The final speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Annekatrin Bock and Dan Verständig, whose focus is on programmed futures in education. We use complex technological systems everyday, but must be aware of when they are dysfunctional; as routines break and crises happen, this is when education happens. The promise of education is to address and enable us to navigate uncertainty, but what education provides also serves to negate certain possibilities.
Uncertainty is the starting-point for pedagogical action: it requires such action. But it is also an outcome of such action: education opens up …
The next speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Julie Lüpkes and Anne Schmitz, whose focus is on the imagining of digital futures in digital tool development in education and journalism. These are examples of the mutual shaping of technology and society, through a reciprocal process of co-production, and they may embed a variety of smaller or larger ideas for the future, from projection through vision to imaginaries.
What digital futures do such tools present, then, and what factors limit their full realisation? This study engaged in media ethnographies and stakeholder interviews to understand …
The next session I’m attending at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is on digital imaginaries, and starts with a paper by Peter Gentzel. His approach centres on mapping: digital maps are a form of media that envision futures, showing aspects of our social and cultural life that are not quite visual, and seek to empower us to do and see things that are mostly hidden, and thereby provide for a better future.
Such maps include services like Google Maps, which focusses on providing consumption options, curated online maps of cultural options (like street art across a given city) …
The second day at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with a keynote by Nick Couldry, focussing on the corporatisation of media and everything. He notes a number of key changes over the past twenty years: datafication – the transformation of everyday life into data, and its exploitation by business and government, thereby producing the social for capital; social media – shifting the exploitation of social data to produce attention and shape consumer and citizen action; and artificial intelligence – the corporate capture of the human mind itself, which automates cognitive production and transforms what we value.
And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.
In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …
The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Giovanna Mascheroni, whose focus is on discussions with communicative AI systems about controversial and polarising political issues. This was explored by the use of serious games, with ChatGPT performing the role of a political journalist arguing first against and then for the radical Last Generation climate protest group. The switch from one position to the other was made once ChatGPT’s arguments for started to repeat themselves. Students then did the same, and also interacted with ChatGPT as they did so, and a jury judged who …
The third speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on the role of journalism in fuelling discursive polarisation. He begins by referencing controversial public debates about radical climate protests, which usually evidence some level of discursive polarisation. Such polarisation may be ideological and/or affective, and and become destructive for public debate.
This contrasts with democratic transformative communication, which enables societies to address such conflicts productively. Literature has identified a number of factors that may polarise or depolarise; interestingly, exposure to dissonant views is often seen as polarising, but this …
I’m speaking in the next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen, which is on deliberation and polarisation, but we begin with Hilke Brockmann, whose focus is on ‘echo chambers’ amongst political elites. These are believed to be a risk to democratic processes, and driven by algorithmic processes; but these ideas have rightly been challenged in recent years. We would do better to focus on polarised interactions between political elites, and especially on the margins of the political environment, and this may be intensified by external political events.
The present study examined this by assessing tweets by all …
The final speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Hossein Derakhshan, whose focus is on AI and algorithm studies. He begins by noting an ontological crisis in media studies: the field has looked at the production of, audiences for, and texts of media, but the rise of algorithmic platforms in particular has meant that the media texts, in particular, have now been destabilised – users of media no longer necessarily encounter the same texts in the same forms, formats, and combinations.
Instagram posts and stories, TikTok feeds, Spotify playlists, Meta ads, AI chats are …
