Every day, citizens, publics, media and organisations co-create meaning in contexts embedded, implicated, and problematised by digital technologies, and the political, economic, and cultural forces that sustain them. The UTS Technology, Media & Strategy (TMS) Group seeks to make sense of these forces through engaged scholarship and theorising.
The Technology, Media & Strategy Group (TMS) engages with the dynamic platforms, publics, and challenges of contemporary media contexts. Research fields represent diverse disciplinary perspectives but all point to the growing importance of trust and legitimacy as prime markers of high-quality investigation, authentic listening, and research that creates social impact. Our scope transcends local, national, and global contexts.
The TMS research team is comprised of over 20 scholars and HDR students who meet at the intersection of fast-changing technologies that impact civil society. Our research foci transverse the stability and integrity of democratic institutions to the inclusion of multiple voices and viewpoints in stakeholder consultation, to the ethical underpinnings of software design and data analysis. The Technology, Media & Strategy Group unpacks how organisations, thought-leaders and change-agents navigate emergent media conditions to drive positive (and sometimes negative) social outcomes and impact.
Together, our research focuses on how public communication, social media and media practices intersect, develop, and achieve social change with technology being seen as the central driver behind these developments. The group offers critical analysis, mixed methods research and industry consultancies that provide national and global underpinnings for both the Global North and the Global South. In turn, we deal with how power manifests through (and sometimes outside) the cultural infrastructure of communication networks.
The TMS group reflects on these topics during an unprecedented moment in history, as professional silos bend to the reality of citizen journalism, the rise of influencers, and the waning status of traditional sites of authority and expertise.