Another year is almost over, which must mean that conference season is upon us. This means, in particular, our annual pilgrimage to the wonderful annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, which was held this time in Daegu, South Korea. Here’s the round-up of presentations by members of the QUT Social Media Research Group – and to look back on the conference, check out the #IR15 hashtag (before it disappears) and my liveblog from the conference.

A couple of presentations considered social media from a systemic perspective – here are Ben Light and Elija Cassidy on the practices of disconnection using social media:

And here’s our ‘very big data’ perspective on Twitter as a global social network:

Wilfred Wang explored Weibo, and highlighted the fact that even in centralised China regional differences still matter immensely in social media:

Jacinta Buchbach explored the implications of social media use for employers and employees:

Jean Burgess, Elija Cassidy, and Ben Light discussed the social media components of the Movember phenomenon:

While Ben Light tackled the elephant – er, the cat – in the room:

Finally, in a panel of the uses of social media for second-screen engagement with television, Darryl Woodford et al. introduced Telemetrics as a new set of methodologies and metrics for evaluating audience engagement:

And continued the discussion by considering the impact of existing follower/followee structures in the Australian Twittersphere for such engagement with TV content:

So much for 2014 – see you next year in Phoenix for IR16 (the call for papers has been released already)!