The research program 2 focuses on regulatory structures and the emergence of rules in digital communication spaces.
Socially relevant communication is increasingly shifting to privately organized and algorithmically designed online services and platforms. These new forums and practices of social self-understanding influence democratic processes and the distribution of rights and resources in digital constellations.
Members of the research program investigate the rules of communicative power and the power of communicative rules along three central guiding questions:
- What normative factors can be distinguished in digital communication spaces and what regulatory structures do they form with regard to the (also algorithmic and design) practices of actors (structural perspective)?
- What processes and practices give rise to rules in and for digital communication spaces, including the EU’s digital package, and what interactions exist between rule-making processes inside and outside the spaces (process perspective)?
- Which actors in which constellations are part of rule-making and/or regulatory structures, how are the corresponding power relations constituted and how are responsibility and legitimacy questioned and reconstituted within them (actor perspective)?
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, LL.M. (Harvard)Dr. Tobias Mast