SMS Radio

Listen now | Heather Ford researches Wikipedia and digital politics at the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. Miles chats to Heather about Wikipedia’s role in the information ecosystem after some sneaky edits to a Cabinet Minister’s page fuelled speculation around historical rape allegations.

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Listen now (29 min) | Fan Yang is a PhD candidate at Deakin University researching news production on WeChat Official Accounts based in Australia. Fan talks about how the “African gang” narrative played out on Chinese social media; what WeChat’s news cycle can teach us about the business of journalism; and how techno-orientalism fuels reporting on Chinese apps.

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Originally aired August 2020:

Dr Crystal Abidin, Senior Research Fellow and ARC DECRA Fellow at Curtin University, unpacks the phenomenon of Influencer Wars, and explains why we should generally be taking influencers more seriously.

This was a chat about Crystal’s upcoming chapter “L8r H8r: Commoditized Privacy, Influencer Wars, and Productive Disorder in the Influencer Industry”. Check out the pre-print here.

For further reading:

Abidin, Crystal, and Mart Ots. 2016. “Influencers Tell All? Unravelling Authenticity and Credibility in a Brand Scandal.” Pp. 153-161 in Blurring the Lines: Market-driven and Democracy-driven Freedom of Expression, edited by Maria Edström, Andrew T Kenyon, and Eva-Maria Svensson. Göteborg: Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research. <pdf | Open Access book | Purchase book>

Abidin, Crystal. 2016. “Sorry not sorry: Influencers, shamelebrity, and para-apologetic transgressions.”Selected Papers of Internet Research 17: The 17th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. <Open Access>

Abidin, Crystal. 2018. “Public Shaming, Peer Surveillance, and the Profitability of Internet Drama.”Mynah Magazine #2, pp. 62-75, January 2018. <Excerpt | Buy | Read>

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Josh, Cheyne and Miles break down the great Zucc’ing of Australian news from Facebook just days after Google agrees to hand over millions to news media (but mostly Murdoch).

Stuff we dig (non-Facebook edition):

This tweet thread from The Nod’s and former Gimlet producer Eric Eddings challenging the hypocrisy of the Reply All Test Kitchen series

This Monthly piece by Martin McKenzie-Murray on Dave Grohl’s AIDS denialism and celebrity misinformation

This surreal interview with Craig Kelly by Gizmodo’s Cam Wilson. Also, this week we found out one of Kelly’s senior aides is facing some pretty serious allegations.

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Simon Angus is Associate Professor at Department of Economics at Monash University, and co runs the IP Observatory. Simon and the IP Observatory are the ones monitoring global internet activity and are usually the first to find out about events like the recent internet shutdowns in Myanmar. Josh speaks to Simon about how these observatories work and what we can learn from them.

In the news: Facebook finally takes a stance against anti vaxxers and we learn more about the role they played in the Capitol riots.

Stuff we dig:

This feature by Ashish K. Mishra about India building it’s own social media

This Stanford IP piece about your data on Clubhouse

This Seth Simons feature on alt-comedy and the alt-right

One cop’s insidious attempt to avoid accountability on Instagram

And this meme which nails not only our uni lives but our attempts to keep this show under 30 mins:

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Minoli Wijetunga is an academic, a trainer, and a researcher currently studying at the University of Oxford, previously attached to the Digital Humanities Lab at University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Her studies focus on education and its many intersections such as gender and class.

This episode, Cheyne speaks to Minoli about how academia can do better when it comes to consent in social media research.

And in the news this week: Microsoft and the Bargaining Code battle, Craig Kelly’s wikipedia page, and internet shutdowns in Myanmar.

Check out Minoli’s essay on informed consent on TikTok here:

https://genderit.org/articles/i-have-read-and-agree-terms-and-conditions-informed-consent-age-social-media

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"The Government is trying to force media companies and the platforms to talk….”

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