[ICTs-and-Society] Inauguration lecture Christian Fuchs: Social Media and the Public Sphere

[Marisol Sandoval]

Social Media and the Public Sphere
Inauguration Lecture
Christian Fuchs
Wed. Feb 19, 2013, 18:00
Univ. of Westminster, Regent Street Campus

More information is available here:
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/inaugural-lectures/2014/social-media-and-the-public-sphere 


Registration is requested and possible here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inaugural-lecture-series-2013-2014-social-media-and-the-public-sphere-tickets-7899322085 


Social media has become a key term in Media and Communication Studies 
and public discourse for characterising platforms such as Facebook, 
Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Blogspot, Weibo, 
Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr. This lecture will discuss the 
implications of social media for power structures in society, the 
economy and politics.The lecture will first discuss the question "What 
is social about social media?". Providing answers requires a social 
theory understanding of what it means to be social. The lecture will 
explore different concepts of the social and relate them to the realm of 
the media.Social media are an expression of the tendency that in 
contemporary society boundaries become liquid. The distinctions between 
the private and the public, play and labour (playbour, digital labour), 
work and leisure, production and consumption (prosumption), individual 
and collective action, online and offline, networking and autonomy, 
spatial distance and co-presence, anonymity and knowledge, presence and 
absence, appearance and disappearance, and visibility and invisibility, 
are blurring. This lecture will discuss what risks and opportunities 
these changes imply for society. Many political and academic discussions 
about the implications of social media for society are concentrated on 
the question of whether social media enhance or endanger various 
dimensions of the public sphere. Whereas some say that social media make 
the economy more democratic and have been used as tools of revolutions 
and democratisation ('revolution 2.0', 'Twitter/Facebook revolution'), 
others hold that social media are first and foremost instruments of 
control and commerce. The lecture will engage with Habermas' concept of 
the public sphere and discuss social media's variety of implications for 
the structural transformation of the public sphere.Whereas we are 
accustomed to the idea of public service broadcasting, an understanding 
of how a public service internet could look and be advanced is largely 
missing. This lecture wants to contribute to the public discussion of 
how the social dimension of the internet and the media can serve the 
public interest, the concept of a public service internet and how ideas 
for specific organisation, policy and funding models could look like.

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