Professor Terry Flew delivers keynote for Charles Sturt University’s 50 Years and Beyond series
Professor Terry Flew was honoured to be an invited keynote speaker for Charles Sturt University’s 50 Years and Beyond: School of Information and Communication Studies “Thoughts on the Beyond” Public Lecture Series. In his address, Professor Flew explored the evolving frontiers of media, communication, and digital society, reflecting on how the past five decades of scholarship can inform the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. His keynote brought together historical insight, contemporary analysis, and forward‑looking perspectives, offering a thought‑provoking contribution to this milestone celebration of the School’s legacy and future vision. A full transcript of the presentation is below.
Introductory Remarks
I would firstly like to thank the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University for inviting me to be a part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Information and Communication Studies programs at CSU. I would like to thank Professor Tina Du as Head of School for extending this generous invitation to speak today. It is great to be a part of a series of events that are both celebratory of the University’s achievements in the information and communication fields, and to provide signposts to a future located at the intersection of information, communication, people, technology, society and psychology.
I would also like to acknowledge that the University is on Wiradjuri Country, on the Land of the Three Rivers. I pay my respects to Elders of the Wiradjuri Nation, past, present, and emerging. I also acknowledge the University’s commitment to Yindyamarra values. Yindyamarra brings Western knowledge and Indigenous wisdom together in a voyage of discovery. The University acknowledges that, with Yindyamarra, we embrace caring and stewardship for Country and being good ancestors to future generations.
I am also very much aware of the rich history of the Information and Communication Studies programs here at CSU. With such notable alumni as Andrew Denton, Amanda Keller, Latika Bourke, Chris Bath, Samantha Armytage, Melissa Doyle, Jessica Rowe and Hamish McDonald, and with the ongoing work of Distinguished Professor Stan Grant Jr. so prominent in Australian public discourse, there is much to celebrate.
I also note the achievements of 2MCE, one of Australia’s oldest community radio stations, which is about to celebrate its own 50th anniversary. Born out of the heady six months of Australia’s only Department of the Media, headed by Moss Cass in the last days of the Whitlam Labor Government, it is a salutary reminder of what can be achieved when reforming governments meet with grassroots activism from civil society.
The Crisis of Trust in Institutions
I currently have the great fortune to have been awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. Established in 2009, the ARC Laureate Fellowships aim to support academics with a proven track record of leadership and innovation to build strong research teams, mentor the next generation of researchers, and to undertake ambitious research programs that address significant challenges and knowledge gaps. There are 17 Laureate Fellowships awarded annually, across the sciences, humanities and social sciences.
My ARC Laureate is on the theme of mediated trust. It responds to the challenge that has been identified by many as a crisis of trust in the institutions of liberal democracy. At the same time, it aims to broaden the scope of trust research from its traditional grounding in sociology and political science by considering the implications of mediated communication, and particularly communication mediated through digital technologies, on cotemporary understandings of trust.
The program is focused upon the intersection of ideas, interests and institutions. It is presumed that ideas about the future, and particularly utopian and dystopian views on the potential of new digital technologies, play an important role in shaping the institutional responses to such new media. At the same time, it also recognises that material interests shape these dominant discourses. Ideas matter in such debates, but so too do relations of power and the political economy of digital capitalism. As we are very much aware, when powerful people from the world’s largest tech companies come to shape the dominant ideas about digital technologies, this becomes a very potent mix.
The work program associated with the Laureate is focused upon trust in four domains: (1) trust in news media; (2) trust in digital platforms; (3) trust in institutions; and (4) trust in artificial intelligence. We will undertake empirical work on trust across different countries in Europe, Asia and North America, as well as in Australia, and those research findings will be made public in 2026.
What we can say at this stage is that there is what may be referred to as a ‘crisis of grievance’, where the distrust is less in public institutions per se, than it is in the perceived gap between the promises of such institutions and the outcomes that people perceive in their daily lives. This generates a discontent with institutions of government and the media in particular, that can turn into distrust at certain pivotal moments.
According to sources such as the OECD and the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in government in Australia sits around the average level for countries surveyed, above such countries as the U.S., France, Germany and the U.K., but below countries such as Sweden, Singapore, Canada and The Netherlands (Edelman Trust Institute, 2025; OECD, 2024). Trust in the media for Australians is among the lowest in the world, with the 2025 Edelman Report finding that only 47% of Australians trusted the media, as compared to an average of 52% among the 28 countries surveyed(Edelman Trust Institute, 2025).
We also see distrust with universities in Australia, although this is less than distrust in government and media. There is still a respect for expertise, but it is tempered by concerns that the management of Australia’s universities are insufficiently focused upon questions of the public good. Recent events at several Australian universities have been corrosive of trust over recent years, although there is not the degree of polarisation that one sees in the U.S. about attitudes to elite universities.
