The Team
Peter Lewis, Director
Peter is one of Australia’s leading public campaigners with more than two decades' experience in media, politics and communications. As a principal of Essential Media, he has been behind some of Australia’s most successful and innovative campaigns including Every Australian Counts for the NDIS and Never Alone of the Luke Batty Foundation.
He oversees the fortnightly Essential Report and is a regular columnist for the Guardian Australia.
In June 2019, he published “Webtopia – The WorldWide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work” (UNSW Press).
Email Peter: [email protected]
Jordan Guiao, Research Fellow
Jordan is a digital strategist with 14 years' experience in digital transformation, digital policy and social media strategy for the media, broadcasting, financial industries and more. He is the former Head of Social Media for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service. In 2018/19 he lived at Silicon Valley and worked with the most prominent technology companies, gaining unique insights into the technology capital of the world.
Email Jordan: [email protected]
Associates
Mark Andrejevic
Mark Andrejevic is Professor Media Studies in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. He has been researching and writing about digital media for two decades. He is the author of four books as well as numerous academic journal articles and book chapters that explore the ways in which the online economy impacts the ways we interact with each other and understand the world around us. His latest book, Automated Media, raises significant concerns about the impact that commercial platform curation has on democracy, public debate and political polarisation. He is also Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society.
Dan Stinton
Dan Stinton started as Managing Director of Guardian Australia in July 2018, responsible for all commercial operations. He has over 20 years’ experience working in media and technology, starting out as a journalist for The West Australian and Scoop Magazine (1998-2003) before moving to the commercial side of media as General Manager of RTRFM (2004-2007), Director of Business Development for Yahoo7 (2007-2014) and Head of Digital for Seven West Media (2015-2018). In 2014 he co-founded eBev (a technology platform for the wholesale wine trade) and is an active startup investor and advisor. Dan holds an MBA from the University of Western Australia as well as a BA (English) from Curtin University.
Belinda Barnet
Dr. Belinda Barnet is Senior Lecturer in Media at Swinburne University with research interests in digital cultures, social media, the app economy, data analytics, AI, data privacy, cyberstalking, and the history of digital media. She welcomes applications from prospective students working on topics in social media and digital media. Her current projects include examining the role of automation in speech rehabilitation in order to improve the use of Cochlear Implants in deaf children, and investigating Shadow Data. Alongside her research work, Dr Barnet has worked as Service Delivery Manager (Wireless Content Services) for Ericsson Australia. She is the author of "Memory Machines: the Evolution of Hypertext" (Anthem Press UK, 2013). She convenes the Social Media Major at Swinburne.
Axel Bruns
Axel Bruns is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing 'big social data'. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19.
Timothy Graham
Dr. Timothy Graham is Senior Lecturer in the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He is a Chief Investigator in the QUT Centre for Data Science (Co-Lead of the Social Systems Domain), and is Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His research combines computational methods with social theory to study online networks and platforms, with a particular interest in online bots and trolls, disinformation, and online ratings and rankings devices. He develops open source software tools for social media data analysis, and has published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, Information Polity, and Big Data & Society.
Toni Hassan
Toni Hassan is the author of Families in the Digital Age: Every parent's guide and a Walkley Award-winning journalist. She has held senior positions in communications and advocacy in the not-for-profit sector, most recently in public health. Toni is an adjunct scholar at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University (an ecumenical body which progresses wisdom for the common good) where she explores issues related to participatory democracy and social policy.
Daniel Stone
Daniel is a highly experienced policy and advocacy professional with a history of influencing the outcome of complex policy challenges. Over the course of 10 years, he has advised a broad range of clients from federal and state cabinet ministers through to the executive and senior leadership teams of more than 80 civil society organisations and businesses. Shaping their thinking and consequent decisions around technology issues. He specialises in data-led communications - with a focus on developing tools that engage and drive people to take action.