Tag Archive for: Conference

International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) preconference – The 50th Anniversary of Communication Policy & Technology #IAMCR2025

IAMCR 2025 CPT precon

I was honoured to be invited to participate as a panel discussant at the 50th Anniversary of Communication Policy & Technology preconference. I was invited to talk at the first panel, The Asia-Pacific Perspective to
Communication Policy Research, alongside Prof Yu Hong, Zhejiang University, China; Prof Ang Peng Hwa, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and Prof Yu-li Liu, Shanghai University, China.

My panel followed an excellent opening remarks from the Dean of the Faculty, Professor Lionel Wee, and Prof Jeremy Shtern, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada (Secretary General, IAMCR), and Prof Gerard Goggin, Western Sydney University, Australia (Co-Chair, Global Media Policy Working Group, IAMCR). Within this session, I took two key items away:

  • Policy implications are pertinent and remain the same – allocation of resources, global north and south, voice those who have none, etc. (Jeremy Shtern);
  • Inter-generational research has really helped the Section grow (inclusion of ECRs and HDRs), how might this shift over new technologies and their introduction (Gerard Goggin)

This was followed by the Keynote Roundtable, which had five generations of Presidents of the CPT Section. THe following key points were made by the following colleagues:

  • Emeritus Prof Robin Mansell, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
  • Emeritus Prof Cees Hamelink, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Dr Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEAsia, Sri Lanka
  • Prof Hopeton Dunn, University of Botswana, Botswana
  • Prof Francesca Musiani, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France

Emeritus Prof Cees Hamelink

  • The process of UN and IAMCR focusing on techniology and human rights, but nothing actually happening beyond broad and general agreement.
  • Bypass governemtns, engage with individuals

Emeritus Prof Robin Mansell

  • CPT – infrastructures and political economy, but also the uses of technology
  • The issues haven’t changed but the technologies have, the ‘thigns’ we research are changing (platforms, datafication, AI, social meida, etc.) but the underlying issues remain and continue to need attention

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEAsia, Sri Lanka

  • Wihtin the global context, the state is the issue – Sri Lankan state government is a huge hump in the road for communication and power
  • Regulator work is important

Prof Hopeton Dunn, University of Botswana, Botswana

  • Real growth came when the secion started working with the ECR network – this tells me that is is the crossover of policy research needs novel approaches
  • Shcolarship that ceoms form htose marginalised voices is important to encourage emerging scholars (and students) to understand their place within the world. It connot be just one voice and one way of scholarship
  • AI versus IA (internet access) – while some parts are forging ahead with AI work, some parts of the world are still coming to grips with getting online

After lunch, we moved to Panel 2: AI governance

  • Tarja Turtia, Senior Programme Specialist, UNESCO Communication and Information Sector
  • Dr Jingbo Wang, United Nations University Institute in Macau, Macau
  • Prof Jungpil Hahn, National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • Dr Chew Han Ei, Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore
  • Moderator: Dr Jun Yu, National University of Singapore, Singapore (Local Organising Committee Co-Convenor)

Prof Jungpil Hahn, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • Working on AI projects that are human focused
  • Has funding for projects

Dr Jingbo Wang, United Nations University Institute in Macau, Macau

  • Research community is needed to bring the issues to policymakers, and then to be involved with more hands-on work in terms of how the results go post-policy implementation
  • What will be the jobs in 10 years that we need to be focussed on within AI
  • Check this out: https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future

Tarja Turtia, Senior Programme Specialist, UNESCO Communication and Information Sector

  • UNESCO is there to protect humans
  • Guidelines for Governance of Digital Platforms
  • Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
  • It’s difficult to undertake ‘fairness, equality, etc.’ as these principles are somewhat objective, burt UNESCO is ther to push pressure on policymakers
  • Working in AI and public media
  • The traditional media and the broader ecosystem also contributes to this AI discussion space

Dr Chew Han Ei, Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore

  • Policy studies and has a research project out that examine show chat bots respond to taboo subject: I’d Blush If I Could

PANEL 3: Policy beyond Communication Tech
Prof Catherine Middleton – Professor, Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
Dr Bohyeong Kim – Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Vanderbilt University, USA From Chat App to Fintech Giant: Kakao’s Journey Through South Korea’s Policy Landscape

Dr Renyi Hong – Associate Professor, Department of Communications and Media, National University of Singapore,
Singapore
Dr Wijayanto – Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia Governing the Digital Space: Regulation, Institutional Fragmentation, and Governance Gaps in the 2024 Indonesian
Election

