At the annual meeting, AoIR transitions its Executive Committee. Over the next few weeks, we will post interviews from our incoming Executive Committee, as we welcome them into the leadership of the Association.
Axel Bruns
2017-2019 AoIR Executive Committee – President
Who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. I’ve been doing Internet research since the late 1990s or so, focusing at first on online communities and then increasingly on citizen journalism and other UGC-related projects. As part of this I’ve also been focussing strongly on the development of new research methods, especially for dealing with the large datasets now available from social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
What is your AoIR Executive Committee position?
President.
What motivated you to serve on the Executive Committee for AoIR?
AoIR is my intellectual home, and a wonderful, supportive community of scholars. I think it’s important for all of us who have benefitted so much from our involvement with AoIR to give back to the community by helping to guide the Association in one form or another – and I’d particularly like to see the Exec come to reflect more clearly the international diversity of the Association. So when we come around to the next Exec election, I hope many more members of the AoIR community will be prepared to stand for office.
How long have you been involved with AoIR? How many conferences have you attended?
I’ve attended every AoIR conference since Toronto in 2003, and I served as conference chair for AoIR 2006 in Brisbane. I’ve also served in an open seat on a previous Exec.
What is/are your current research interests?
I’m just about to publish Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, a sequel to my 2005 book on citizen journalism that examines the developments in the intersections between news and social media that have occurred over the past ten years or so. As an extension of this work, I’m also planning more research into the informational structures of the contemporary public sphere(s), and especially into the role that so-called ‘fake news’ actually plays here.
What is your favorite meme or YouTube video? Please provide a link to it if you can.
So many memes, so little time! Right now, though, I’m in love with the video for Marillion’s “Living in FEAR” single – a glorious, uplifting rejection of the politics of fear and division that we’re struggling with in so many places around the world at the moment.
