 2: RMIT

Fay Anderson

  • From Gemini: “the query likely refers to Jean Lee, the last woman to be executed in Australia, who was hanged in 1951 in Melbourne. While she was not in Perth, her execution is a significant event in Australian legal history, and her case is often confused with others”
  • Journalistic coverage of Jean Lee included single mum, yet the men of this same murder crime, have disappeared (in the media) murder of bookie, William George Kent
  • Ronald Ryan was also implicated, set for capital punishment, Holte was pro his death, Pentridge prison, Coburg
  • The coverage of these two cases highlight significant gaps in the reporting approach
  • Journalists were invited to observe the death in the gallows of these three convicted individuals
  • Brian Morley SMH
  • Contemporary material (podcasts) continue to use this material, such as the interviews with journalist and other historical artefacts

Stephanie Brooks – “We might as well face up to it” Youth gangs…

  • Cronulla Riots: the ways in which we find our way into these stories through journalism/how do we (Steph) go into these stories with journalists?
  • This, I guess we use the word, human
  • Bob Carr’s incredibly deaf response “…support police”
  • Western Sydney and moral panics (Noble and Poynting, 2010) I think this is the article
  • “Streets to avoid in Bankstown – Mean Street” – WTAF?
  • Moral Panics – Cohen work here
  • Voices of journalists is missing in scholarly representations

Alexandra Wake, “Trauma at Home”

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AANZCA 2025 Conference – Day 1


Keynote: Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgenson (University Dean of Research Environment and Culture Cardiff University) The rise of boutique media: Authority, trust and emotion in post-industrial news production

  • Boutique media as those that are not institutionalised media creators
  • First positive piece of journalism research I’ve seen in years
  • Call to Action to expand how we understand media with a range of media forms
  • Boutique media has the affordability to be agile and responsive, but is also at risk of being swooned by those they commentate on (i.e. how influencers operate)

Children’s Creative Agency

Digital puppet lab: child expressions of agency, identity, and creativity through multimodal, play-based workshops

Harrison Waed See1, Sian Tomkinson1, Lingyue Ding1, Kylie Stevenson2, Giselle Woodley1, Stephanie Milford1

1: Edith Cowan University, Australia; 2: Murdoch University, Australia

  • Interviewing children is hard, so alternative approaches are needed
  • Young people using iPads to understand ‘texture’
  • Drawing to workshop scenarios “draw your puppet in an adventure…”
  • Co-design emerges as strong because of the ownership the young people have in their puppet design
  • Instead of giving answers, ask questions to help guide the participant to find the answer

Children as Creative Digital Players: Exploring Digital Play in Family Contexts Among Children Aged 3–5

Lingyue Ding, Edith Cowan University, Australia

  • High penetration rate of internet for people, and young people, as basis of research
  • Screentime and parents having negative view of video games, rely more on control-based mediation
  • Qual research methods, young people and parents, ethnographic
  • Q: what about interviewing paediatricians?
  • Much evidence of the resilience, sharing of joy, longer moments of concentration, higher levels of emotions (sounds like negative emotions)

Uncovering the Analogue Archaeology of Children’s Digital Gamble-Play Cultures

Jessica Balanzategui1, César Albarrán-Torres2

1: RMIT; 2: Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

  • ARC grant presentation
  • Non mobile game data presented here, but rather material gaming play cultures such as claw games etc. to highlight cross pollination across an ecosystem of young people and gambling
  • Melbourne central walkthrough of the space that is from the muliple spaces that blur the line between adventure park/game arcades/Lego shops etc.
  • Eb Games and arcade sit side by side, adapted Walkthrough method
  • Ambient Play, Larissa and Ingrid
  • Conflation of urban space: it’s Melbourne Central – it’s difficult to ‘see’ it when you are there all the time (and probably not a young person)
  • Playthings and Playtime

Co-Designing Digital Policy in Early Childhood Education: Turning the Tide on Top-Down Approaches

Stephanie Milford, Sinead Wilson, Karen Murcia, Emma Cross, Sarsha Mennell, Curtin University, Australia

  • Policy lag in this space where early childhood centersa re now creating their own ‘policy’ (I suspect more guidelines than policy?)


