Dear Colleagues, Greetings! Jean Burgess will give the Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture in the 2024 International Communication Association (ICA) Conference on Saturday, June 23, at Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre, in Gold Coast, Australia. The title of Burgess’ lecture is "Why the GenAI Moment Needs Communication and Media Research.” Burgess notes that Generative AI (GenAI) moment, marked most emphatically by the release and widespread adoption of large language and multimodal models in 2022-2023, represents a paradigm shift in the history of AI, its meanings, and its roles in society - and it is a paradigm shift to which communication and media research is uniquely well positioned to respond. Burgess indicates that GenAI is fundamentally an information, communication and media phenomenon. In addition to operating and being applied predictively, analytically, and discriminatively, Burgess believes that AI is now emphatically expressive, communicative, and agentive in its operations and uses. It is already deepening existing tendencies toward personalization and customization in our media environment. It is also rapidly being integrated into the infrastructures, platforms, and interfaces of the internet and digital media whose characteristics and cultures communication and media researchers have spent the last several decades working out how to observe and study. In this talk, Burgess argues that communication and media researchers have much to offer - theoretically, methodologically, and pragmatically - as we all try to deal with the challenges and possibilities suggested by GenAI. In doing so, Burgess positions the GenAI moment within a far longer history that includes other key moments of transformation, such as those marked by the emergence and adoption of the World Wide Web, the smartphone, and social media platforms. Like these technologies, Burgess argues that GenAI is a potentially general purpose technology that is likely to have significant implications for a wide range of other societal domains. Working through the history of scholarship focused on these and other examples, Burgess hopes to show how digital communication and media studies scholars could be playing a far more central role than we have in the recent past, as our societies and cultures grapple with the further transformations unlikely to unfold over the coming decade. Jean Burgess is Distinguished Professor of Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Digital Media Research Center, and in the QUT School of Communication. She researches and publishes on issues of cultural participation in new media contexts, with a particular focus on user-created content, online social networks, and co-creative media including digital storytelling. For more information regarding her experiences, awards, and publications, please see https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/people/jean-burgess/ Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture Series, established by Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research (CCCSIR, www.cccsir.com) in 2003, brings leading Internet researchers to annual ICA conferences to promote the development and interest of Internet research. With the interdisciplinary nature of Internet research, the lecture series brings researchers from various disciplines as well as industry leaders to establish dialogues with communication researchers about topics and issues of Internet research. The theme of Steve Jones Lecture Series is " The Internet as Culture.” For more information about this lecture and lecture series please contact Shing-Ling Sarina Chen at sarina.chen@uni.edu.