About the DMRC
The DMRC aims to conduct world-leading research that helps society understand and adapt to the changing digital media environment. It is a leading Australian centre for the fields of media and communication – areas in which QUT has achieved the highest possible rankings in ERA, the national research quality assessment exercise. We are actively engaged with the Asian region across all our research programs; and we have a strong commitment to research training for academic and industry researchers alike.

The Centre is based within QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and located within the Creative Industries Precinct at Kelvin Grove – a $150 million facility for teaching, research, production and business development in media and design, visual and performing arts. This site boasts some of Australia’s most sophisticated, high-tech digital facilities, and acts as an incubator for the next generation of ground-breaking ideas, emerging and experimental artists and designers, and creative enterprise.

About the PhD Scholarships
Applicants with excellent academic track records (equal to an Australian Bachelor Degree with First Class Honours) or equivalent research experience may be eligible for competitive PhD scholarships to undertake study with us. Successful applicants will work on topics that align closely with one or more of our four research programs. The DMRC is also offering a number of additional top-ups to these scholarships for highly ranked students.

Program 1 – Journalism, Public Communication & Democracy
This program addresses the digital transformation of public and political communication. We combine state-of-the-art big social data analytics and rich qualitative approaches to develop new insights into the impact of digital and social media on journalism and the processes of opinion formation which are core to a functioning democratic system.

PhD topics for 2016
– Debates in social media spaces and their impact on public communication
– Audience feedback mechanisms and their impact on journalism
– Transformation of journalistic forms and content in the digital age

Potential supervisors – see staff profiles here.
Dr Emma Baulch (Media & Communication)
Prof Axel Bruns (Media & Communication)
Prof Jean Burgess (Media & Communication)
A/Prof Folker Hanusch (Journalism)
Dr Stephen Harrington (Media & Communication)
Dr Tim Highfield (Media & Communication)
Prof Brian McNair (Journalism)

Program 2 – Industries, Economies & Regulation
This program aims to develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and critically engaging with digital media industries and the digital economy. It focuses on the interaction between socio-technical innovations and legal, regulatory, educational and policy environments.

PhD topics for 2016
– Digital media and entertainment industries – national, regional and global perspectives
– Regulating digital media platforms – the roles of online intermediaries in Internet governance including human rights
– Digital copyright and innovation

Potential supervisors – see staff profiles here
Dr Emma Baulch (Media & Communication)
Dr Bridgstock (Creative Industries)
Prof Jean Burgess (Media & Communication)
Prof Stuart Cunningham (Media & Communication)
A/Prof Michael Dezuanni (Film, Screen & Animation/Education)
Prof Terry Flew (Media & Communication)
Dr Ben Goldsmith (Media & Communication)
Dr Kylie Pappalardo (Law)
Dr Kevin Sanson (Entertainment Industries)
Dr Christina Spurgeon (Media & Communication)
Dr Nicolas Suzor (Law)
A/Prof Patrik Wikstrom (Media & Communication)

Program 3 – Technologies & Practices in Everyday Life
In this program, we investigate how digital media technologies both shape and are shaped by the everyday practices of diverse users, in relation to questions of digital inclusion and participation. Our research engages with a range of contexts including education and work, gender and sexuality, cultural and media consumption, the popular cultures of digital media, and the everyday experience of place.

PhD topics for 2016
– Cultural diversity and social inclusion in digital media environments
– Placemaking, mobile and locative media
– Digital labour and workplace identities

Potential supervisors – see staff profiles here
Dr Ruth Bridgstock (Creative Industries)
Prof Axel Bruns (Media & Communication)
Prof Jean Burgess (Media & Communication)
Dr Elija Cassidy (Media & Communication)
Prof Stuart Cunningham (Media & Communication)
A/Prof Michael Dezuanni (Film, Screen & Animation/Education)
Dr Ben Goldsmith (Media & Communication)
Dr Tim Highfield (Media & Communication)
Prof Ben Light (Media & Communication)
Prof Brian McNair (Journalism)
Dr Peta Mitchell (Media & Communication/Urban Informatics)
Dr Kevin Sanson (Entertainment Industries)
Dr Christina Spurgeon (Media & Communication)
A/Prof Patrik Wikstrom (Media & Communication)

Program 4 – Digital Methods
This program focuses on the development of innovative research approaches, methods and tools grounded in and suitable for the study of digital media – from computational analyses of ‘big social data’, to close qualitative analysis of digital media platforms and practices, and critical approaches to questions of method. These approaches may be applied across any of the other three programs in the Centre.

