Platform Media: Algorithms, Accountability and Media Design

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.