 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second edition of our lecture series, Making Sense of the Digital Society, Using Digital Society Well. The Federal Agency for Civic Education works together with the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society on these lectures. We started in December. Manuel Castells was our first guest. We will keep on having more conferences throughout the year. Every six to eight weeks we will have hopefully very exciting presentations here. This series was inspired by the diverse and ambivalent aspects of digital progress and that we need to keep in mind permanently whether it's in private life, in our work life or elsewhere. And they keep challenging us. This is due to the fact that the technological development keeps increasing and we couldn't imagine this speed a few years ago. Due to the digitalization we see enormous potential for communication, for production and for participation and they keep revolutionizing these aspects. However, it is especially due to these elements that there are risks that we had not expected before for our societies because there are a few globally acting and quite intransparent players internet companies which dominate these markets. Big data has enormous potential for surveillance but also for the manipulation of human behavior. And additionally we see the anonymous behavior in the digital sphere which gives a certain protection but many people also abuse this. Therefore we see over and over again that there are racist and inhuman declarations and statements online such as hate speech, fake news and others. Of course all these tendencies are not new. We've seen them for several years now. However, they have reached a dimension which as far as we are concerned make it necessary to start a debate on digital participation and the legal design of the online sphere and this needs to be discussed with a much broader audience. Therefore we are delighted that so many of you have come here today for this second lecture. We decided to discuss these enormous changes that have to do with digitalization and we want to use a European perspective for this. That means that for the coming months we will invite leading intellectuals from Germany and from other European countries. They will present leading ideas, leading visions for how to shape our digital society. We invite them in order to tell us about their areas of expertise and to explain digital change for us. They will also show us the very complex present and also future. On that note I would like to end my little speech. We are not here for my introductory words but you have come here in order to hear our guests speak. It is Professor Dr. Christoph Neuberger from the Ludwig-Mazzimilians University in Munich. We are absolutely looking forward to hearing him speak. He will talk about democracy and public sphere in the digital society. I wish all of us an inspiring and insightful evening. I would now like to give the floor to our host, to the very much appreciated journalist, Tobi Müller, who will introduce and present our speaker a bit more. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Melina, from the Federal Agency for Civic Education for your introductory words. There is hardly anything that I can add. We have already said that you are not here to listen to us but to our guests. However, I would like to find a bit of additional information. You know the most important words. It is not only in the US but also in Germany. For instance, the lying press that this word came up here in Germany. That speech also is an important word here. In my home country in Switzerland on the 3rd of March, we will vote on if the SED will be abolished and if the fees that must be paid by everyone will be abolished as well. This will basically be the end of the public broadcasts in Switzerland. We know that these trends exist. However, what we do not know yet, which is our question today, who talks to us today and what are the norms that we have nowadays for media? How can we describe this? How can they be described by research by scientists? These are phenomena that are happening very, very quickly. And how can we describe them better? I think that this is something that we will learn about tonight by our guest. Welcome to Making Sense of the Digital Society. We also have a hashtag for tonight, which is digital society. You can use this hashtag in order to ask questions or make comments. After this presentation, after the about 30-minute discussion that I will have with our guest, you can participate because we can hardly talk about the Internet without having you participate in it. Of course, this is a major part of this when talking about old media, old mediums and how we change them. Of course, we are also streaming. And you can see this on alex-ballin.de, which is a local broadcaster here in Berlin. And you can also watch the stream online. You can watch this on bpb.de, the Federal Agency's website and also on the website of the Institute for Internet and Society. You might know this standard situation when talking about media and criticism. Since there have been media and mediums, there have been two sides. You might even call it bipolar because there are the optimists and the pessimists. Some say, oh, we don't know what's going to happen. We've reached the end of civilization. And then there are those who see the new messiahs in this new medium. Our speaker tonight is so very well known because he's neither one of the optimists nor one of the pessimists. He has stayed calm and reached an opinion on this. He is considered a visionary in his field, especially in Germany, because sooner than others he realized that the old media, not old descriptions of democracy and public sphere, are not enough for what we are currently experiencing. Around one year ago in December 2016, he received the Schelling Prize from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2011, until 2011, he gave lectures in Münster. Afterwards he started working at the LMU University in Munich and is the head of the Department of Communication Sciences. He has a very broad title for his presentation, which we do not often see in this kind