Making sense of our connected world
Digital Singularisation
According to Andreas Reckwitz, we are living in a time of fundamental social change — our society is becoming a society of singularisation. Digitisation is playing a pivotal role in…
Click Cliques: User Types in Online Learning
It should have been an educational game changer. The world’s top universities were offering courses online, free to anyone with an Internet connection. Enthusiasm was high, as was enrollment. But…
Academic impact outside of academia
What actually is academic impact? And how can one optimise the non-academic impact of research? Those were the key questions at the first “Impact School”, which was held at the…
Data, information, interaction. A multi-layer approach in online publishing
This blog article presents the prototype of an online publication design for the recently published study “Kooperationen zwischen Startups und Mittelstand” of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and…
What kind of open access future do we want?
Open access debates are increasingly focused on “how” rather than “why”. Tony Ross-Hellauer and Benedikt Fecher present two possible scenarios for an open access future, consider the relative merits and…
The blog journal elephantinthelab.org spots problems in science
You have probably heard the phrase “ the elephant in the room” to say that there is a problem that everyone knows, but no one talks about. As of July…
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!
How metaphors shape the digital society
Cloud, Big Data, Piracy, Virus are common terms in the debates about digital technologies. At the same time they are methaphors that originate from other fields than technology. What normative or political baggage do they therefore carry? How does this vocabulary shape the emerging digital society? In the series of articles on the How metaphors shape the digital society different authors analyse the assumptions and meanings of metaphors in the digital era.