Algorithms and digital platforms play increasingly important roles in governing how we communicate and how we discover and engage with media and culture. The ‘platform turn’ in dominant media systems has significant implications for life opportunities, employment, participation in the digital economy (whose content is distributed and prioritized?), the star system (who is promoted and how? what counts as success?), politics (which and whose perspective is dominant? how has political deliberation and debate been re-mediatized?), international relations (whose view of the world is dominant?) and social relations (how are inequities in representation reproduced and transformed?).

This conference will draw together researchers in Canada and beyond to explore the intersections between media/communications/cultural policy and platforms. Presentations will address arts policy, broadcasting policy, communication rights, Indigenous communication and cultural policy, competition policy, cultural industries policy, heritage policy, internet policy, media policy, speech regulation, privacy, smart city regulation, and platform regulation.

For more information, go to https://cnmap.mcmaster.ca/events/comcultpolicy2021/index.html.

Speakers

Edward Greenspon, President and CEO of the Public Policy Forum, a non-profit Canadian thinktank, worked as Editor-in-Chief of the Globe & Mail and in numerous prominent media roles, over the past 30 years. In 2018 he co-authored, with Taylor Owen, the report Democracy Divided: Countering Disinformation and Hate in the Digital Public Sphere. Democracy Divided offers policy options that respond to the rise of digital platforms to sustain Canadian media and communications systems. Under Greenspon, the Public Policy Forum has produced a number of important studies; its current Digital Democracy project is studying the Canadian media ecosystem leading up to the 2019 federal election, with the goal of setting out policy options; and its Shattered Mirror project examined the state of the Canadian news media in light of the rise of online platforms.