of field. We are glad that he has chosen it. It is called Democracy in Public Sphere in the Digital Society. Afterwards we'll have our talk and then you can participate. However, I'm glad that he has come here safe and sound in just in time from Munich. Welcome, Professor Christoph Neuberger. Thank you very much for this kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to speak here in front of you today. Mr. Müller already mentioned it. I will talk about a topic that can be quite astonishing, because today we are talking about the whole. We try to take a broad perspective on society. That is necessary, but it's also a major challenge. Usually we try to focus on details. We look at what's happening in the news. We look at very detailed research questions. And hardly ever we have to look at the big picture. That's what I try today. Of course it's not enough to present it in all its facets within 45 minutes. Therefore I will focus on certain main thesis. I try to do it as structured as possible, and afterwards we'll have the opportunity to clarify certain questions or go more into depth in certain areas. My presentation is made up of four parts. First I would like to start with a description. I would like to ask what is new about this digital society. This, by the way, is the society that is marked by digitalization, and I will especially focus on the Internet. Therefore I will basically start with the phenomenon itself and try to work out what is the contrast between what we have described as a digital society since the 1990s and today. Then I will go back a bit and take a look at what my perspective is. I speak as a communication scientist here, but this is only one of many perspectives. Of course we have plenty of discourse universes that could take a look at the digital society, and all of them have their own logic. It is quite difficult to leave your own bubble in this case. However we need to connect these different universes better. But first I would like to describe my perspective on the Internet as a communication scientist. Afterwards I would like to evaluate, does the digital society receive from Internet what it expects? This is the part where I will ask exactly this question and also ask how you could develop a certain evaluation benchmark. And in the last part of my presentation I will talk about the design. We will resume where we have reached and how we can shape Internet better. However first we need to understand how it works. We need to be able to explain how this network audience works. Here we need science, we need theories that can explain us how this interaction dynamics work before we can think about how to improve the Internet. So that was a brief overview of what I would like to talk about and I hope I will be able to keep it within 45 minutes. So first let's talk about the characteristics of the Internet. I wondered what is special about it. In digital society what is different from what we have experienced earlier in the analog society? First we need to talk about the scope of the fracture. Is everything new or do some things also remain the same? Is it justified to talk about a revolution? Do we see these enormous changes? Is the comparison to Johannes Gutenberg and the invention of the letterpress really right? Or do we overestimate what is happening? We usually tend to making things bigger than they are. We will probably not reach a final conclusion here but maybe we can talk about this at the end again because there certainly are certain factors that show us that things are changing enormously. Pierre Bourdieu wrote an essay about television. In this essay he described two groups of persons dealing with modern media. On the one hand we have the visionaries, the optimists. They are of the opinion that everything changes and then there is the other group. These people think that everything remains the same and nothing has changed. We have our own biographic experience and therefore know that whenever we are dealing with new digitalization there are certain effects happening when working with a new mobile phone when seeing the internet for the first time, for instance. I would now like to talk about a book by Thomas Mann which takes place at the beginning of the 20th century. He describes the gramophone here. I would now like to quote a part of this book. Mann describes the gramophone as a wonderful technological object which allowed one to listen to music just as though an artist were playing right in front of him. So there is this effect of astonishment when being confronted with a new medium. But this experience passes very quickly. The more often we have these new contacts with new media the quicker it passes. And this is the case in our presence today. For a long time media developed very slowly. There were new media. They needed to become a part of what was already existing. In 1605 there was the first newspaper in 1923 the first broadcaster on radio and in 1935 the first television channel. With digitalization we now see a constant change and innovation. Hermann Lüber, a philosopher, described it as the shrinking of our presence. With reference to Koselek he says that presence is a time frame in which we see stability because what we know and what happens basically is the same. Our experiences help us to cope with the presence and with what is the near future. However in our modern times this has changed. Our experience and our expectations do not match anymore. This becomes dangerous when the speed is so fast that we need to keep on making new experiences and gain new knowledge constantly. This is the situation of the so-called liquid presence. The internet definitely supports this development of our society. This then leads to a certain limitation as described by Niklas Luhmann. This means that we do not have time anymore to lean back and think about it because we are currently exposed to new technologies. This is what is meant with the shrinking of the presence. So until now I've only talked about the scope of the fraction and how quick it happens. Now I would like to ask what is special about the internet? As we have learned it is difficult to describe media. They should always be differentiated in two aspects. On the one hand we see the technology and knowledge about technology that you need to have. When taking a look at this technology the internet is an incredible medium. Some people say it's not even a medium, it's a technological infrastructure. And it's not comparable to anything we have experienced so far. It's not a machine with buttons, it's not paper. It's different. Peter Glaser, an Austrian author, once said that the most difficult thing about the internet is to imagine it because we have no clear picture when it comes to cyberspace and other areas. These don't help us in understanding and grasping the internet either. