 Let's give our Padel a great applause as well for being here. Inge van de Ven from Team 22 is here about participation of academics in the public sphere. I represent the staff of online culture, art, media and society today. And the question we would like to focus on is, how do we participate as academics in the public sphere? As you know, disseminating the results of research to a wider audience beyond the university is one of the key agenda points of the university's new strategic plan. Well, in the context of online culture, we focus on today's complex landscape of opinions, on the growing difficulty of estimating the truth value of facts, the increasing reliance on emotion in the public debate and also the increasingly algorithmic nature of the public sphere. So in the beginning of the 1960s, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has analyzed the modern public sphere as a model for the way that people engage in rational discussions about political issues. And these discussions often took place in coffee houses all over Europe. The public sphere, and I quote, is a domain of our social life as such a thing as public opinion can be formed, where citizens deal with matters of great interest without being subject to coercion, to express and publicize their views. Well, this public sphere is still a useful concept for thinking about the way democracies work today. It attempts to describe how citizens reach consensus and their deliberations about society. It is about how people respond to the ideas and the behaviors of politicians, but it is also about the question, what constitutes the truth value of facts? Or what constitutes factual information? So today, coffee houses have largely been replaced by social media platforms. From behind our screens, we obtain a lot of fragmented information in a very short amount of time. And to be honest, we often still do this in coffee houses. But the problem that we currently face is that not all of this information is based on checked facts. Well, last year, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Catherine Weiner, wrote an article about this development claiming, there we go again, that we live in a post-truth age. Weiner claims that technology has disrupted the truth. I quote, increasingly what counts as fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true, and technology has made it very easy for these facts to circulate with the speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era or even a decade ago. And indeed, in the digital age, it is relatively easy or easier than ever to publish false information, which is then quickly shared and taken as the truth. Falsehood and fact now spread in exactly the same way, as is evidenced by the current rise of all the right media. So virality gets valued over truth and form, such as click-base, over content. So we ask, what then is the role of the public intellectual and of the academic in the face of these new problems? What can we bring to the table? We argue that this role is still very much the same as the one identified by Alexei de Tocqueville in the 19th century, namely to inform, because a democracy without a well-informed people is a democracy in crisis. The academic does not only has to produce outstanding knowledge and science, she also has a duty to enter the public arena to take a stance based on her own knowledge and her own expertise and to help build a more just, equal and democratic society. We feel that our department is very well placed to take up this role because we operate at the nexus of globalization, culture, digitalization and the arts. We deal with a rapidly changing society and we educate our students to be committed academics but also players in the cultural fields who can make themselves heard. So for 2025, the goals that we envision are to train students and engage ourselves in separating facts from fiction, truth from rumors and data from knowledge. Second, to manage information overloads. After all, collectively we read more than ever before, both on and offline. And training and reflection on what demands close attention and what can be skimmed or what must be understood in a deeper sense and what can be consumed in a more distracted fashion or when to zoom in and when do we zoom out are essential skills for our survival into the information age. And third, to participate in an increasingly interconnected and algorithmic public sphere. We feel that the voice of the academic today is still too much strapped inside the scientific journal. Future academics should invest not only in trying to understand society but they should actively intervene in order to improve it. We've already begun to encourage students to take an active stance. In September last year our department has launched Digit magazine which is a learning and publication tool when students learn to publish their own articles and then generate their own traffic for their content by using social media. Digit is based on academic research made by students and scholars and then disseminated towards an audience beyond the university. As such, it offers a glimpse of what we seek to accomplish in the years to come. So in conclusion, we ask the university from students to scholars to join us in a sustained effort to get heard, to participate so as to stimulate the availability of clear explanations and also rational argumentation within the public sphere. Thank you.