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This was my ICA Fellows presentation to the 2021 Annual (virtual) Conference. It provides an overview of my academic career and some of the priority areas of my work.

This paper understands the evolution of Internet governance as occurring in three phases: (1) the early phase of a largely open Internet and minimal government regulation; (2) growing concern about online harms and other adverse consequences of the platformisation of the Internet; and (3) the current phase, where appropriate models of Internet governance are being widely debated, and nation-states are enacting new laws for digital platforms. It notes that the implications of this shift are yet to filter through to global Internet governance institutions, which continue to be largely framed around multistakeholderism and a minimal role for national governments. The result is the rise of tendencies towards a global ‘Splinternet’ and a democratic deficit around issues of Internet governance.

We experimentally study bounded rationality in real estate by observing the effects of market news and media credibility cues on house price predictions. Non-professional market actors read news articles about recent house price trends from online news sources varying in perceived trustworthiness and brand anonymity, and then predicted selling prices of apartments for monetary reward. Boundedly rational actors are expected to make (imperfect) use of public information and rely on contextual ques to infer information quality. Price predictions were in the opposite direction of market trends in a control condition without market news. As hypothesized, (1) market news on price trends increased the accuracy of predictions, and (2) information from a more credible medium had stronger effect on price predictions when its brand was made visible. Systematic inaccuracies in price predictions, their improvement with market information, and reliance on credibility cues suggest that non-professional property valuations are boundedly rational.

We introduce a novel experimental protocol for studying the economic effects of growing mistrust in traditional news media. In a preregistered experiment, participants first read news articles on trends in the Australian housing market from sources with either high or low trustworthiness and either with or without visible brand information. They then predicted selling prices of apartments for a monetary reward. As hypothesized, (1) reading news on declining house price trends lowered expectations about house prices, and (2) news from a trustworthy source had stronger effect on economic expectations when source brand was made visible.

This paper provides a critical reflection on five interconnected issues which give debates about trust and mistrust in news a greater degree of urgency. The first is the changing relationship between news publishers and digital platforms, and the ways in which the growth of ‘social news’ may have enhanced elite dominance of news flows. Second, I consider the ‘accountability revolution’ facing traditional newsrooms, where digital technologies and demands for equity and social justice in both news reporting and representation challenge conventional models of journalism and news coverage. Third, I discuss the crisis of the news media business model. Fourth, I consider the specific impacts of COVID-19, which has served to accelerate trends such as the shift in power towards digital platforms, social justice demands on traditional news media, and the crisis of advertiser-financed media. Finally, I discuss the implications of a turn towards subscription-based news, and the need for new analytical models to understand this development.

What has been referred to as the crisis of trust in social institutions has deep connections with communications, whether it be declining trust in news media and journalism, or the many debates and enquiries into the power of digital platforms. But communications as a field is not prominent in trust research, as compared to philosophy, sociology, political science and economics. Through a systematic literature review of the concept of trust in three leading ICA publications – Journal of Communication, Communication Theory and Annals of the International Communications Association (formerly Communication Yearbook) – 157 articles are identified as engaging with trust in a sustained way, at the societal (macro), institutional (meso) and interpersonal (micro) levels. It is argued that there are prominent strands of trust research in communication that warrant greater acknowledgement.

This article provides an overview of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Digital Platforms Inquiry, as a case study in the new thinking about digital platform regulation taking place in many nations. With its focus upon the impact of digital platforms on news and journalism, the ACCC Inquiry parallels other reviews, such as the Cairncross Review on the Future of Journalism in the United Kingdom. While the Inquiry had a somewhat ‘accidental’ history, the core issues that it raised have acquired considerable political resonance in Australia. The concept of harms provides a useful lens through which to understand the ACCC’s focus, as it identified harms caused by the market dominance of Google and Facebook for traditional news media businesses, and for consumers and citizens. Responding to the ACCC Final Report will present challenges in identifying the public good dimension of journalism and who should pay for it, the scope and reach of digital platform regulation and its relationship to media policy and regulation, and the scope for small nations to effectively manage the power of global digital platform giants.

There has been major debate in recent years about the speed and scale of technological innovation, and whether digital technologies create new issues relating to trust and ethics. This presentation will consider key issues around trust and ethics in the digital age, and the appropriate policy environments for creative innovation, particularly relating to digital platforms.

This paper explores foundational conceptions of trust from fields such as philosophy, sociology, economics and political science. It also looks at integrative approaches to trust, as found in social capital theories, as well as contributions from communications scholarship. It is argued that while trust has tended to be understood as an intersubjective concept, questions of truth have dominated discussions of institutions and society as a whole. The digital age requires a more integrative and interdisciplinary framework, that brings together the interpersonal, institutional and societal dimensions of trust.

Conversations about the internet in the 2010s tended to go along one of two distinct tracks. One track pointed to the new affordances of digital and social media. The other focused upon the growing concentration of ownership and control over the internet by a small number of giant digital corporations. This paper identifies the platformization of the Internet as a key development of this period, which raises new issues for media laws and policy.

This paper critically evaluates the globalization paradigm in the social sciences and its limitations in terms of theories of the nation-state, migration and cultural identity. It notes the rise of populist political parties and movements worldwide and considers whether we could be witnessing a reversal of globalization trends for the first time since the 1960s. This "post-global" scenario is one of four considered in the paper.

This paper observes that the contemporary crisis of trust in institutions arises in part from the duality of trust in modern societies, where citizens are expected both the believe in and be sceptical of claims to expert knowledge. In the digital age, this manifests itself around a crisis of trust in digital platforms, which have become central to contemporary communication practices and forms of shared social knowledge and understanding. It presents the case for developing alternative methodologies to survey-based approaches, that can make use of digital data to advance insights around trust in a digital age.

In this paper, I draw out lessons from media history that are relevant to the digital age. The paper focuses on the significance of technology as a driver of social change, drawing attention to the competing accounts of Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams about technology and society, as well as theories of the internet and the network society. I will apply the insights from these debates to three current questions concerning digital platforms: the question of disinformation and ‘fake news’; the problem of trust in journalism; and the social responsibility of digital platforms.

This paper considers issues around digital platforms and their ethical responsibilities in the context of a wider crisis of institutional trust in liberal democracies. It discusses options for external regulation as self-regulation appears to have failed, which include industry codes of practice, the application of 'soft law', regulation through media policy, and international governance frameworks.

This paper considers the role played by statutory bodies such as the Australian Law Reform Commission as case studies in knowledge brokering, or the bringing together of academic knowledge and policy knowledge around areas of public concern. It reflects upon the author's own experience as Lead Commissioner of the National Classification Scheme Review, where areas of knowledge that would not seem immediately relevant to policy-making, such as Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality, can be brought to bear upon debates about media classification and censorship.