Making sense of the digital society
The current rapid social and technological change brings about enormous uncertainties – a great need for explanations and sense-making but also of shaping our common future. This high-profile lecture series thrives to develop a European perspective on the processes of transformation that our societies are currently undergoing. To this end, the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) are inviting great European thinkers to help us making sense of the digital society.
What is really changing in society beyond the hype of short-term excitement? What is power in the digital society, and how is it distributed? Do we witness the revival of democracy through increased participation and transparency, or rather its demise due to fragmentation and populism? Are services fueled by algorithms and artificial intelligence improving our private and business lives or do they enforce social inequalities? How does urban life change in times of digitization and what role do infrastructures take?
The series began in late 2017 with a kick-off event with Manuel Castells, author of the influential "Information Age" trilogy and professor at the University of Southern California. Other speakers included Elena Esposito, Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the LSE in London, and Eva Illouz, Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Armin Nassehi, Professor of Sociology at LMU Munich and Shoshana Zuboff, who is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School. All speeches can be listened to in the playlist, further information on the events can be found below.
All events in the series will be moderated by Tobi Müller. They are held in English and translated simultaneously into German.
Upcoming events in this series
Past events
Kim Lane Scheppele: Democracy at risk – The autocrat's spyware?
Carola Westermeier: Money as a digital technology
Rob Kitchin: Navigating Smart Cities
Daniel Miller: The global evolution of smart technologies
Lorenz Hilty & James Maguire: Digitising the environmental paradigm
Gina Neff: Making AI work for us
Stefania Milan: Resistance in the datafied society
David Betz: Warfare in the digital age
Kanta Dihal: How the world sees intelligent machines
Krisztina Rozgonyi and Marius Dragomir: Freedom of expression in Central and Eastern Europe
Helen Kennedy: Everyday life in times of datafication
Judith Simon: The ethics of AI and big data
Genia Kostka: Big data dreams and local reality in China
Jan-Werner Müller: The critical infrastructure of democracy
Iyad Rahwan: How to trust machines?
Tilman Santarius: Making digitalisation work for the climate!
Joanna Bryson: The role of humans in an age of intelligent machines
Livestream: Philipp Staab – The crises of digital capitalism
Cancelled: Lina Dencik – Justice in the Datafied Society
Sybille Krämer: Cultural history of digitisation
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: The power of platforms and how publishers adapt
Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy
Armin Nassehi: What problem does digitalisation solve?
Louise Amoore: Our lives with algorithms
José van Dijck: Europe and responsible platform societies
Dirk Baecker: Digitalisation and the next society
Eva Illouz: Capitalist subjectivity and the internet
Andreas Reckwitz: Digitalisation and society of singularities
Nick Couldry: Colonised by data – the hollowing out of digital society
Stephen Graham: The politics of urban digital infrastructures
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