💬 Social Implications of Information Systems

I am active in Information Systems research looking at (social) impacts of technological systems, AI, and digitalisation in general. My scope of analysis ranges from the organisational level to the societal level.

My collaborations in IS blend theoretical foundations with new insights from philosophy, the social sciences, and higher education studies, amongst others. (Marx & Cheong, 2023).

Collaborators include (from UniMelb unless otherwise stated): Shanton Chang, Rashika Bahl* (PhD candidate), Dana McKay (RMIT), George Buchanan (RMIT), Davor Petreski* (PhD candidate), Carlo Perrotta, Peter Woelert, Julian Marx, Winn Chow, Sherah Kurnia, Susie Sheldrick, Ofir Turel, Hamed Qahri-Saremi (Colorado State University), Raffaele Ciriello (Sydney), Shreya Jha* (PhD candidate), Graham Sewell, and others…

My highlights in this space include:

New York Times interview on Facebook’s 2021 Australia news block.
The Age interview on QR code adoption in Victoria during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ticker News interview on the ‘hypocrisy of social media giants’.

Other past research projects include (a) pioneering several research techniques, including Twitter-based survey and sampling, as well as natural language processing (combined with my forté of metadata analysis) to identify marketing behviours of craft beer pioneers versus their mainstream counterparts (Aleti et al., 2016) and (b) analysing the discourse on Twitter for energy policy and contemporary energy-related issues in Australia (Morgan et al., 2018).

Collaborators include: Torgeir Aleti (RMIT); Sue Bedingfield (Monash); Paul Harrigan (UWA); Kerri Morgan (Deakin); Will Turner

References

2023

Decentralised social media: Scoping review and future research directions

Julian Marx, and Marc Cheong

In ACIS 2023 Proceedings, 2023

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Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter/X, or TikTok are controlled by and rely on a single service provider. However, repeated controversies around data breaches, algorithmic bias, or misinformation have eroded trust in these centralised platforms. Concurrently, advancements in blockchain technology have opened avenues for decentralised social media that distribute control and data across a network of participants, thereby challenging their centralised counterparts. This study reviews existing literature on the topic and finds that what we know largely focuses on the technological implementation of decentralised social media. Therefore, we surveyed the literature for socio-technical dimensions of the phenomenon and found that control, privacy, operation, security, rewards, adoption, and research are central themes in this regard. We use those themes to derive recommendations for future research in Information Systems (IS) and beyond that aims to unpack individual, organisational, and societal implications of decentralised social media.

2018

“Power to the People!”: Social Media Discourse on Regional Energy Issues in Australia

Kerri Morgan, Marc Cheong, and Susan Bedingfield

2018

2016

An investigation of how the Australian brewing industry influence consumers on Twitter

Torgeir Aleti, Paul Harrigan, Marc Cheong, and Will Turner

2016

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