D_07 Prototypes of Social Cohesion
Projects
- Sections:
- Bremen, Hamburg
- Disciplines:
- Communication and Media Studies
Abstract
Facebook, X, and TikTok are widely seen as drivers of radicalization and hate speech. As a result, digital platforms and social media are typically framed as problems when it comes to social cohesion. In contrast, this work package focuses on pioneer communities and alternative platform models. It investigates the potential that digital platforms can, in fact, hold for fostering social cohesion.
We study groups from the fields of “civic hacking”, “data activism”, “platform cooperativism”, and “future journalism” that work with digital media and infrastructures. What do these groups criticize about the current use and regulation of digital technologies? Which prototypical concepts do they develop to deploy digital platforms in ways that strengthen social cohesion? And what visions of possible futures guide their work?
At the center of the analysis are the imaginations of these pioneer communities, their practices, and their discourses. Like few other groups, these prototypes of mediatized forms of community have transformed media practices and modes of participation. Within them, ideas of community were imagined long before they became technologically feasible, and many social media technologies ultimately emerged from these contexts.
The work package is based on an interdisciplinary media-ethnographic research design. Through a comparative analysis of Europe and the United States, we reconstruct the organizational models of alternative platforms. Our methods include interviews, observations of events, and the analysis of internal documents. In a second step, we identify the associated concepts of social cohesion and future visions.
Transfer Activities
In a third step, we conduct transfer-oriented future workshops with citizens, in which the everyday practical potential of such future visions is discussed. Using art-based methods, we explore innovative methodological approaches. The aim is to disseminate knowledge about innovative concepts of social cohesion and to encourage participation in alternative platform models.
Digital platforms and social media are typically perceived as problematic when it comes to questions of social cohesion. Facebook, X/Twitter, and TikTok are associated with radicalization and hate speech and are therefore considered a threat; platforms such as Airbnb, Deliveroo, and Uber challenge local economies. In academic research, after the retrospectively naïve utopias of the early internet, the question of which potentials digital platformsmight hold for social cohesion has long remained underexplored. This work package (WP) deliberately adopts a change in perspective by examining “pioneer communities” that seek to establish “alternative models” of platforms.
The aim of the research is to study groups oriented toward digital media and infrastructures from the fields of civic hacking and data activism. Such movements often maintain close ties to (cohesion-oriented) data journalism, which gained particular relevance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The WP asks about the “prototypical” concepts these groups develop for using digital platforms to foster social cohesion, as well as the critiques they formulate regarding existing uses and regulatory frameworks of digital technologies.
The WP addresses the overarching question of the role of mediatization dynamics for social cohesion by examining models of cohesion through digital platforms that are often “everyday-cybernetic,” that is, based on principles of self-organization. In doing so, it analyzes the “imaginations” of pioneer communities, their “practices,” and their “discourses,” including the “worldviews” and “self-conceptions” that guide social action. As debates around “data colonialism” illustrate, these issues involve processes of global power shifts and symbolic scarcity in a particularly acute way.
Within the focus on “mediatization dynamics,” the WP engages with the “interlocking transformation of media and society,” paying particular attention to “new forms of mediatized community” and the “transformation of cultures of participation.” Media- and technology-oriented pioneer communities exemplify these developments more clearly than almost any other group. In such contexts, contemporary forms of mediatized community were imagined before they became technologically realizable, and many social media technologies—up to recent developments such as ChatGPT—emerged from these milieus. Current and future transformations of digital media cannot be adequately understood within RISC without taking these pioneering developments into account.