Moderator: Prof Shaojing Sun, Fudan University, China

Prof Catherine Middleton – An Investigation of how Current Policy Debates about 6 GHz Spectrum and Wi-Fi 7 Will Impact Digital Inclusion in the Next Decade

  • License spectrum – set in a way that commercial operators pay fees to governments to use them, users pay to providers for access. Citizens are paying for a public resource (Mobile network operators)
  • Wireless networks are different in that we are not paying for them – permissionless innovation
  • US govt. is looking at charging for wifi spectrum – they would sell it to a provider and then we pay to use it.
  • Wifi 7 example given, required for faster broadband speeds to our home to avoid a bottleneck
  • Work by Ofcom: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/innovative-use-of-spectrum/ofcom-pioneers-sharing-of-upper-6-ghz-spectrum-between-mobile-and-wi-fi-services
  • Work by ACMA: https://www.acma.gov.au/consultations/2024-05/planning-options-upper-6-ghz-band

Dr Bohyeong Kim: From Chat App to Fintech Giant: Kakao’s Journey Through South Korea’s Policy Landscape

  • Kakao Talk – 43 million users, South Korea population is 51 million
  • Ride Hailing, information, food, etc. (super app)
  • Kako has 218 affiliates and 175 subsidiaries in 2023
  • 26 million users are on Kakoa Bank, it’s fintech subsidairy
  • Published article: South Korea’s Megacorp and super app: Kakao’s paths to market dominance – this is how the Chaembol are not able to own financial services industry
  • Sandbox finacial regulatoriy space(2019) – test services without regulation that might inhibit innovation – Q: how has this worked and could this approach be used in broader context of digital technologies? Could we reframe policy as a helpful tool and not a roadblock?
  • Kakao pay now also uses social media activity ‘points’ to understand financial information

Dr Wijayanto – Governing the Digital Space: Regulation, Institutional Fragmentation, and Governance Gaps in the 2024 Indonesian Election

  • Indonesia’s political battleground is on TikTok – positive disinformation and whitewashing were key tactics used
  • There are no laws against AI so it cannot be controlled – stance of govt.
  • Officials can have 10 accounts, and rely on platform governance to make sure all content is OK

Dr Renyi Hong – Platform Workers Bill: The Politics of Regulating Workers’ Injury in Singapore

  • Singaporeans are covered under a pension act, and a Platform Workers Bill (compensation)
  • Platform workers are now one fo the most dangerous workplaces (compared with construction, scarily)
  • Insurance is covered by platform providers for ‘free’ but it is actually included in the charge to consumers, but this de-associates the platform provider from the worker and their potential claims
  • Grab has Audio-protect – https://help.grab.com/passenger/en-sg/360035134272

PANEL 4: Regionalising Communication Policy
Dr Wafa Khalfan – Independent Scholar, United Arab Emirates
Dr Yongliang Gao – Associate Professor, State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication
University of China
Dr Tianchan Mao – Postdoctoral Fellow, Fudan University, China
Dr Lydia Ouma Radoli – Associate Dean, School of Communication, Daystar University, Kenya

Dr Lydia Ouma Radoli – Searching for a Middle Ground: Analyzing Artificial Intelligence Policies for Journalistic Practice in the Global South

  • Ethical issues versus opportunities for machine jouralism
  • Shifting the practice of journalism to include more technological dynamics, significant politics and audience sentiment
  • Bias mitigation, transparency and accountability – all areas that are pertinent for AI in journalism
  • Trust again appears as a significant issue (I interpret this as trust and institution)

Dr Wafa Khalfan – Regionalizing Communication Policy & Technology: Situating the Gulf Region in Global Media and AI Policy Discourse.

Dr Yongliang Gao – From the Regulation of Content Production, Technological Application, Market Operation, and International Communication to Social Governance

Dr Tianchan Mao – Governance in the Shadows: Why the Co-Governance Model Undermines the Effectiveness of Platform Governance in the Facebook Oversight Board?

  • Two sides of platform governance – what the platforms claim, and the impact of their actions
  • What is the efficiency of the Facebook Oversight Board? (I thought it was a kind of puppet mechanism, even thought I have some amazing colleagues sitting on the Board – I’d be keen to hear their thoughts)
  • Thematic analysis which was then run through topic modelling process – violence became a key issue to unpack
/by
,

2019 Internet Research Overview

Jonathon_Hutchinson_Internet_Research

I’m lucky enough to be the Program Chair for the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers Conference, to be held in Brisbane in October. During the last week, I have engaged in the next task as Program Chair and gone through each individual submissions as I assign them to reviewers. This process involves reviewing the title, the abstract and then matching those papers to most suitable experts within the Association.