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the internet can do everything, convergence. The internet gives us more than any of the other mediums separately. It can be used in all kinds of fields. I would now only like to name a few. The participation is very broad. Everyone can participate. There's not only this one-way street anymore of the medium towards the audience, but the audience can respond. Now there are more ways of participation and there are longer chains of interactions as well. Furthermore, there are new possibilities of connections and of networks. So far, we had the newspaper that was in between information, the information source and the audience and now there's a direct way. Furthermore, we see in many areas that there's a lot of transparency. This is usually automated with the help of algorithms that can show us personalized information. The internet offers us any kind of information source and medium. We see an automation of data as well and there are lots and lots of other things that I cannot mention all. The time and space dimension also shows new opportunities. We can storage information. We have a better access to this information because we have our mobile phones, our laptops with us all the time. So this is what I describe as the intangibility of the technology and the internet as an old rounder, but that is only one aspect of it. The second aspect is how we should deal with this technology. How do we shape the internet? So is everything open for everybody? The speciality of the internet is that on the one hand, technologically, it is shapeable. You can do a lot with it. The second point is that in it, all of a sudden everybody can participate with the traditional mass media. It was usually just a small editorial office, some publishers, some journalists. So that was the circle of people who told people what to do with this media. The internet with the social media, everyone can participate. On the one hand, because of the huge number of participants, this means that there is a lot of need of coordination, of who shall participate, but the possibility of opting in also takes place on platforms which are provided by certain internet companies, Facebook, Twitter, etc. So we have broader participation, involvement, but on the other hand, this is again concentrated in the hands of a few operators. So in any case, we are dealing with a medium that can be shaped, that everybody can switch into. That's why it's so difficult to make very general statements because it's very easy to find other opinions on it. Mrs. Kasek said it in the following way, referring to Twitter. The quality of Twitter is difficult to generalize, just as little as you can generalize on the quality of a bookshelf. Twitter is as good as the number of its uses. There is no shared basis. Those who joined Twitter, joined Twitter because they wanted to. This is a good description of this intangibility of the internet to describe it as a paradox. It's the finality of this temporariness. That's what's so special is, and it is very heterogeneous. Another characteristic that I'd like to only briefly touch upon is the expensive force in this digitized world. In the 1990s, we still thought that we had two worlds. On the one hand, the real world and cyberspace, on the other hand. Cyberspace, a virtual world with different rules, an anonymous world where you can play with virtual identities without context and without any consequences or impact on the real life. Today, this notion has changed, I think, when we noticed that on StudiFox and other media like Facebook, it was realized that you only transfer the real context that you have in your real world that you do not necessarily create new contacts. So, activities you used to do in the offline world are now transferred to the online world. And the Internet of Things will further merge the two worlds. I talked about characteristics. I tried to describe how the digital world differs from what we knew in the past. I would now like to look at the consequences of this. First, we need to talk about the context. The context collapse, the dissolution of borders and the crossovers because everyone can participate and because the Internet is indeed shapeable and has such a huge potential and because there are no borders, the former institutional order is dissolving. So, it has a weakness as an institution. You can see that positively, but on the other hand, dividing lines and context are important for a better understanding. They provide orientation to the people in the past. We had a well-structured media world with clear boundaries. You knew your brand, you knew your newspaper, the way the layout works, etc. In many places we now see this erosion of boundaries. We looked at it in a study on journalism, only recently, this erosion of boundaries between professionals and amateurs. We have lay journalists who think that they can do journalistic work with boundary, obviously disappearing. We have other phenomena that are exacerbated by the Internet. Sometimes you do not know whether the producers of texts in the Internet, whether they are advertising something or they are only promoting themselves. Their role and their identity is often not clear. So, we are dealing with crossovers who do not have a clear media identity. But there are other areas as well where we can identify such a solution of boundaries. If we look at newspapers, radio, TV, in contrast to the Internet, we tried to sort of separate them. But now we are confronted with a cross-media phenomenon and also