Tech and Politics

Trailer for Tech & Politics, the podcast of the Chair for Governance of Complex and Innovative Technological Systems at the University of Bamberg.

The goal of this lecture series is to help you to make sense of digital media, the changes it brings, and the challenges it presents. In order to do so, we look at some of the biggest controversies about the uses of digital media in politics and society. We look beyond the headlines and see what kind of scientific evidence is available, how this evidence is produced, and what it does tell us about the role of digital media in politics and society. This podcast will introduce you to the best available evidence on ongoing controversies, enable you to ask better questions on the role of digital media in politics and society, and show you the tools that allow you to answer them. Digital media are hear to stay. No matter how much some people might wish, there is no way back to a time and politics before. So, we'd better start figuring out how this works.

Computational social science (CSS) is an interdisciplinary scientific field that studies human behavior and social systems using computational methods and research practices. In this episode, we will discuss CSS, what makes it different from other approaches in the social sciences, and attempt a definition.

Our discussion of computational social science and its promises and challenges has remained rather abstract. It is time to turn to CSS as a practice. For this, let's have a look at the typical CSS project pipeline.

Text analysis is a prominently used approach from computational social science. In this episode, we examine three recent studies closely, that are using text analysis in interesting and constructive ways.

In computational social science there are great hopes and enthusiasms connected with the availability of new data sources. In this episode, we will be talking about working with one of these new data sources: digital trace data.

We encounter AIs daily, be it in the voice assistants in our homes and phones, through automation in our workplace, or as the drivers of policing or credit decisions. In this and the following episodes, we focus on the impact of AI on democracy.

In this episode, we will be talking about the conditions for the successful application of artificial intelligence across different areas.

In this and the following episode, we will be talking about artificial intelligence and its impact on democracy. In this episode, we will start by discussing AI's role in elections and its impact on people's informational autonomy.

We continue our discussion about artificial intelligence and its impact on democracy. In this episode, we focus on AI's impact on equality and the competition between societies, some democratic, some not.

In this and the following episodes, we will be talking about data and algorithms with a special focus on their uses in and effects on politics. In this episode, we start with data.

In this episode, we will talk about algorithms, what they are, how they work, and concerns they create once applied broadly and in scale across society.

In this episode, we will be looking at how the uses of data and algorithms change political campaigning.

In this episode, we will be looking at how the uses of data and algorithms change journalism.

All over the world, we see people using digital media to question and challenge authorities, organizations, norms and behaviors they perceive as dysfunctional or unjust. Digital media are therefore an important element in the challenge of established social institutions, sometimes even enabling these challenges in the first place.

In this episode, we will focus on the mechanisms through wich digital media allow challenges to social institutions.

In this episode, we will focus on digitally enabled challenges to political parties.

In this episode, we will focus on how digitally enabled challenges fail and how to assess their legitimacy and impact on democracy.

Democratic societies need spaces in which people and political elites become visible to each other, develop shared agendas, and settle on collectively binding decisions. These spaces are the public arena.

In this episode, we discuss the impact of digital media on one of the most important structures hosting the public arena, the news media.

Digital media have not only challenged the position of traditional structures of the public arena. Digital media have also led to the emergence of new structures hosting the contemporary public arena in digital communication environments. In this episode, we discuss some of the most pressing challenges raised by the digital extension of the public arena.

In this episode, we look at three studies illustrating how to approach different aspects of the contemporary public arena empirically.

Keynote zur Gemeinsamen Jahrestagung der DGPuK-Fachgruppe Journalistik/Journalismusforschung, der DGPuK-Fachgruppe Kommunikation und Politik, dem Arbeitskreis Politik und Kommunikation (DVPW) und der Fachgruppe Politische Kommunikation (SGKM) an der Universität Trier vom 29. September 2022.

Data are crucial for the discussion of politics and digital media. Understanding the core concepts and issues arising from the quantification of social and political life and the resulting data is important for engaging in many of the subsequent controversies of the uses of digital media in politics.

Quantification makes some things visible, while hiding others. To better understand this process, we have to examine how things become numbers, we have to examine measurement.

Data provide a reduced representation of the world and promise to uncover hidden patterns and connections between entities that remain invisible in their full, unreduced manifestation in the world. This allows people and organizations to make sense of the world, and increase their level of control.

This episode sketches the tensions that arise from the drive to generate data-enabled insights and people's expectations and rights to privacy.

Algorithms are sets of steps by which to solve pre-defined tasks. Today the term appears predominantly in connection with computing. Algorithms allow computers to perform tasks. They are crucial in the advances of computer-enabled analysis and automation.

Algorithms are also used to provide suggestions and advice.Iit is helpful to differentiate between algorithms providing advice and suggestions to experts and those providing advice and suggestions for lay people and users of digital communication environments and services.

In this episode, we focus on algorithmic action and fairness.

In this episode, we focus on remaining fears and challenges associated with algorithms: bubbles and loops, the alignment problem, and opaqueness. We close the discussion of algorithms by an account what can be done to improve their uses in society.

The success and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised awareness of the technology's economic, social, and political consequences. The most recent step in AI development -- the application of large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models to the generation of text, image, video, or audio content -- has come to dominate the public imaginary of AI and has accelerated this discussion. But to assess AI's societal impact meaningfully, we need to look closely at the workings of the underlying technology and identify the areas of contact within democracy.

The successful application of artificial intelligence depends on a set of preconditions.

At the individual level, AI impacts the conditions of democratic self-rule and people's opportunities to exercise it.

In which we discuss three further areas where artificial intelligence begins to touch on democracy: equality, elections, and the systemic competition between democracy and autocracy.