Journalism Practice & Impact

Turning Tides of Friendship: Chinese-Australian Journalists and Local Communities, 1920-1945© [Zoom]

Caryn Coatney University of Southern Queensland, Australia

  • Chinese Australian reporters, editors and publicists are harnessing power to raise awareness of their own communities
  • Beyond jounrnalistic values, there is, heroic responsibility, business elite,
  • This was underway while the White Australia policy, thre was pushback from other Australian journalists (SMH, Tele, etc.) arguing that trade would be at risk if the White Australia policy remined
  • Mrs Fabian Chow (Alice Lee Kim)
  • The Chinese journalism world has risen and fallen across eras within Australia, which is very different to what was happening in the US and the UK. Unionism was high there, whereas here they were more focused on traded development.

Virtuous hacks: Identifying the qualities that characterise good journalism through qualitative research

Sacha Molitorisz, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

  • Virtue ethics and Australian journalists
  • Eudaimonia (flourishing) is a good thing
  • Virtue – th epurpose of human life is to live a good life. Identify what the virtues are and cultivate them – this is eudaimonia
  • Top three: courage, justice, truth-telling
  • Q: how does this differ from journalist ethics?

What do we do with diversity? Limited mechanisms of news media redress under stress

Archie Thomas1, David Nolan2, 1: University of Technology Sydney; 2: University of Canberra

  • Diversity is an ambivalent assemblage, heterogeneous, an ’empty signifier’ (Ahmed, 2012), its backlash suggests its successes and failures
  • Institutions being forced into ‘diversity’
  • Often diversity is the embodied diversity, the visible,
  • Diversity policy across news media orgs, through a traffic light system (clear, there but unclear, not there)
  • staffing is one persepcitve, infrastrucues and policies is another and this is reflected in different countries
  • Q: are news orgs doing diversity in different ways, then?

*image generated by AI, obviously.

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Navigating Research Goals for 2025: A Personal Roadmap

Man thinking about research in 2025

New year. New me.

That seems to be the catch cry on every piece of social media coming my way just now. That couldn’t be further from the truth for my professional world! I think I want go with the catch cry from my new neighbour – ‘just stand up’ (which is a reference to trying to get out of bed in the early morning when doing a marathon training block). I think ‘just stand up’ can actually apply to much of my life this year.

There will be new things underway, which one would expect, but it is much the same in my research world. I did spend some time as I started back at work thinking about research in 2025 – grants, projects, outputs, conferences. I think is especially important given I will be on research leave for the second half of this year.

Let’s break my thoughts down (realistically, this is a bit of a roadmap for me to follow this year to keep track of things).

Research Ares of Interest – in development

Social Media Disengagement – could be helpful to revamp this area in 2025.

Vietnam – Phase 1 of Sydney Vietnam Media Innovation Hub.

WeChat Official Accounts – working on TikTok scraper with Sydney Informatics Hub.

Media policy – continuation of research into media and its regulatory/governance approaches.

TikTok – creator culture based on Discovery Project work.

Underspheres – continuing GenAI work with Stilinovic and Bailo.

Projects Underway

TikTok Discovery Project

IDPO

Vietnam Platforms

Conferences

International Communication Association (ICA) – Denver Colorado, 12-16 June. Papers to present: Moral Media Panics (rejected), Creative underspheres (rejected), Creator Studies (under review).

International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) – Singapore, 13-17 July. Papers in preparation: Media Moral Panics (Humphry & Page Jeffery); WeChat Official Accounts (Dwyer, Xu & Wang); Vietnam Platform Studies (Solo).

Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) – Brazil, 15-18 October. Papers in Preparation: Media Moral Panics (Humphry & Page Jeffery); Vietnam Platform Studies (Solo).

Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA) – Sunshine Coast, November (?). Papers to present: Vietnam Platform Studies (Solo).

Grants

Preoccupied by platforms: Vietnam and its platform society. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2025.


Understanding and preventing social media-driven ‘performance crime’. Australian Research Council Discover Project Scheme, 2025.

S

S

Standard Measures of Effect (LOE2). Department of Defence, 2025.

Grants in Development

I

GenAI Influencers – Ikea Foundation.

Vietnam Platformization – International Initiative for Impact Evaluation.

