The week or so after being named as a Shortlisted Finalist for “Digital Culture in the Platform Era” for the ICA Popular Media and Culture Outstanding Book of the Year at the 2026 International Communication Association’s Annual Conference in Cape Town, South Africa has given me a chance to reflect on all of the wonderful panels and see how those presentations fit into my research on the DIONS Nexus (Digital Communication, Internet Culture, Online Communities, the Network Society, & Scalable Selves). It would be easy to be overwhelmed, as there were over 600 in-person sessions and about 50 hybrid sessions across the various regional hubs that were hosting the conference across the world. I think that the one element that kept me grounded was that there were several themes that I could latch onto in the titles and the abstracts of the panels and their presentations.
It comes as no surprise that there were a ton of panels and presentations on AI’s impact on society and communication practices in particular. I came across at least 47 different panels that dealt with some aspect of Artificial Intelligence and its ramifications on global culture. Quite a few dealt with the most foundational questions and concerns about its impact in the classroom and on communication pedagogical practices. AI has been an area of focus for me for more than a decade. I appreciated the work that the scholars from the Association of Internet Researchers and the National Communication Association’s Communication and the Future & Human Communication and Technology internet divisions have done on the subject long before it had reared its head into the realm of higher education. All of the warnings about generative artificial intelligence ties to ethical research, the “cognitive debt” that students acquire from such technologies, the inability for humans to make meaningful connections with others, the creation of false scholarship/fictional research that never was conducted, and a barrage of other concerns raised by those scholars years before the current hot takes on the subject. The only critique is that most of the current research in the field of scholarship presented at ICA 2026 seems to be more reactive than the proactive scholarship of years gone by. It is also as if we (as communication scholars) are waiting for some sort of metaphorical “second shoe to drop” in the wave of news releases and keynote speeches on the future of AI.
The theme that I found most interesting was the number of panels on journalism and the manner in which the profession and practices associated with this field were disseminated. There were a number of panels that localized the researcher to the continent of Africa. One focused on “investigating the psychological and emotional burdens that sub-Saharan African journalists suffer as a result of covering others’ violence, crises, and conflicts,” another “examining methodological, ethical, and safety challenges of media research in war zones,” and one had the general overview of “examining how Africa is narrated, imagined, and negotiated across global media systems. Moving beyond familiar critiques, it highlights research tracing the vocabularies, institutional logics, and material infrastructures that shape contemporary portrayals, visibility, and silences in the mediated circulation of African meanings.”
I was encouraged by how the scholarship in this division was focused on the changing perceptions and narratives around the nature of journalism in an era of flux and globalization. Much of that flux can be attributed to the changing practices and norms in journalism through the tension between the local focus of journalism and the national/international coverage of breaking news. As the theme of ICA 2026 was “Communication and Inequalities in Context,” the division did a great job addressing the “inequalities seen and unseen” in the journalism research itself, the inequalities in the newsrooms, decolonizing journalistic practices across the globe, and the technological opportunities that are present when the journalists and news organizations across the globe are dealing with the social transformations associated with inequalities and global challenges.
Most of the remaining time I spent in the conference (and realistically, the main reason I was at ICA 2026) listening to the presentations from the Popular Media and Culture interest division. My enjoyment of Henry Jenkins’ scholarship on fan culture could be seen in how division members looked at how to survive fandom’s hierarchies, or even how fandoms adapt their favorite works into formats that were more accessible to a general audience. Even my scholarship in memetic communication has a place in this division, as there was a panel looking at the keyboard cultures that allowed memes to find their place in different fandoms and how those fandoms negotiated their feelings through the use of satire and humor. Beyond humor, another panel looked at how fandoms created banter around mourning the loss of past works and the nostalgia associated with such a past.
Readers of this posting will note the thinness of this report as I wanted to give a general overview, rather than a deep dive that would be too much for this format. I want to spend more time going over the various papers to discuss the connection between their scholarship and what I have been working on throughout the years. This processing helps, as I can place the research in its proper context among the wide variety of experiences that come from such an international conference that takes place in such a culturally rich location like Cape Town, South Africa.
I am very appreciative of the Steering Committee of the International Communication Association’s Popular Media and Culture for selecting “Digital Culture in the Platform Era” as a Shortlisted Finalist for their Outstanding Book of the Year Award, the editorial staff of Palgrave Macmillan (especially Robin James and Felicity Plester) for their support in getting this award, and Ohio Northern University (especially the Getty College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office and the Art & Communication Department) for giving me the resources and opportunity to attend this conference.
