Events

In this roundtable, presenter Angela Wu will step participants through a number of her Platform media projects and the mixed methods she deployed in them. Her methodologies draw from media studies, science and technology studies, cultural sociology, and network science. She has deployed these with respect to research on (1) data analytics and algorithmic cultures, (2) web use and digital infrastructures, and (3) information technology, politics, in post-reform China.

Using Google’s face match as a case study it argues that the extension of cultural access to media architectures while opening a new space for sharing can obscure the embedding of objects within digital economies and logics. It puts forward the notion of algorithmic cultural recommendation and argues the need to reimage the outsourcing of curatorial practices to new forms of algorithmic mediation. Presenter: Caroline Wilson-Barnao.
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It is common to talk of Media Platforms, the Platform Press, and the Platform Economy. We see processes of platformisation extending beyond media platforms to include retail, tourism, accommodation, taxi services, agriculture, and the home. We are seeing not only the transformation of our media system, advertising and marketing, but the thoroughgoing platformisation of much of our economic and social life. This workshop is designed to illuminate and sort through these various issues. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Ramon Lobato, Adrian Athique and Nic Carah.

This presentation examines how the idea, creation, screen manifestation and cultural reception of digital human faces has evolved over the past four decades. It traces some of the factors that have shaped, and continue to shape, these human-like designs. This paper asks: how have these things changed over time, and what kinds of understandings about technology, scientific knowledge, acting, and humanness have emerged over the digital actor’s evolution? Presenter: Lisa Bode.

This roundtable with presenter Vibodh Parthasarathi will address key questions in the field of journalism in the era of platformisation. How is the Platform Press evolving internationally? What parallels and lessons are there to be drawn from Indian social media use and its intersection with Australian news and social media use? How are the powerful multinational social media platforms that are reforming media and communication globally doing so in the world’s largest democracy?

In this presentation Tom O’Regan ponders the remarkable continuity of thinking connecting Paul Lazarsfeld and Mark Zuckerberg observing how each was centrally concerned not with the media providers nor indeed with media users but with establishing “audience measurement” and “metrics”—the pivotal middle bit between media providers and their audiences.
VIDEO AVAILABLE