Dear Colleagues, Greetings! Vincent Obia (University of Sheffield) will give the Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture in the 2026 International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference on Saturday, June 6, 3 pm to 4:15 pm, at CTICC Ballroom East (CTICC1, Lev 1), in Cape Town, South Africa. Obia’s lecture is titled “Governing for Humans: Reclaiming a people-centred vision for AI and the internet.” Obia argues that we are living in a vision of technology conjured by Big Tech conglomerates, a vision enabled by the prevailing regulatory architecture. Obia notes that from Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act to AI policies in Africa and across the world, governance instruments have propped up a vision for technology that makes it possible for a few Big Tech executives to wield unprecedented power and shape the digital ecosystem in their interests. Obia states that underpinning this vision is the belief that all human data is available for extraction at scale, the march towards superintelligence cannot be questioned, and unchecked AI expansion is ideal and should be left unregulated, even if it destroys our environment and intensifies exploitative labour and structural inequalities. Obia believes that this vision underscores how our social realities are being constituted in service of the mould created by Big Tech executives. But crucially, Obia continues, it also reveals the ways in which governance can be used to propel a different vision of technology that works for humans. This is what Obia attempts in his lecture, for which he draws from his research into platform governance and AI policy across Africa to highlight regulatory imaginaries conceived by stakeholders who he has engaged with in his tour of the continent. Obia states that his reflection highlights how these imaginaries intersect with governance principles in other parts of the world in order to shape norms and policies that challenge Big Tech’s hegemonic vision and reinstate agency for people, movements, and communities. He applies notions of sovereignty, decoloniality, and participation to define a vision of technology and AI based on the collective and the pluriversal, even more so for global majority countries that are at risk of having their digital futures decided upon by corporate actions and governance frameworks in rich nations. These form the foundation of his argument on the need for governance mechanisms defined by a people-centred vision to reshape the evolution of new media technologies. Obia is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Information, Journalism and Communication in the University of Sheffield, carrying out a research project titled: “A continent on the margins: Investigating African approaches to regulating AI.” Before joining the University of Sheffield, he was a lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication, University of Lagos (2023-2024), and a Commonwealth Scholar with full-funding for PhD studies at Birmingham City University (2019-2023). More information about Obia could be found at https://sheffield.ac.uk/ijc/people/academic-staff/vincent-obia 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.