Trust and Communication
My own disciplinary background is in communication. But in saying that, I note that the question of whether communication is a discipline is itself contested. In his 2019 book, Communications: A Post-Discipline, Silvio Waisbord has described communications scholarship as being based around ‘a patchwork … [of] different ontological understandings’, and that ‘what brings communication scholars together, if anything, is not immediately obvious’.(Waisbord, 2019, pp. 45, 48).
For Waisbord, the six conceptualisations of communication are as: (1) connection; (2) dialogue; (3) expression; (4) information; (5) persuasion; and (6) symbolic interaction. Of these, communication as connection is a concept that can only exist when technologies of communication are explicitly foregrounded, and communication as information necessitates machines that can process and distribute information, thus leading back to questions of technology. Communication as persuasion necessarily requires consideration of the institutions that seek to persuade the public – the media and creative industries, broadly defined – while communication as symbolic interaction is built upon the underlying premise that there is no social life outside of communication.
Since communication is about mediation of the interactions between social structures and everyday life, this draws attention to the central role played by technologies and institutions in such mediating processes. What we can see from this analysis of what constitutes the disciplinary core of communication is that the most influential definitions of the field explicitly incorporate technology, institutions or both into their definitions. There is thus no communication outside of its interaction with technologies and institutions.
Thinking about communication, institutions and technology as being interconnected helps us to understand more clearly the nature of mediated trust. Communication at its simplest involves the interaction between a sender and a receiver of a message that is mediated through some form of technology. Yet our interactions that go beyond the face-to-face (the micro level of communication) are situated in and through institutions and organisations (the meso level of communication) or involves messages sent simultaneously to multiple receivers (the macro level of communication).
There is a similar dynamic to trust. Once we get beyond the micro level of what Niklas Luhmann termed ‘familiar worlds’, trust takes on an increasingly abstract character. As Luhmann put in Trust and Power:
As a social order becomes more complex and variable, it tends overall to lose its matter-of-fact character, its taken-for-granted familiarity, because daily experience can envisage or recall it only in a fragmentary way. Yet the very complexity of the social order creates a greater need for co-ordination and hence a need to determine the future – i.e. a need for trust, a need which is now decreasingly supported by familiarity. In these circumstances, familiarity and trust must seek a new mutually stabilizing relationship which is no longer grounded in a world which is immediately experienced, assured by tradition and close at hand (Luhmann, 2017, p. 23).
When we talk about social trust, rather than the trustworthiness or otherwise of individuals, we are necessarily also engaged with the meso level of institutions, and the macro level of social systems. These are not analytically separate domains. Anthony Giddens observed in The Consequences of Modernity that trust in abstract systems, or the institutions of modern societies, can only occur in and through the ‘face-work’ of those who we deal with at an everyday level as representatives of these otherwise complex and abstract entities (Giddens, 1990).
Digital technologies transform and disrupt these relationships in important yet paradoxical ways. Social media appears to reduce the distance between the senders and receivers of messages, which appears to reduce transparency and increase the trustworthiness of senders, yet the processes through which messages are received become even more opaque and filtered through the algorithmic practices of profit-oriented digital institutions. Commercial platforms have created what Nick Couldry has termed a ‘space of the world’ that layers an information space upon the social world, so that ‘the technical properties of information space now directly affect the quality of social space i.e. whether it feels good to live together or not’ (Couldry, 2025)
In such environments, trust struggles. We can see two clear manifestations of this. First, there is what Gil Eyal has termed the crisis of expertise (Eyal, 2019). As the Internet has made virtually all information publicly available to most of the world’s population, the claims of knowledge institutions to have a unique gatekeeper function with regards to truth claims has been eroded.
This can have a positive impact. Revelations such as the Wikileaks files, the Snowden files and the Cambridge Analytica scandal could only play out in the manner that they did in a digitally networked environment in which whistleblowers can engage outside of the protocols of traditional media institutions to make information public available that reveals the inner workings of corporate, governmental and military power.
But it is also a world in which rumour, conspiracy, disinformation and ‘fake news’ can flourish, as the gatekeeper functions that may once have constrained such information flows have been eroded. As conventional news organisations struggle to be sustainable facing the challenge of digital platforms to audiences and advertising revenues, and as newsrooms are downsized and the professional status of journalism downgraded, this can become a self-fulfilling doom loop.
The second manifestation is anti-elite populism. As the inner workings of institutions are increasingly revealed in the digital world, and as digital users increasingly become used to an algorithmically driven social world of continuous engagement through likes, dislikes, comments, shares, threads, retweets etc. the idea that the social world should conform to the expectations of the digital world becomes stronger.
