New Media & Society special issue: Automated responses to the COVID-19 pandemic
Author Kathy Nickels
Date 1 March 2024
The New Media & Society journal has released its special issue: Automated Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic edited by Prof Mark Andrejevic, and Dr Christopher O’Neill from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) at Monash University.
This special issue examines the pandemic response as a mediated phenomenon – one that paired digital information technologies with automated logistical systems to address inter-related crises of circulation.
In the logistical sphere, automated media were used to manage flows of people, commodities and even (in the case of ‘smart’ ventilation systems) air itself. In the media realm, automated systems played a role in circulating timely notifications and alerts and in detecting and responding to false information.
This theme issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers focused on the analysis of automated control and response systems, including the networked devices and infrastructures that supported them, and the digital forms of data collection and processing they enabled.
“The special issue brings together remarkable contributions from researchers across the ADM+S, said Dr Christopher O’Neill.
“The breadth and rigour of this research make clear both the challenge of understanding how automation has changed in the wake of the pandemic, as well as the contribution that the ADM+S has made to this project.”
New Media & Society engages in critical discussions of the key issues arising from the scale and speed of new media development, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and on both theoretical and empirical research.
News Media & Society is a Q1 journal, ranked in the top 25 percent of journals for impact in the international research community.
Some themes that emerge from the special issue contributions, include:
- the relationship between automation and the temporality of viral contagion,
- logics of pre-emptive intervention and
- forms of atmospheric and environmental control
Special issue contributions from ADM+S members:
Automated responses to the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic: An overview
Mark Andrejevic and Christopher O’Neill
Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism
Anna Jackman, Michael Richardson and Madelene Veber
Granular biopolitics: Facial recognition, pandemics and the securitization of circulation
Mark Andrejevic, Christopher O’Neill, Gavin Smith, Neil Selwyn and Xin Gu
Supermarket ‘dark jobs’ and rapid grocery delivery: Transformations in labour, technology and logistics
Lauren Kelly
QR codes and automated decision-making in the COVID-19 pandemic
Gerard Goggin and Rowan Wilken
Acting like a bot as a defiance of platform power: Examining YouTubers’ patterns of ‘inauthentic’ behaviour on Twitter during COVID-19
Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Louisa Bartolo and Betsy Alpert
Beyond the ‘critical incident’: COVID-19, data journalism and the slow road to editorial automation in Australian newsrooms
Silvia X Montaña-Niño and Jean Burgess
Disaster, facial recognition technology, and the problem of the corpse
Christopher O’Neill
Future notification: Living and breathing in post-pandemic climate change
Sarah Pink, Yolande Strengers and Hannah Korsmeyer
Beyond extraction: Data strategies from the Global South
Heather A Horst, Adam Sargent and Luke Gaspard