About the Initiative
Platform Media (such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Baidu, and WeChat) are rapidly transforming traditional media, reframing interpersonal mediated communication, and changing the rules of the game for everything from retail to politics, religion to regulation, evaluation to advertising. The aim of this project is to provide joined up research interrogating the urgent social, political and economic issues raised by platform media. These issues have been identified as:
the centrality of algorithms and machine learning processes to these platform media;
the accountability and regulatory issues platform media give rise to;
the infrastructures supporting platform media;
and the re-imagining of media and audience-users as platform media change the basis for media industries.
This research initiative aims to meet these challenges by: developing innovative research methods and tools for the critical examination and assessment of algorithms; exploring the accountability of media platforms in a partnership between researchers from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the TC Beirne School of Law; systematically comparing the ways infrastructures supporting platform media are developing in each of Australia, China and India; and re-imagining media and their audience-users in circumstances where platform media are becoming the dominant media.
The Platform Media Research Initiative incorporates several streams of research, bringing together a number of discrete projects. Collectively, these projects further the Initiative’s goals of critically analysing platform media, its processes of algorithmic selection, its infrastructures, surrounding issues of regulation and accountability, and platform media’s re-imagining of media provenance, operations, character, and spheres of operation.
Visual Social Media
This research stream utilises cultural-computational and cultural studies approaches to develop innovative research methods and tools for the critical examination and assessment of algorithms. Initially centred on Instagram in 2018, this research methods focus will extend in 2019 to experiments in research method development. Given the intersection between this research and the concerns of the Platform Media Accountability stream, the development of these experiments closely aligns the two projects.
Platform Media Accountability: Law, Regulation, Policy, and Accountability
This research stream connects social-legal, legal and science and technology studies approaches to emerging media platforms with longstanding political economy and media policy approaches to the development of media, communication and telecommunications and broadband policy and regulation. This project aims to bring together researchers from the School of Communication and Arts and the T.C. Beirne School of Law to establish a Platform Media Accountability working party to facilitate regular research round-tables, select and coordinate visits by key national and international researchers, and stage workshops on specific themes of common interests between the disciplines, such as Platform Media Law and Privacy Law.
Platform Media and its Infrastructures
This stream will interrogate the problems and opportunities created by different national arrangements for broadband infrastructure roll-out, data centres, the interaction of mobile, fixed telephony and cable, competition policy and regulatory frameworks. The research conducted as part of this project will develop an international perspective on common problems and opportunities arising from platform media’s technical, commercial and network infrastructures.
Re-imagining Media in a Time of Platforms
This stream uses the connections between Australian and US partners to develop a semester-long Research Seminar Series on this general theme. It utilises a variety of approaches to explore the instabilities generated by platform media over what and when is media, the advent of user metrics and the transformation of audience metrics. It will seek invited contributions from local and international speakers. Alongside this seminar a semester long RHD and Early Career Researcher initiative on Re-imagining media will be developed to amplify this research initiative.
For inquiries, please contact:
Dr Melanie Piper
Project Coordinator
School of Communication and Arts
m.piper2@uq.edu.au
A/Prof Adrian Athique
Lead Chief Investigator
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
a.athique@uq.edu.au
+61 7 3346 7416