Outputs

Revisit Hobbs and I article from 2021, political influencers

Recast failed Journal of Computer Mediated Comms article for Qual Research/International Journal of Qual Methods

Caring as Journalistic Practice with Diana Bossio (Digital Journalism)

Matchpoint for Creativity with Chunmeizi Su for SI Global Media & China

Media as Method with Justine Humphry and Olga Boichak for Qual Methods

Moral Media Panics with Justine Humphry, Cat Page Jeffery for Children and Media

PSM and Media Industries for RIPE book (solo)

Outputs Under Review

AI and Creative Industries with Terry Flew and Wenjia Tang, Book Chapter

Vietnamese Digital Media (solo), Media International Australia

Creative Underspheres with Stilinovic and Bailo, New Media & Society.

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So, there’s quite a bit underway and in development in my research land for 2025. Guess I just need to stand up and get it done. I’m very much looking forward to continuing this work while also spending the second half of this year seeking my next area of scholarship and commencing work on book number four.

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Sydney Vietnam Innovation Symposium

Yesterday, I attended the Sydney Vietnam Innovation Symposium both as a delegate and as an invited speaker. The event is a major milestone in the development in the work so far from our Sydney Vietnam Academic Network, which now has incredible support from the University of Sydney, the NSW Government, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Austrade among many others. A big congratulations to Professor Greg Fox and Associate Professor Jane Gavan for their tireless work in this space, and for such a successful symposium.

It seems the ‘physical’ Network will be realised sooner rather than later.

There were a a great number of addresses, roundtables and research presentations during the day which provided such a solid foundation for the next five to ten years of work in the country (apparently it takes 20 to 30 years to do research in Vietnam, as one of the presenters noted!).

Speakers

Dignitaries of the morning included:

  • Professor Mark Scott, Vice Chancellor and President of the University of Sydney
  • Honourable Minister Mr Bri Anoulack Chanthivong, NSW Minister for Innovation, Science and Technology & Minister for Trade
  • Honourable Bui Thanh Son, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Socialist Party, Vietnam

Some of the crucial take aways included the fact that Vietnam is number 13 in the top 20 countries Australia has included in the Australian Innovation Strategy, its GDP was $6billion in 2022, NSW is committed to working with the country, it is a model of how countries can bring their people out of poverty through economic transformation, there is a strong focus on its tech precinct and ‘night time’ economies.

The event was also a celebration of 50 years of collaborative science and technology research between Australia and Vietnam.

Opportunities

One of the huge research potentials is the Aus4Innovation hosted by CSIRO. The Aus4Innovation scheme is:

Aus4Innovation is an AUD$33.5 million development assistance program that aims to strengthen Vietnam’s innovation system, prepare for and embrace opportunities associated with Industry 4.0, and help shape Vietnam’s innovation agenda in science and technology. Through the Aus4Innovation program, Australia and Vietnam will work together to explore emerging areas of technology and digital transformation, trial new models for partnerships between public and private sector institutions, and strengthen Vietnamese capability in digital foresight, scenario planning, commercialisation, and innovation policy.

https://research.csiro.au/aus4innovation/

It’s great for agriculture just now, but they do rotate the focus – keen to keep an eye on this scheme for when its digital comms time.

Layton Pike (RMIT) spoke about the pioneering work that had been done by RMIT in Vietnam and that approaching the country as a consortium of universities is better than vying for leadership. There are 100million people with about 22 million students – one university can’t service all of those students. He also made me aware of the Australian Vietnam Policy Institute (AVPI) which is a useful clearing house of research and public poloicy. Excellent resource.

I also met Ngheim Long, the President of the Vietnamese Australian Scholars & Experts Association (VASEA). They are a reasonably new organisation, but seem to be an emerging peak body for Vietnamese scholars.

And while I missed this year’s round, the New Colombo Plan PhD Scholarship scheme will be front and centre for 2025 research. Engaging a cross-country PhD seems like the obvious way to build research momentum now.

Research

One thing that blew my mind came from the Medicine Faculty, specifically a cancer researcher. Professor Robyn Ward is my new favourite human in the world. Beyond just a stellar career of health research, she and her team have been tasked with addressing a Research Impact Assessment Framework. It feels like there is qualitative research trickling into the Sciences here? Anyway, it was a revelation to think about these things from a Medicine perspective, such as multiple stakeholder perspectives on impact (for me I read that as cultural value). So establishing a framework that is designed by the stakeholders on what they think is important – in this case knowing something works, culture, partnerships, sustainability, engagement, etc. etc. This can then result in a ‘score card’ to measure research engagement based on the importance to a variety of stakeholders. WHAT IF I DID THIS FOR CULTURE? Theme 1 of my Future Fellowship just became so much more interesting now… A Cultural Impact Assessment Framework.