In 2022, after acquiring the Twitter platform and rebranding it as X, Elon Musk repeatedly used the phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” to describe various design decisions made about the platform after online polls. The Latin phrase translates to “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”. There is of course a democratic potential to populism, in that appeal to the people as the ultimate source of democratic authority presents a challenge to those elites who claim to be acting on the people’s behalf.
But it also has a demagogic potential in that it implies that constitutional checks and balances on power are passe in a world where the public can directly engage via social media. It is unsurprising that, after a poll found that a clear majority of Twitter users voted for Musk to step down as Twitter CEO, Musk suggested that he would change how polling on Twitter works so that only those who pay for Twitter’s updated subscription service can vote. Soon after, the polling on X ceased.
Debating the Digital Public Sphere
Communications as a field has evolved a historical benchmark for understanding and evaluating the relationship between communications media and social trust. It is the concept of the public sphere, first proposed by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the early 1960s. Arising out of the constitutional revolutions of late 18th and 19th century Europe, Habermas identified what he termed the ‘politicization of associational life’ as lying at the heart of new uses of communications media to both bring people together, and to collectively organise around shared ideals, norms and values (Habermas, 1992). Such media would be central to the rise of mass political movements in the 19th and 20th centuries and instigated new modes of political communications.
Yet Habermas’s idea of the public sphere has left two competing legacies. One points in the direction of partisan media – and with the term ‘media’, I include art and literature for these purposes – that represents organized collectivities, and which is overtly normative and political in its modus operandi. Habermas is very ambivalent about this tradition, concerned that it can enable a ‘tyranny of the majority’ and the subordination of the search for truth to the desire for power. In this respect, Habermas is a critical liberal, concerned to defend constitutional order and the liberal ‘system of rights’ against political capture.
The second legacy is that of the public sphere is a relatively neutral space, providing the institutions and frameworks through which competing interests, ideas and opinions can contend. It constitutes part of the civic spaces through which a citizenry can move towards rational decision-making through communicative action in a discourse-oriented and deliberative democracy. This has been the dominant interpretation in the English-speaking world, squaring as it does with the idea of public broadcasting as potentially representing all interests in a nation, as well as the ideal of journalistic objectivity, with its core professional practice being the ability to separate facts and opinions.
After 30 years of an evolving digital public sphere, we can say with confidence that the Internet and social media have been very good for the public sphere in the first sense of competing ideas and interests receiving amplification through communication, and a disaster in the second sense. Political polarisation, misinformation, and the proliferation of conspiracies and pseudo-expertise have thrived online. This has been combined with the growing crisis of sustainability for traditional news media organisations, as advertising revenue disappears to the digital platforms, and a devaluing of journalists as purveyors of “fake news”.
Philip Schlesinger has referred to this as a post-public sphere, where forms of news and journalism as we have traditionally understood them continue to operate, albeit in a weakened state, alongside global digital platforms that have become de facto gatekeepers of online knowledge, distributed through poorly understood algorithms for commercial gain (Schlesinger, 2020). The authority of the traditional media as knowledge gatekeepers have been effectively challenged, but what exists around it is de-institutionalised and largely unregulated.
While there is a belated push to regulate digital platforms in Australia, Canada, the European Union and elsewhere – although not, importantly, the Untied States after the election of President Trump – there is a struggle to identify what should be the first principles underpinning such regulation. The Australian Federal Government attempted on two occasions to pass legislation setting rules to prohibit online misinformation, but on both occasions the legislation was abandoned as it went too far for some inhibiting freedom of speech, and not far enough for others in enabling what they considered to be objectionable speech.
Where facts, “alternative facts”, rumours and conspiracies all circulate in the informational bouillabaisse, it has become easiest to substitute power and political calculation for normative principles and the notion of a shared public interest. One outcome, as can be seen in the U.S., is that the defunding of public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS can proceed apace, as the ruling political party can conclude that such outlets are “not our people”.
AI and Communication
Events are moving rapidly in the world of what we have come to term artificial intelligence. The AI sector worldwide is expected to grow from being worth $250 billion in 2025 to over $1 trillion by 2032. It has also come to be at the centre of many of the major debates of our time, including geopolitical battles about which AI systems will be dominant, whether giant tech corporations have become too powerful for nation-states to govern, whether these AI systems will displace creative cultural practice and knowledge work, and whether we as consumers and citizens can differentiate what is real and what is machine generated.
As a concept, AI has a long history. Alan Turing’s “Imitation Game” was around whether a person can accurately determine whether messages were sent by humans or machines in the absence of visual cues. The first major conference on Artificial Intelligence was held at Dartmouth College in 1956. There have been successive waves of AI enthusiasm in the 1960s and early 1970s, the 1980s and the period from 2010 to the present. It is worth noting that there have also been ‘AI Winters’, such as these of the late 1970s and the 1990s, where AI was seen as ‘hype’ that had not adequately delivered on its promises.
