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The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Justine Humphry, Catherine Page Jeffery, and Jonathon Hutchinson, whose focus is on the current moral panic about young people’s uses of social media, in Australia and elsewhere. While such moral panics are not new, the current debate represents an escalation. How did we get here; what is the agenda; what role has it had in creating the conditions for regulatory change; and how does it affect norms, ideal, and expectations about childhood?

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a paper by Terry Flew, Agata Stepnik, and Tim Koskie, who begin by noting the changing contours of Internet governance. There is increasing nation-state regulation in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states, as well as renewed debate about the treatment of digital and social media platforms and a populist push towards greater regulation.

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Bernadette Hyland-Wood, whose interest is in the co-design of an Indigenous client-centric, community-focussed project. This builds on her background in advocacy and development for open data sharing initiatives.

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Alanna Myers, whose focus is on Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission and the questions of truth-telling and media coverage it raises. The defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum seems to signal that Australians are not yet ready to embrace such truth-telling, yet at the same time Victoria is pushing ahead with its own truth-telling commission, which commenced here in the past week.

The next speaker at the AANZCA 2024 conference is my excellent colleague Katharina Esau, presenting our work on news media polarisation in the Voice to Parliament coverage. Our slides are below, too.

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference has a strong focus on Indigenous Australians and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and starts with a paper by Lisa Waller, focussing on future visions for the post-referendum era. This explores in particular the speeches made on the night that the referendum results were announced: government speakers presented a limited agenda related to socioeconomic equality, while opposition speakers articulated a reactionary neo-assimilationist vision.

The second day at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a keynote by Ysabel Gerrard, whose focus is on youth and social media – her new book The Kids Are Online is coming out in March 2025. Her research has involved studies of mental health cultures, anonymous apps, naming cultures, digital photo editing, and tech nostalgia, and the book makes a strong case for moving beyond binary approaches to social media as either good or bad, helpful or harmful, positive or negative, and for understanding social media as both at the same time, depending on the context. This also means that the challenge of youth social media use are not solvable with simple or simplistic solutions, whatever our politicians might pretend.

Yes, youth social media uses can be risky, and this can result in harm – but this comes with the territory. Young people negotiate their identities across platforms in highly paradoxical ways: sometimes technology use can result in polar opposite experiences that exist simultaneously within the same context, and this can be highly productive. Engaging in like-minded stigmatised communities can make young people them feel less alone, for example, but also exposes them to problematic content; it can be both exciting and harmful.

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kyle Moore, whose focus is on food delivery apps. These serve as an example of the gig economy, which enables irregular work structures and task-based activities by workers who usually provide all of their own equipment for their tasks. The workers themselves are also one category of app users, in fact, and exist in a liminal legal state between employees and freelancers.

The next presentation in this AANZCA 2024 conference session was mine, introducing our new practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time.