the way we look at mass media is something that we need to think about. YouTube, for example, well, what is mass communication? And we have a smaller and a bigger audience at times. There are new boundaries between the public sphere and the private sphere, and the private interest, topicality and storing of information. We have a mixture of facts and fiction. I am not going to try a bleak picture, but I think we have to notice that we see the erosion of previous boundaries as we knew them in the past. And of course, in the past, we also trusted that these boundaries were respected. My next point is the return of the masses, collective phenomena on the Internet. The so-called mass media, the newspapers and radio never really reached the masses in a traditional sense, like masses were described during the French Revolution. Mass is now described as a crowd of people in one room. Mass only knows a dispersive audience where the individual stays by him or herself. But this big mass that is controllable and accountable is not something that was reached by the traditional mass media. And every study only focused on the impact of the so-called mass media on the individual. What we are faced with today are interactive collective phenomena. We have a new dynamic because a lot of people work together. We have chain reactions. We have an escalation of events. And very often it's difficult to identify who triggered what in these viral effects. Often the impact is difficult to trace. And we have a high degree of complexity that challenges us to develop new methods and new theories. And this is what I would like to conclude with. The mass is something that we sort of lost sight of in the late 18th and 19th century. We had revolutions, shocks of the French Revolution to the powerful who had to realize that the masses can bring everything out of control. What we saw in the cities, we had the formation of big groups of people who act together and with each other. All this has been described in mass psychology, for example, by Gustave Le Bon. Of course, from a different perspective, he talked about the incited masses who responded to something. We also see a lot of mass phenomena on the Internet, but I think today we have a more differentiated view of the wisdom of the masses. And also when you look at Wikipedia, for example, a lot of people join together and try to bring something fruitful and something enriching to the others. The question is how do we deal with it? Let me now turn to the last point of this part of my presentation. What are the consequences, the perfect technology and the urgency of the essential questions? We talked about multi-modality. We talked about the shapeability of a media. The more perfect the technology, the less important it becomes. The less of an obstacle the technology is, the less we need to look at its actual use. Marshal Lunds said it's not about the message, but it's the media that characterizes the message. Manuel Castells wrote that the message in this new system is indeed the characteristic. Now, what does that mean? Chris Anderson, the former chief editor, said it's no longer about what the distribution channels want. And we come back to the essential question, what do we want to achieve with this new, almost boundless technology? Already in 1995, an essay in the Neue Züricher Zeitung, we could read about the dissolution of the boundaries and there it was said that this new technology relieves us of many burdens in everyday life. We have the emergence of a normative intelligence, which is an intelligence that helps us to find out what we want and what is good for ourselves and for the others. This essential question can be asked again when such a new media emerges all of a sudden as it was the case with the internet. It sort of emerged almost out of the blue. Todd Brecht described a similar experience in the 1920s when the first radio broadcasts were started and he said, our society allows us to make innovations, inventions that still have to find their market. You had the possibility to tell everything to everybody, but you could also choose not to say anything. And he then said that the radio, basically, took on the role of a proxy, that it would only do what others had done before in real life, and he said that radio would have to find its own justification for existence. The internet is a very similar case. It has hardly any limits other than the radio, which now takes us to the question as to what we expect from the internet as a society. But let me in between briefly touch upon another topic and look at something or look at the way I look at these topics as a communication scientist. I think it's important to state that how we talk about the new media, the new media that are still emerging, they are produced, they are still being produced. It's what Mr. Geese described as a communication process, but there are different perspectives that follow their own logic. We have a journalistic, legal, a political discourse, a scientific and academic discourse that is again subdivided into different expert debates, sometimes competing with each other, often not really communicating with each other. And if you don't get your own field of expertise, you often have to feel the need that you want to break out of this bubble. But the great and dominant public debate on the internet is often driven by spectacular individual incidents, topics described by the visionaries in Silicon Valley, where the scientific expertise often falls behind. The question is how we can provide better accessibility. I think this is a big question, not because I would like to focus on the academia or my expert field in particular. Scientific logic may have its disadvantages. We are usually very slow. We are slow to respond. What we present is often not very gripping, difficult to understand. But we see on the internet that only too often theses are taken for granted without being checked or verified. And this results also in a kind of loss of trust in journalism that many people speak about, even though there is no real evidence for that. There are a number of surveys that have looked into this topic and my colleagues from Munich also looked into