PhD topics for 2016
– Critical approaches to big social data, data-mining and surveillance
– Methods for network, statistic and geo-visualisation
– Innovation at the interface between traditional and digital methods

Potential supervisors – see staff profiles here
Prof Axel Bruns (Media & Communication)
Prof Jean Burgess (Media & Communication)
Dr Tim Highfield (Media & Communication)
Prof Ben Light (Media & Communication)
Dr Peta Mitchell (Media & Communication/Urban Informatics)
A/Prof Patrik Wikstrom (Media & Communication)

How to apply
It is essential that you discuss your application with us well before the deadline.

Contact the Centre via email at dmrc@qut.edu.au to express your interest.

Include with your email:

1. Current CV including educational qualifications
2. Brief statement outlining which of the proposed topics interest you
3. Names of preferred supervisors (optional)

If suitable supervision for your project can be arranged, we will then work with you to complete the formal application.

General information on the University’s Annual Scholarship Round including eligibility requirements and the application process can be found here.

Closing date: 30th September 2015 (earlier enquiries essential)

Overview

From the beginning of my academic career up to now I have been investigating the way digital media is changing the face of cultural participation and public communication.

A decade ago when I started, in that early heyday of the ‘web 2.0’ and ‘participatory culture’, we looked to blogs, to image-sharing, to community-based digital storytelling workshops as ways that everyday creativity might find its audiences, and that ordinary people might find each other in ways that had not been possible on such a widespread and visible scale before.

I theorised that everyday, personal uses of digital media might be the key to participation in interest, issue and identity based publics.

My theoretical and ethical orientation was grounded in cultural studies, especially its approach to everyday and popular culture; and therefore my cultural citizenship definitions emphasised everyday, personal, even mundane practices of creativity like storytelling, photosharing, scrapbooking, graffiti, skateboarding, cooking or gardening – practices I collectively called ‘vernacular creativity’ – and the way these may serve to connect individuals and communities in the service of broader civic goals.

Coming from this distinctive disciplinary background, I can draw out some complementary and competing meanings of creative citizenship with respect to digital and social media specifically.

1. Creative and collaborative approaches to solving civic challenges, using digital and social media; that is, creative ways of being citizenly – using digital media to organise and promote the community garden; the development of crowdsourced crisis maps on the fly
2. Creativity that, through its enactment, visibility and connectedness in digital media contexts, enables certain modes of civic engagement as an often unintended consequence; that is, the civic benefits of creative participation – getting involved in an international community gardening association formed as a result of gardening and locavore food bloggers finding each other online
3. Citizenship understood as the rights and responsibilities toward creative communities of which one is a member (e.g. a good citizen of the music scene; a good ‘netizen’ – or, being a citizen of digital media – what would that look like?)

Bearing in mind that creative citizenship, like all modes of group identification, can work to exclude as well as include; and that trolls and bullies can be fairly creative in their uses of digital media too.

The Web 2.0 Moment

The Web 2.0 ‘moment’ of the early to mid 2000s was a key period of optimism for creative citizenship and digital media understood in these ways. The Web 2.0 moment saw the rise of automated blogging software like Blogger and Movable Type, the widespread take-up of these tools, and the broader idea of Web 2.0 services focused on providing platforms for user-created content and connectivity – the barriers to participation in digital culture were now much lower, but participation was still very far from population-wide. This was a moment of artisinal, DIY creative citizenship, but still really the domain of the digerati not the masses.

But there was still a strong sense that the rules and roles of culture were changing. The academic field of research around participatory culture was marked by debates for and against the cultural and social value of user-created content. There were some early concerns raised about free labour in the context of proprietary platforms, but the market in user data, the algorithmic turn were largely yet to come, or at least they hardly registered for most of these critics.

The Social Media Moment
Fast forward to the end of that first decade of the 20th century, and I think we arrive at a different kind of moment, structured by a different set of relationships between the tech industry, the user, and culture – one that I have been calling the platform paradigm.

Indeed, returning to my third model, that of being a citizen of digital media, we might even think of platforms as in some ways analogous to city states – Mark Zuckerberg was infamously called the Sultan of Facebookistan in the media at one stage – but perhaps that’s stretching civic metaphors too far.

