Journalist and cultural critic Jia Tolentino argues in The New Yorker that our experience of time is changing radically in the contemporary mediated political moment (2025). With political and news cycles unravelling with increasing rapidity, reality, she writes, is eating time. This sense of temporal vertigo was something we were aware of when we decided upon the theme of the 2024 Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA) Conference, held at RMIT University in Melbourne. Noting that our societies and polities are facing multiple crises at the planetary level – climate change, declining public trust, widespread political uncertainty, increasing geopolitical instability, and rapid technological upheaval – we decided upon a singular word for our conference theme: pause. Amidst this temporal dislocation, and in the face of these global omnicrises, we wanted to make a case for a moment of disciplinary pause during the conference.
While difficult in the current political and media environment, we wanted to suggest that this moment of pause was not a sign of apathy or inaction, but rather a chance for careful listening, deliberation and interaction. And so, we came together to share our research, casting our thoughts both backwards to our technological, political and media histories, as well as to think about, propose, speculate and formulate future directions for research and innovation.
An important moment of pause was created by the On Country keynote delivered by Boon Wurrung elder, chairperson, and founder of the Boon Wurrung Foundation, Dr N’arweet Carolyn Briggs. N’arweet led participants to the present-day banks of the Birrarung (also known by its colonial name, the Yarra River) for an immersive walk through the history and possible futures of this important cultural site.
In her keynote, Dr Ysabel Gerrard shared some of the research behind her latest book, The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life. The keynote came at a moment when in Australia the federal government had just introduced age restriction legislation for social media, so Dr Gerrard's reflections provided an important and timely opportunity to think about the complex relationships and negotiations young people have with digital and social media, devices and their identities.
Another of our keynote speakers, esteemed journalism scholar Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski, drew upon his reporting work at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, United States, and an ethnography of the digitisation of mental health work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to examine the representation of poverty and its poverty of representation in contemporary social and political discourse.
The Henry Mayer lecture was delivered by CEO of the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), Seb Chan. Chan presented a dynamic provocation about the challenges and opportunities of engaging audiences while documenting and exhibiting screen cultures.
In this special issue of Media International Australia, we present a selection of articles developed from papers presented at AANZCA2024. These articles reflect the diversity of topics, sub-fields, and methods on offer at the conference. Taken together, these individual contributions demonstrate how media and communication studies can help society better understand, and better respond to, the profound social, political, and technological transformations of our times.
Katharina Esau, Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, Samantha Vilkins, Laura Vodden, and Thet Zin Myint investigate polarisation in one of the most contentious political issues of recent memory: the Australian referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. However, rather than look at polarisation amongst members of the public, the authors instead examine viewpoint diversity within Australia's news media. They find that despite the Voice being a complex issue that went beyond a left-right party political divide – instead, supporters and opposition could be found across the political spectrum – Australia's news media often framed the referendum as yet another electoral horse race between the governing Labor party and the Coalition opposition. The authors end by considering the extent to which news media can contribute to destructive polarisation.
Cameron McTernan also examines diversity in Australian media, in this case by measuring the extent to which Facebook has afforded opportunities for new entrants into Australia's historically concentrated media ecology. Using ownership and engagement data from Facebook, McTernan outlines the scope, scale, and structure of Australia's platform news market. He finds that while Australian news on Facebook is relatively diverse, at least compared to outside of the platform news market, nonetheless ownership of news Facebook pages tends to still be concentrated in the hands of a few key players: News Corp and ACM, especially. McTernan ends by considering whether the platform is capable of providing opportunities for new entrants, especially in the context of the breakdown of the News Media Bargaining Code.
Next, Greg Treadwell and Merja Myllylahti investigate the relationship between trust in news and trust in other social institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand. By mapping public trust in news against trust in government, businesses and NGOs, the authors suggest that journalism's trust issues can be ‘untethered’ from broader social and institutional mistrust. That is, while all these social institutions are dealing with their own trust issues, journalism's issue is unique – in Aotearoa, New Zealand, at least – and needs to be studied and addressed as such.
Shifting away from high-level analyses of the news industry and towards the experiences of individual journalists, Shi Feng, Leah Li and Alexandra Wake undertook a concept analysis of journalistic cultural competence to capture and extend current thinking around the role of health journalism. Importantly, their paper positions health information not as a pre-existing sphere of knowledge, but as something that is coproduced between the news media, the biomedical and other social sectors. Acknowledging this coproduction allows for a better understanding of the vital role that health journalists can play in addressing systemic health disparities within multicultural societies, such as Australia.
Responding directly to the conference theme, Syrie Payne considers the refiguring of ‘pause’ for viewers and producers of television content in the streaming era. Payne outlines the way that our experiences of pauses both within and between television episodes has been radically changed in the streaming era, reshaping distribution models and consumption practices. Nonetheless, she outlines the way that some producers still make use of the pause between episodes, with its origins in TV's broadcast era, as a technique to enhance narrative tension and engage audiences. In other words, while technology has wrought significant changes to some elements of television production, some historical characteristics remain part of its current form.
While there is widespread concern about teens’ access and use of pornography, particularly considering current debates about teens’ access to social media, Giselle Woodley, Marc Zen, Harrison W. See and Lelia Green pause to consider some empirical evidence about the sort of porn teens are consuming. In a series of interviews and focus groups, the researchers found that teens demonstrated their capacity to critically consume and analyse a range of porn content. Further complicating debates about access restriction, teens demonstrated some porn literacy, while also indicating a need for further education to support their understanding of porn production and consumption.
Also within the context of these debates around social media's apparent toxicity, Caitlyn McMillan provides a necessary intervention by examining how people use TikTok to learn about their own neurodivergence. From McMillan's interviews and focus groups, McMillan finds that – contrary to media concerns about ‘self-diagnosis’ – participants used TikTok to affirm their identity and find community. Neurodivergent TikTok, in this sense, can be situated within a growing body of research that demonstrates how digital media affords opportunities for individuals to not only find information about identities under-represented in mainstream media, but also help people connect with others and form communities around those identities.
Jiaru Tang engages with societal concerns around the growing use of AI tools. Tang considers the response to AI generated images on China's largest fan art platform, Lofter. When Lofter introduced AI tools on its platform, there was a strong backlash among its users. Tang studied their responses and found that the users of Lofter were worried about the potential financial exploitation of their work, the theft of their creative labour, and their community and artistic aspirations as both fans and creators.
Lastly, Tom Wilma critically examines and reconceptualises ‘avatars’ within the context of the entangled social politics of digital media. Wilma argues that scholars need to rethink the ontology of the avatar. Often, digital avatars are framed as objects of embodiment: of users projecting themselves in digital spaces in order to ‘actualise’ their identity. Using digital music performances as a case study, Wilma argues that scholars should instead see digital avatars as a ‘translative’ process. In other words, avatars mediate – users must negotiate with avatars and avatar infrastructures. Wilma concludes by arguing that research must see digital avatars as reflective of, inhabited by, but also independent of their users.
The papers selected for publication here reflect just a sample of the diversity of contributions to the AANZCA2024 conference. They also demonstrate the continued relevance of our discipline in an uncertain world. We know the opportunity to pause, collectively, will stay with those who participated.
