New Media and Youth Political Engagement

This article critically examines the role new media can play in the political engagement of young people in Australia. Moving away from “deficit” descriptions, which assert low levels of political engagement among young people, it argues two major points. First, that there is a well-established model of contemporary political mobilisation that employs both new media and large data analysis that can and have been effectively applied to young people in electoral and non-electoral contexts. Second, that new media, and particularly social media, are not democratic by nature. Their general use and adoption by young and older people do not necessarily cultivate democratic values. This is primarily due to the type of participation afforded in the emerging “surveillance economy”. The article argues that a focus on scale as drivers of influence, the underlying foundation of their affordances based on algorithms, and the centralised editorial control of these platforms make them highly participative, but unequal sites for political socialisation and practice. Thus, recent examples of youth mobilisation, such as seen in recent climate justice movements, should be seen through the lens of cycles of contestation, rather than as technologically determined

Safe and Responsible AI in Australia: Submission Paper

We thank the Department of Industry, Science and Resources for the opportunity to respond to the Safe and Responsible AI in Australia Discussion Paper. In light of the enormous social, economic, political, cultural and ethical challenges presented by rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly generative artificial intelligence, the opportunity to participate in a policy deliberation process that aims to address questions of the social good at an early stage, and to design suitable regulations to meet such challenges, is very much welcomed. Our submission is a collaborative enterprise between academic researchers in the Disciplines of Media and Communications and Government and International Relations in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney. It is a collectively authored document that has arisen out of collaborative discussions among a diverse group of researchers with a shared interest in the digital, and a shared focus upon the common good