After two years of COVID-19 restrictions and two online conferences, the International Communication Association was finally able to host their annual ICA Conference in person. This was the 72nd ICA conference, and it was held from May 26 to May 30 in Paris. Once again, the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society had a strong presence, with a total of nine contributions and one award. Christoph Lutz, Alexander Buhmann, Shubin Yu, and Suzanne van Gils attended the conference and presented their research across different divisions and sessions.
On Friday May 27, Alexander presented the paper “Public Relations and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence”. For this paper he won a top faculty paper award in the Public Relations division.
Christoph was one of the co-organizers of the preconference “Comparative Privacy and the Literacies of a Networked Age: A Critical Approach” in Mulhouse on May 25, together with Kelly Quinn (University of Illinois at Chicago), Dmitry Epstein (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Carsten Wilhelm (Université de Haute-Alsace), Philipp Masur (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Sabine Bosler (Université de Haute-Alsace), and Lemi Baruh (Koç University). He was also one of the co-organizers of the panel “Privacy at the Crossroads? Digital Cynicism, Resignation and Apathy: And What to Do About it” in the Communication and Technology division. Within this panel, he was a co-presenter of the paper “Privacy Apathy, Fatigue, Cynicism, Digital Resignation and Adjacent Concepts: an Overview of Concepts and Findings”.
On Saturday 28 May, Suzanne presented the paper “Calling Siri a Grumpy F*ucker: The Study of Incivility Towards AI Versus. Human Service Agents”, together with Kateryna Maltseva Reiby. This was within the Session “HYBRID: Interacting With Digital Assistants: ‘ForniCATing Alexa’” within the Communication and Technology division.
On this day Christoph also presented the paper “Blasting and Posturing: The Role of Impression Management in Facebook Users’ Online Political Participation”. The following Sunday, May 29, he presented the paper “Digital Inequalities and Organizational Inequalities: Closing Missing Links” and chaired the session “Is This 1984‽: Surveillance and ObfusCATion”, both in the Communication and Technology Division.
Last but not least, Shubin presented the paper “Emoji for Social-Mediated Crisis Communication: Cautions and Solutions” on Monday 30 May, within the session “Issues in Digital PR: Influencers, Emojis and Cybersecurity”, within the Public Relations division.
All the presentations were well received and the conference provided the Nordic Centre with many interesting conversations and networking opportunities.