A crucial element of this work I have been doing is trying to understand the ‘digital’ elements of social media platforms as material elements, and understanding platforms as co-created. Unevenly and undemocratically co-created, but co-created nonetheless. it is through the interactions between all this ‘stuff’ that platforms are constituted, and that they do things; all these elements are co-influential in what each platform is and can be used for.

I do not think it hyberbolic to say that a very great deal of social life at the micro and macro level has become entangled with digital media – cf Mark Deuze’s book Media Life.

This moment is one characterized by the new ubiquity, legitimisation and normalisation of social media. Even in contexts where the penetration of digital devices is still growing, these dominant platforms will be inextricably part of the digital media ecology for new users – through the Facebook phone, the embedding of Google services into Android phones, and so on.

And the global shift to mobile media greatly extends the meaning of ‘ubiquity’ into our workplaces, our homes, schools, our pockets, and with the rise of wearables, the datafication of even our bodies.

And with the new ubiquity comes the new legitimacy – social media is part of the communicative infrastructure of global society now. And at key points social media has quite visibly been legitimated by government and community uses for practical purposes in undeniably serious situations like the 2011 Queensland Floods. Research has aided this legitimation process by doing large-scale data driven research only made possible by access to the Twitter API, which is really intended for commercial third-party development; and access to such data is a highly controversial and politicised issue right now.

The mainstreaming of social media platforms like Twitter has made possible communities of interest like agchat oz. Weekly Twitter Q&A sessions use the #agchatoz hashtag to capture discussions of interest to the self-identifying agricultural community, ranging from personal issues such as succession planning and rural mental health, to work matters including sustainable farming methods and how to manage natural disasters, as well as more public concerns such as animal welfare and live export. Most discussions solicit a range of perspectives from producers, consumers, scientists, journalists and other professionals; sometimes discussions connect to other issues and their hashtags (like #banliveexport for the issue of animal welfare in the meat industry), thereby causing a collision of constituencies. …not to mention #felfies (short for farm selfies) – which are perhaps an instance of what Lance Bennett calls personalised inclusive collectivity – where the #felfie meme is doing network-building work as well as self-representation for global rural citizens.

And social media has its own popular cultures that support practices of what John Hartley has called silly citizenship – memes, viral culture of the web (Shifman), which are a vital part of political discourse today – where by political I mean both Big P and small p politics (e.g. gender and sexuality issues). The David Cameron on the phone to Barack Obama meme-fest is a great example of this – it is silly and funny but also enacts a strong critique of the contemporary mediatization of politics and the dominance of superficial PR over political communication.

Competing Futures

But despite or even simultaneously with all this flourishing of activity, the affordances of the dominant platforms we associate with social media have changed in complex ways that at least according to some critics, do support mass take-up in the service of business interests, but may not support user creativity and innovation as they once did. (Always bearing in mind the counter-example of the Kodak camera, which created a mass market via the enclosure and automation of key aspects of the photographic process, but at the same time opened up access to photographic production to the masses).

I do think there have been some significant shifts in the way that users and their agency are being repositioned as these platforms grow and mature and seek profit ever more urgently as the venture capital runs out – and here I use the shorthand ‘the self and the world’ to think about the axes along which this repositioning occurs.

and as these platforms evolve and the technical means to advertise and market to us become ever more sophisticated, our experiences of them are ever more heavily mediated by the corporate interests of these platforms – even when the corporate interest is to serve us content we perceive as ‘relevant’, keeping us coming back for more.

How then do the politics of platforms, data ownership and access, the algorithmic turn, filter bubble, advertising-driven etc affect the creative citizen?
e.g. FB newsfeed algorithm might mean that organisations increasingly need to pay to get messages through such channels; and there are pretty serious consequence for global citizenship of the tendency of these platforms to encourage us to associate with and consume the content of people who we like and who are like us, as this visualization by Gilad Lotan of hashtag co-occurrence in Instagram images associated with the Gaza conflict shows.

