[Air-L] Steve Jones Lecture features Jean Burgess in 2024 ICA

[Sarina Chen]

Dear Colleagues,


Greetings!



Jean Burgess will give the Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture in the
2024 International Communication Association (ICA) Conference on Saturday,
June 23, at Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre, in Gold Coast,
Australia.



The title of Burgess’ lecture is "Why the GenAI Moment Needs Communication
and Media Research.”  Burgess notes that Generative AI (GenAI) moment,
marked most emphatically by the release and widespread adoption of large
language and multimodal models in 2022-2023, represents a paradigm shift in
the history of AI, its meanings, and its roles in society - and it is a
paradigm shift to which communication and media research is uniquely well
positioned to respond. Burgess indicates that GenAI is fundamentally an
information, communication and media phenomenon. In addition to operating
and being applied predictively, analytically, and discriminatively, Burgess
believes that AI is now emphatically expressive, communicative, and
agentive in its operations and uses. It is already deepening existing
tendencies toward personalization and customization in our media
environment. It is also rapidly being integrated into the infrastructures,
platforms, and interfaces of the internet and digital media whose
characteristics and cultures communication and media researchers have spent
the last several decades working out how to observe and study. In this
talk, Burgess argues that communication and media researchers have much to
offer - theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically - as we all try
to deal with the challenges and possibilities suggested by GenAI. In doing
so, Burgess positions the GenAI moment within a far longer history that
includes other key moments of transformation, such as those marked by the
emergence and adoption of the World Wide Web, the smartphone, and social
media platforms. Like these technologies, Burgess argues that GenAI is a
potentially general purpose technology that is likely to have significant
implications for a wide range of other societal domains. Working through
the history of scholarship focused on these and other examples, Burgess
hopes to show how digital communication and media studies scholars could be
playing a far more central role than we have in the recent past, as our
societies and cultures grapple with the further transformations unlikely to
unfold over the coming decade.

Jean Burgess is Distinguished Professor of Digital Media at the Queensland
University of Technology (QUT) Digital Media Research Center, and in the
QUT School of Communication. She researches and publishes on issues of
cultural participation in new media contexts, with a particular focus on
user-created content, online social networks, and co-creative media
including digital storytelling.  For more information regarding her
experiences, awards, and publications, please see
https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/people/jean-burgess/



Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture Series, established by Carl Couch
Center for Social and Internet Research (CCCSIR, www.cccsir.com) in 2003,
brings leading Internet researchers to annual ICA conferences to promote
the development and interest of Internet research.  With the
interdisciplinary nature of Internet research, the lecture series brings
researchers from various disciplines as well as industry leaders to
establish dialogues with communication researchers about topics and issues
of Internet research.  The theme of Steve Jones Lecture Series is "
The Internet as Culture.”



For more information about this lecture and lecture series please contact
Shing-Ling Sarina Chen at sarina.chen at uni.edu.