What we call AI can include quite a lot of different things. It includes machine learning, but also computer vision, robotics, natural language processing, autonomous and sensor technologies, as well as what we have come to term Generative AI and, most recently, synthetic AI. The surge in academic interest in AI from 2023 coincided with advances in Generative AI, particularly the ways in which it enabled not only rapid information processing but replication of completed works that had been assumed to come from a recognisable author or creator. As one of these was very obviously the student essay, it set off a plagiarism panic in the higher education sector whose implications we are still struggling to deal with.
What I want to conclude with are considerations of what AI means for communication. This is both in terms of how we communicate, and for the communications discipline. I noted at the beginning of this talk that one way of conceiving of communication has been as the transmission of information. What is variously known as the Shannon and Weaver model, the sender-message-receiver model, and encoding/decoding, is premised upon the idea that humans communicate with humans, with the assistance of technologies of communication (media). While there can be many complexities to questions of production, reception and interpretation, the underlying premise is that this is human-machine communication: people communicate with people with and through machines.
We have acknowledged for some time that machines can communicate with machines. The maps that navigate your driving journey would not be operable unless they did. But what AI has done is inserted machines into all dimensions of the communication process. Messages can be sent by machines, and they can be received by machines. AI not only sorts and processes information, but creates information, and it does so not only in its own capacity, but in conversation with its users. And as those conversations evolve – as we train a chatbot to better understand what it is that we want – so too does the AI-based system become a communicative partner.
We often construct this around the authentic and the fake. But authenticity can be, and frequently is, constructed. When the print journalist Daniel Schorr went to CBS Television in the 1950s, he said to his producer “You know, I understand print fine, but television has got me a bit puzzled, what’s the secret?” And the producer said to him, “Well, the key to success on television is sincerity, and if you can fake that you’ve got it made.” (quoted in McNair et al., 2017). Today’s podcasters, YouTubers and influencers frequently seek to bring an authenticity to their communication which they claim to be missing from heavily produced and highly scripted mainstream media.
Hollywood has always been in the fakery game. When King Kong climbed the Empire State Building in 1933, swatting planes with Fay Wray in his hairy paws, what audiences were revelling was not the realism of the images of a large gorilla climbing a tall building. The history of cinema is not a search for verisimilitude, where the cinematic image increasingly converges upon the real. When Dwayne Johnson single-handedly saves San Francisco in San Andreas, the VFX is much more convincing than King Kong, but the scenario is no less fake. With the 50th anniversary of Jaws, what we are struck by is that the suspense did not come from the sighting of the shark itself, which looked lame even by 1975 VFX standards, but by the art of Steven Spielberg in creating a scenario where the error is immanent, with a lasting cultural legacy.
Communication is going to be increasingly devolved to machines, and the decisions will not necessarily be made by humans. Many have commented on the seemingly excessive politeness with which ChatGPT has responded to user requests. My sense is that this a deliberate design choice as it enables the user to continue to appear to be the sender of messages, even when in practice the information is largely held within the software. It may be interesting to contrast the tone of different bots in this regard: will an airline chatbot be more polite than one for social services, and will the airline chatbot be more polite to customers on the Loyalty program?
For communications as an academic discipline, there is a need to be thinking about practices as involving people, institutions and machines as agents. It is unclear whether we can continue to speak of “media” as the devices through which we communicate, and that our understanding of technology needs to be an expansive one. AI developments come at a time of immense concentration of political and economic power, which challenges our capacities to set public interest criteria as signposts for the development of such systems. But we can be sure that there is going to be a lot of tinkering with these technologies, and this will provide us with new insights with pedagogy, research and creative practice.
References Cited
Couldry, N. (2025). The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and what If It Can’t? Polity.
Edelman Trust Institute. (2025). 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report: Trust and the Crisis of Grievance. Edelman.
Eyal, G. (2019). The Crisis of Expertise. Polity.
Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1992). Further Reflections on the Public Sphere. In Habermas and the Public Sphere (pp. 421–460). MIT Press.
Luhmann, N. (2017). Trust and Power (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
McNair, B., Flew, T., Harrington, S., & Swift, A. (2017). Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia: Public and Producer Perceptions of the Political Public Sphere. Routledge.
OECD. (2024). OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions – 2024 Results: BUILDING TRUST IN A COMPLEX POLICY ENVIRONMENT. OECD Publishing.
Schlesinger, P. (2020). After the post-public sphere. Media, Culture & Society, 42(7–8), 1545–1563.
Waisbord, S. (2019). An Invitation to Communications: The State of a Post-Discipline. Polity.
Dr Agata Stepnik discusses digital ethnography