Also, I spoke. It was a kind of tough crowd as the majority of delegates were Health Science, Medicine and Science scholars (we are only three from FASS – Museum Studies, Economics and Media Comms)

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Civic Algorithms: A digital intermediation challenge

Recently, I was invite to deliver a keynote for a joint session with the News and Media Research Center and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy to explore the ideas and concepts of digital intermediation.

The blurb:

How might generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automation be undertaken to produce social good? In an increasingly automated digital media world, user agency is challenged through the loss of interaction functionality on the platforms, technologies and interfaces of everyday digital media use. Instead, algorithmically designed decision making processes function for users to assist them in making sense of these environments as a means of assisting them to seek out content that is relevant, of interest and entertaining. However, if the last five years are anything to go by, these sorts of recommendations, particularly across social media, have caused anything but social cohesion and unity amongst users, and have instead spread misinformation, vitriol and hurtful media. Would our society be different had we designed systems that focused on, while still entertaining, content that places the wellbeing of humans at the forefront over content that is, for the most part, popular?

This presentation uses the lens of digital intermediation to explore how civic algorithms might be designed and implemented in digital spaces to improve social cohesion. By unpacking the technologies, institutions and automation surrounding the cultural production practices of digital intermediation, it becomes clearer how these leavers can be adjusted to nudge and encourage platforms, users and content creators to engage in improved civic processes. As a digital intermediation challenge, creating and working with civic algorithms presents as a potentially useful approach towards improving the cornerstone of our democracies by ensuring citizens have access to accurate information, are engaging in the discussions that are important and relevant to them, and are operating within digital environments that value social good alongside commercial gains.

And here’s the recording of the session, slides included:

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Intelligent Newsbots? AI in conversational journalism

Recently, I presented some emerging research on newsbots, that builds on the work Heather Ford and I did in 2018.

As part of this developing research, I examined 16 newsbots to understand to what level the automation is, what are the issues at play, and how the news is integrated ‘automatically’. The outcomes are still emerging, but there are some interesting preliminary findings to go through from the first parse.

It was excellent to be given a stage at the 2023 ADM+S Symposium to present these preliminary findings, while also talking with some of the leading industry and academic people in this space.

Below is a recording of that session. Please enjoy the session:

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New Book: Digital Intermediation

It is with great pleasure I can share the publication of my new book, Digital Intermediation: Unseen Infrastructure for Cultural Production.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003177388/digital-intermediation-jonathon-hutchinson

This book offers a new framework for understanding content creation and distribution across automated media platforms – a new mediatisation process. The book draws on three years of empirical and theoretical research to carefully identify and describe a number of unseen digital infrastructures that contribute to predictive media (algorithmic platforms) within the media production process: digital intermediation. The empirical field data is drawn from several international sites, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Sydney and Cartagena. By highlighting the automated content production and distribution process, the book responds to a number of regulatory debates emerging around the societal impact of platformisation. Digital Intermediation: Towards transparent digital infrastructure describes and highlights the importance of key developments that help shape the production and distribution of content, including micro-platformization and digital first personalities. The book explains how digital agencies and multichannel networks use platforms strategically to increase exposure for the talent they manage, while providing inside access to the processes and requirements of developers who create algorithms for platforms. The findings in this book provide key recommendations for policy makers working within digital media platforms based on the everyday operation of content production and consumption within automated media environments. Finally, this book highlights user agency as a strategy for consumers who seek information on automated social media content distribution platforms.

As with all new publications, Routledge have provided a 20% discount for all purchases – please use code AFL03.

Also, a series of book launches are underway from August through to October in Australia, so looking forward to seeing those who can travel to the following locations:

  • 9 August – News and Media Research Centre, University of Canberra
  • 20 September – Digital Media and Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology
  • 27 September – AI Governance and Trust in Digital Societies, University of Sydney
  • 19 October – RMIT University
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