Provocations: the Digital Creative Citizen

I conclude with some suggestions about how digitally native strategies and tactics for engaging in social media platforms might become part of the apparatus of community-based creative citizenship initiatives as well:

1. Exploit social media logics with playful and ‘silly’ citizenship
2. Adopt adaptive, multi-platform strategies & avoid delegating everything to one or two platforms
3. Develop critical engagement with platforms and their cultures as part of digital creative citizenship

#digcult14: Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality with Social Media
28-29 October, QUT, Brisbane

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars in the study of the digital, gender and sexuality, the symposium seeks to further interrogate questions of the contemporary making of digital cultures of gender and sexuality. Whilst difference-based approaches to understanding the gendered make up of social media users and audiences have been tackled, this symposium focuses more upon the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed and circulated with and by this media. Additionally, it will seek to explore how sociotechnical elements of social media are being transferred to other digital cultures of gender and sexuality.

Speakers include: Kath Albury (University of New South Wales), Jenine Beekhuyzen (Griffith University), Jean Burgess (QUT), Paul Byron (University of New South Wales), Elija Cassidy (QUT) Stefanie Duguay (QUT), Clif Evers (University of Nottingham Ningbo), Ben Light (QUT), Sharif Mowlabocus (University of Sussex), Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku), Kane Race (The University of Sydney) and Emily Van Der Nagel (Swinburne University).

The PhD masterclass will be to enable a small group of 15-20 PhD students to engage with a group of internationally recognized researchers, and with each other, to discuss their work and their plans for its development. Please note that applications for the PhD masterclass need to be submitted as per the instructions on the symposium website by close of business in your time zone on 19 September 2014. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application no later than the 25 September 2014.

Both events are free to attend, but places are limited so early registration is advised.
More details can be found at https://www.digcult.org

Of course, at least some of us have been dating on the go for quite a while – indeed, people were using Bluetooth as early as 2005 to meet nearby strangers.But these days the technology is now easier to use and the number and variety of mobile apps available provides more ways to meet potential dates, friends or lovers than ever before.

Grindr has cornered the gay male market, with about 8 million users overall and 1.5 million users logging in every day, while other applications like Hornet and Scruff target subsets of this demographic. Tinder – arguably the app that has sent mobile dating mainstream – boasts of its popularity with women, while its spin-offs aim to satisfy those who would like the ‘hot or not’ style app to be more intellectual (e.g. Willow) or more explicitly sexual (e.g. Mixxxer). Online dating sites have also joined this market by creating mobile applications and mobile-friendly websites.

With this growth in popularity, it is no surprise that media outlets have reacted with noticeable anxiety about the social degeneration and personal dangers the location-based aspect of such apps may pose. For example, in a Guardian story that also charges mobile dating apps with the “trivialisation of human courtship”, the headline ‘Break out the chamomile tea: ‘scary’ Tinder is outdated. Enter: Happn’ implies that readers have reason to be wary of the new French application, which notifies people of prospective hook-ups within 250m, without even bothering with profile matching first.

But despite the recent and rapid uptake of digital technologies like these, and the significant public interest in how they are mediating personal relationships, there is very little research that can help us understand how people are using them, making sense of them, adapting and resisting them in their own everyday lives.

This interaction between users and dating or hook-up apps is exactly what Stefanie Duguay, Ben Light, and Jean Burgess are studying as part of the Social Media Research Group. Our research focuses on how the users of these services negotiate with the technology in order to present themselves as authentic, trustworthy, or safe to meet up with in person.

Bringing together theory and methods from cultural studies, science and technology studies, and software studies, we will discuss this interplay between apps and their users at the Brisbane ICA Regional Conference in our paper ‘On Delegating the Communication and Regulation of Authenticity Claims: Dating and Hooking Up with Digital Media’.

The presentation will discuss some of the significant differences in how people are able to make and evaluate authenticity claims on different dating applications. For example, on the mobile-friendly dating website Squirt, the community weighs in on whether users are who they say they are. They do this by posting ratings and testimonials to the pseudonymous profiles of users they’ve met in person.

By contrast, Tinder uses people’s Facebook information to populate their profiles, importing what’s supposed to be their real name, profile photos, age, friend lists, and interests they might have in common with others. This information then claims authenticity on users’ behalf without them having to spend time completing their Tinder profile.

Meanwhile the ‘adults only Tinder’ app, Mixxxer (web-based and so not subject to App Store rules) employs a very light touch when it comes to authentication, leaving it up to individual users to look after their own safety and enabling a flood of profile pics of dubious authenticity, where arguably it is comfort with nudity and readiness for sex that counts as authentic ‘membership’ of the site – but app reviewers complain of “creeps and fake accounts” in abundance.

