18.9.2024 16.00–18.00 at Helsinki Collegium Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 3rd floor and online. Click here to join the Zoom meeting.
HSSH is pleased to invite you to the New Research Culture (NRC) lecture by Professor Axel Bruns (Australian Laureate Fellow, QUT Digital Media Research Centre).
Professor Bruns is one of the leading researchers globally working at the intersection of digital/computational methods and digital politics. The lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion with Dr. Salla-Maria Laaksonen and Dr. Matti Nelimarkka, two leading scholars who have pioneered the use of digital/computational methods at the University of Helsinki.
The roundtable will be followed by a short reception where drinks and small nibbles will be served.
The Filter in Our Heads – Digital Media and Polarisation
Climate change, Brexit, Trump, COVID, Ukraine: there is hardly a major topic in contemporary public debate online that does not attract heated discussion, entrenched partisanship, widespread misinformation, and conspiracy theorists. Rational, evidence-based contributions often fail to cut through, while affective polarisation is prevalent, and difficult to overcome.
The facile, simplistic view of these developments is that digital and social media have disrupted the traditional public sphere, enveloped us all in ideologically homogenous ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and thereby ushered in the post-truth age – but such technologically determinist explanations have been rightly debunked for failing to account for the full complexity of the present moment in public communication. Hyperpartisans and conspiracy theorists, for instance, are abundantly aware of what their opponents think and say, but instinctively, reflexively reject those views: if there is a filter, it is located in their (and equally perhaps in our) heads, not their information feeds. Similarly, if global digital media platforms were predominantly to blame for the decline of societal cohesion and consensus, why are countries like the US considerably more deeply affected while other democracies remain considerably more resilient?
While these deep divisions are often misdiagnosed as evidence of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, then, they actually point to pernicious dysfunction at a discursive level: they are evidence of deeply entrenched polarisation and hyperpartisanship. Yet digital media studies have yet to develop a full repertoire of conceptual and methodological approaches for the analysis and assessment of such phenomena. Such approaches need to be able to distinguish between benign forms of ideological agonism and partisanship and destructive, entrenched polarisation; and they need to recognise diverse ideological, issue-based, interpretive, and affective qualities in polarised discourse. This evidence is critical to enabling an urgently needed, robust defence of our societies and democracies against the challenges of polarisation.
Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current research focusses on the study of public communication in digital and social media environments, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information, and their implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere; his work draws especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he posts at @snurb_dot_info / @snurb@aoir.social / @snurb.bsky.social.