For those non-academic folk reading this, the conference process usually involves responding to a conference theme as designed by the conference and organisation committees, where potential delegates submit a proposal of anywhere between 500 and 1200 words addressing that theme. This proposal is then sent to a number of reviewers who conduct a blind review (blind meaning they do not know who the author(s) is/are), and then the paper is returned to the program chair with a review and overall score. The papers that receive a suitable score are invited to submit their paper to the conference, while the others are rejected.

We are just about to send the papers out to the reviewers after they have been assigned, which has provided me with some unique insights into the state of the field of internet research. Granted, the proposals are responding to the theme of Trust in the System, which will skew the submissions slightly, but typically academics will usually make their research align with any given conference theme as one’s field usually moves towards a common trajectory. The research that has been submitted can be read as a very strong overview and indicator of where the field is currently, and where it is heading.

Of course the items below are seen through my eyes, which is the first parse of the content coming through the submission portal – the final version of papers that will be accepted and presented will no doubt differ slightly from these initial observations.

What are the hot internet research topics?

As you would expect there is a growing number of research papers in the area of algorithms and platforms. The concept of automation and recommender systems has spread beyond Netflix and permeates in the areas of news and journalism, smart cities, politics, and healthcare.

Platform research continues to be incredibly important with work critically looking at YouTube, Instagram and Facebook as the most popular areas. It is interesting to see the rise of focus on emerging Chinese social media platforms – while I didn’t notice any on TikTok, there was a focus on WeChat and Weibo.

Other very popular areas of research interest include governance and regulation of internet and social media, news and journalism related to the internet, social media and politics, methodologies, labour and things/bots. There is also a group of researchers interested in Blockchain.

Who are internet researchers?

One of the core roles of the review assignment was aligning the papers that were submitted with relative experts in the field. To assist in this process, members of the Association nominate the topics and methodologies of which they are experts. This information provides a unique insight into how we see ourselves as internet researchers.

I have not crunched hard data on this, and would not publish any sensitive data from the Association, so this is a broad observation of my aggregated insights. That is, these are the methods fields that kept popping up when I was assigning papers to reviewers.

One of the most popular internet researcher categories that was available from the pool was ethnographers for social media – participant observation across social media practices. I directly fit into this category and needless to say much of the work undertaken by these researchers could easily align with my own research endeavours.

An emerging category that aligns with the growing field is social media algorithm analysts. As humanities and social scientists become increasingly involved in data science alongside media and communication, the rise of algorithmic analysis has become not only popular, but essential to understand our field.

News and journalism experts are often coupled with social media experts, and the other interesting (and popular) couplings included discourse analysis with social media, and social media and textual analysis/content analysis.

There is a significant gap however, in those researching identities and activism – from what I can see across most of the communication infrastructure formats. A number of researchers are presenting work in this area, yet we still don’t see ourselves as a large cohort of experts in identity research – which seems odd. Perhaps this is just how the methodological categories appear in the conference system, or perhaps this is true of how we (don’t) identify as researchers?

So what does all this mean?

Well, these insights certainly won’t change the field’s direction but it does offer some insights into the gaps of internet research. I think we have platform research covered, while social media and ethnography is very strong. Social media and politics also has a very strong presence.

But there are areas that lack representation in internet research, that would be useful for researchers to pick up on in the next 12 months.

These include:

  • Ethics – in both use of internet and how to research the internet;
  • Algorithm analysis – the growing field here requires more people to apply data science to their existing work on platforms, social media etc.;
  • Geography and geolocation – I didn’t notice any human geographers (I might have missed this) conducting work in internet research in this sample. There is a small group of researchers undertaking geolocation specific work, but there is room for more;
  • Internet histories;
  • Labour;
  • Public sphere;
  • Surveillance;
  • Apps;
  • Conflict; and
  • Commerce.

For me, a light bulb just went on with how to personally align my research after attending conferences. I guess I always thought of conferences as a chance to present my current work alongside the field. But after having undertaken this Program Chair role, I find it is better to also analyse the gaps in the field to position your work for the next 12 months.

Perhaps scholars have always worked like this and I am just catching up with the game, but having these insights has been incredibly useful to shape my thinking. Hopefully they are useful to others in some capacity.

Original photo by 85Fifteen on Unsplash.

/by