Each application’s design works under a different understanding of what demonstrates authenticity, which provides users with certain opportunities and constraints for the way they express themselves. In turn, users can react in ways that conform to the application’s design or that modify and resist its understanding of authenticity.

The features and uses of digital technologies like these can influence our personal relationships. They can frame our interactions, affect our sense of safety, and ultimately affect our health and well-being. But just as important are the many different ways that people make digital technologies work for them.

If you want to learn more, register for the Brisbane ICA Regional Conference and join us in discussing the social and technical dynamics of mobile dating apps.

These and other related topics will also be discussed the day prior to the conference at the first Australasian Symposium on Health Communication, Advertising and Marketing (Health CAM 2014)

This post originally appeared at the QUT Creative Cluster blog.

Our shared featured reading was this new piece by Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell:

van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.

I chose it because I was intrigued by and very much admired the effort to look backward to media scholarship from the broadcast era and to think through what, if any, of that work can be translated into the context of social media. In this case, the authors first elaborate and then experimentally apply the idea of ‘media logic’ to social media platforms, cultures, and industries. We had a lively discussion about this and if we weren’t 100% sure of how well the experiment works, I think it provoked a lot of ideas about how we might try to approach the social media environment in more holistic and systematic ways. This whole exercise inspired me to re-read Raymond Williams’s great book Television, which is notable for the way it successfully combined political economy, cultural analysis and materialism in an attempt to grapple with the then-new medium of TV, way back in the day.

And here in no particular order is the full list of what the Social Media Research Group members have been reading over the past month. It’s a bumper crop!

• Simon, P. (2013). Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data. Wiley. com. Amazon link |
• QUT library ebook full text
• Zuckerman, E. (2013). Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (1 edition.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Barney, K. (2010). Gendering Aboriginalism A Performative Gaze on Indigenous Australian Women. Cultural Studies Review , 212-239.
• Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J., & Stohl, C. (2005). Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory , 365-388.
• Chadwick, A. (2007). Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity. Political Communication , 283-301.
• Flanagin, A. J., Stohl, C., & Bimber, B. (2007). Modeling the Structure of Collective Action. Communication Monographs , 29-54.
• Van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
• Volviv, Z., & Erjavec, K. (2012). Commercial and sexualized nationalism on Serbian reality tv. International Journal of Cultual Studies , 1-18.
• Meeder, B., Karrer, B., Sayedi, A., Ravi, R., Borgs, C., & Chayes, J. (2011). We Know Who You Followed Last Summer: Inferring Social Link Creation Times in Twitter. In WWW ’11: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on the World Wide Web. New York: ACM. 517-526. doi:10.1145/1963405.1963479.
• Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Polity.
• Mergel, Ines (01/04/2013). Social media adoption and resulting tactics in the U.S. Federal Government.   Government information quarterly , 30 (2), 123-130.
• Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740624X13000063
• Siegel, E. (2013). Predictive Analytics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.
• Given, J., & Radywyl, N. (2013). Questions & Answers & Tweets. Communication, Politics & Culture, 46, 1-21.https://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=t8dzoos720ck1
• Qualman, E. (2013). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (2nd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley & Sons.
• Booth, P. (2010). Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
• Mejias, Ulises A. (2010). The limits of networks as models for organizing the social. New Media & Society, 12(4), 603-617.
• Beer, D., & Burrows, R. (2013). Popular culture, digital archives and the new social life of data. Theory, Culture & Society. 30(4), 47-71 http://tcs.sagepub.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/30/4/47
• Gillespie, T. (2013). The relevance of algorithms. Media Technologies, forthcoming. http://6.asset.soup.io/asset/3911/8870_2ed3.pdf
• Langlois, G., & Elmer, G. (2013). The Research Politics of Social Media Platforms. Culture Machine, 14. https://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/505/531
• Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012). ‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’–a digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads. The British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 590-615. https://www.tommasoventurini.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/TheWhole.pdf
• McCosker, A. (2013). Trolling as provocation: YouTube’s agonistic publics. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1354856513501413. http://con.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/09/11/1354856513501413.abstract
• Rogers, R. Debanalizing Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study. https://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_debanalizingTwitter_websci13.pdf
• Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796-812.
• http://pus.sagepub.com/content/21/7/796.short
• Venturini, T., & Latour, B. (2010). The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-quantitative Methods. Proceedings of Future En Seine, 30-15. https://www.tommasoventurini.it/web/uploads/tommaso_venturini/TheSocialFabric.pdf
• Yaneva, A., & Heaphy, L. (2012). Urban controversies and the making of the social. Architectural Research Quarterly, 16(01), 29-36. http://journals.cambridge.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/action/search?searchType=CITEADVANCE&journals=ARQ&volume=16&issue=01&page=29&author=Yaneva&year=2012

And the featured reading for October’s meeting, chosen by Theresa Sauter, is:

Ruppert, E., Law, J., & Savage, M. (2013). Reassembling Social Science Methods: the challenge of digital devices. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4) 22–46. doi: 10.1177/0263276413484941.

