Making sense of our connected world
On IT-Infrastructure security as a complex, not necessarily complicated, task
Every society builds upon functioning infrastructures which are kept as free from bugs and manipulations as possible. That is all the more true when it comes to critical information infrastructures,…
Participating and making decisions online – Participation study 2014 of the HIIG
The rise of the Internet has been accompanied by the promise of an overall democratization like no other medium before (Dorer, 2008). Ever since, the discussion about increasing participation in…
Europe has voted…
Europe has voted – at least a minority of about 43 per cent of 400 million eligible voters did. Subtracting disappointed voters that wanted to state against established parties or…
System error: Open research data and publication-driven research
The blog post summarizes results from the project Sharing Research Data in Academia. A detailed article can be found here. Open Data: An integral part of Horizon 2020 With Horizon 2020,…
re:publica and MEDIA CONVENTION: Political Internet discourse vs. commercialisation?
This year, on the 6th and 7th of May, the international media industry event MEDIA CONVENTION will – for the first time – take place together with Europe’s largest social media conference re:publica and…
Wrapping up NETmundial
Nothing less than the future of the Internet has been discussed at the NETmundial conference in Sao Paulo, Brasil. The Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society participated with its research…
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!
How metaphors shape the digital society
Cloud, Big Data, Piracy, Virus are common terms in the debates about digital technologies. At the same time they are methaphors that originate from other fields than technology. What normative or political baggage do they therefore carry? How does this vocabulary shape the emerging digital society? In the series of articles on the How metaphors shape the digital society different authors analyse the assumptions and meanings of metaphors in the digital era.
