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.