The format is a quick round of catch-ups and show-and-tell where each person discusses one thing they have read in the previous month, followed by a more in-depth discussion of a shared reading that has been assigned, read and critiqued by the group in advance. I thought it’d be nice to share these in a blog post each month – so this will be the first in a series.

Our shared reading this week was suggested by our new Professor of Digital Media, Ben Light:

Johnson, D.G. (1997). Ethics online. Communications of the ACM  40(1): 60-65 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=242875

It prompted some interesting reflections on how our ideas about privacy and anonymity, norms and regulation have changed since the mid 1990s, alongside the shifting technological, economic and cultural landscape of the web.

And here’s an aggregated list of what the rest of us have been reading, responding and reacting to. As you’ll see, the group’s interests combine theoretical and applied research, and range across journalism, media, communication and cultural studies, informatics, law and business (with a bit of evolutionary biology thrown in every now and then, just to confuse people).

• Balsamo, Anne (2011) Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Duke University Press.
• Selingo, Jeffrey (2013) College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students.  New Harvest.
• Crowe, A. (2012). Disasters 2.0: the application of social media systems for modern emergency management. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
• Banerji v Bowles [2013] FCCA 1052 available at https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FCCA/2013/1052.html?stem=0&synonyms=0&query=title%28%222013%20FCCA%201052%22%29
• Publications of  the Telemodernities research project on lifestyle advice television in Asia https://www.telemodernities.org/publications
• Behrent, M.C. (2013). Foucault and Technology. History and Technology, 29(1): 54-104. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2013.780351#.Ug2i-G3cP4y DOI:   10.1080/07341512.2013.780351
• Kieran. T (2010). Stories of Human Autonomy, Law, and Technology in Bulletin of Science Technology Society. 30(18), pp. 18-21 http://bst.sagepub.com/content/30/1/18 DOI: 10.1177/0270467609355052
• Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). A cooperative species: human reciprocity and its evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (https://www.amazon.com/Cooperative-Species-Reciprocity-Evolution-ebook/dp/B0050PADW0/)
• Highfield, R., & Nowak, M. (2011). SuperCooperators: Evolution, Altruism and Human Behaviour (or why we need each other to succeed). Text Publishing. (https://www.amazon.com/SuperCooperators-Evolution-Altruism-Behaviour-ebook/dp/B005651QL6)
• Jeffrey Herrmann, William Rand, Brandon Schein, and Neza Vodopivec An Agent-Based Model of Urgent Diffusion in Social Media Conference paper presented at CSSSA 2013 (The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas) https://www.isr.umd.edu/~jwh2/papers/csssa2013.pdf
• Cameron, M., Power, R., Robinson, B., & Yin, J. (2012) Emergency Situation Awareness from Twitter for Crisis Management. Social Web for Disaster Management (SWDM) Workshop 2012. WWW 2012 Companion, April 16-20, 2012, Lyon, France. ACM 978-1-4503-1230-1/12/04. pp 695-698.https://www2012.wwwconference.org/proceedings/companion/p695.pdf

A bunch of links (in English for the benefit of our readers) relating to Mídia NINJA: an alternative journalism phenomenon that emerged from the protests in Brazil

• https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-14204-midia-ninja-alternative-journalism-phenomenon-emerged-protests-brazil
• https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/08/brazils-midia-ninja-covers-demonstrations-from-the-inside/
• https://www.riogringa.com/my_weblog/2013/07/brazils-m%C3%ADdia-ninja.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/world/americas/brazil-protests.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world&_r=2&

And finally, apparently, people use Facebook more when they’re lonely. Who’d have thought it? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23709009

Next month, at my suggestion we’re reading this new piece from Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell – see you then!

van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14. https://www.librelloph.com/ojs/index.php/mediaandcommunication

 post image from emilysfilms