it, and there is no real evidence of this loss of trust that many people speak about. So maybe if you just keep on talking about it, people will eventually believe it. Another example, echo chambers, filter bubble. That seems to be a fact. That's the way it is presented. People who try to substantiate that empirically have a very hard job. There may be certain tendencies. People like to get in touch with each other. They connect more easily. But we cannot really talk about a disintegration of the public sphere or the general audience. It is usually the big mass media that still sort of provide this link between the different audiences. It would be difficult to explain such phenomena like the hate comments without stipulating that they leave their filter bubble from time to time. Let me now continue with the third part of my talk, and I'd like to focus on that a little bit longer. The question is, does the digital society get from the internet what it expects? So I'll try to sort of position ourselves and taking stock after 20 years. If we were to talk about profit or losses, gains or losses, where are the opportunities and where are the risks of the internet? First question we need to ask is, is the benchmark against which we try to assess it? The society as such cannot wish for something. They can only choose a proxy or a representative who would then say that the one or the other is desirable. So the question is, how can we develop good benchmarks? There are theories, normative theories of the public sphere that describes how this works. There are participatory and other approaches. We often talk about the public value that is discussed, particularly in connection with the public broadcasters, a mandate that they have, the mandate clearly describes what their purpose is. I would like to refer to a catalogue of values, which I consider to be a synthesis of all innovative deliberations of free and democratic values that can be described. Then it's important to also use them as the benchmark, so to speak, for the empirical research and sort of tick them off whether they are met or not. I don't want to talk about the justification of the individual values and the weighing of them. But the question is, what have we achieved? I'd like to present to you eight values and I'd like to try to position ourselves where we are today. If you look at literature, then there is always an optimistic and a pessimistic view on these respective values and the question is, what dominates? First question, freedom. Did the internet give us more freedom? John Perry Barlow said in the mid-1990s that there is a declaration of independence of a cyberspace. He declared it as a free space where governments or companies should not have an influence on. He thought this would be impossible anyway. It's a bit farewell to this idea because we know now that this is no longer the case. The NSA scandal showed us this very clearly. Mr. Muganov said that the internet is a very powerful tool of suppression. Freedom House that tries to measure the freedom on the internet recently said in 2017 that in only 16 out of 65 countries, the internet can be called free. The second value I would like to discuss is that of equality. Again, huge expectations to the internet and at first glance the internet seems to comply. The idea that those who so far did not have such a good access to the internet, that the underprivileged now have better opportunities because the internet is provided for free, it is easily accessible and this question of equality or inequality has always two sides to it. It has this side and the communicative side. So who can actually join into a public debate and form public opinion? When we talk about digital division, there are quite a number of empirical studies. So the technical access to the internet, that is a question that has been answered. 90% of people under 14 years of age use the internet on a daily basis. What we focus on more now today is the question of how is the internet used? Who seeks political information on the internet? Who uses the opportunities to speak out publicly and try to form public opinion? But we also know from studies that there are divisions in the participation. It is not enough to just utter your views and there has been a study on it with the result that the focus on the audience and the internet is even bigger than with the traditional mass media and he also looked at political blogs and he found that usually it's graduates from elite universities or top managers who participate in these fora, people who already in the past could exert a certain political influence. This is all with a question mark. The third question deals with diversity. At first glance we think that everyone can participate. So there should be a lot of freedom of opinion. However, on the other hand, we see that there are lots of reasons why the usage and also the offers are limited. For instance, we see there is a lot of core orientation. Editorials look at one another. They take a look at what matters in different online newspapers. What should they write about today? And in the blogosphere we hardly ever see new topics, but they deal with topics that others have dealt with in the classic media already. Therefore, we do not have as much diversity as we would like to have. And last but not least, it also depends on ourselves. The repertoire of the users of Internet is very limited. You use the same websites over and over again. I do not look for new ones. This also holds true for journalists who usually only use the easy way and do not dig deeper. The next point is the power of opinion. Of course, this is not a value as you will see in a few minutes. Generally, in media politics, we think that there is no concentration or should be no concentration of the power of opinion. On the Internet, however, and this has been expected so that the power is well distributed. However, this is questionable. On the one hand, we see that the intermediary aspects, which is a central point of our debate, are vital. They have influence on opinion building and do matter. Therefore, they can gain a lot of power. Donald Trump, for instance, has more than 40 million followers. This, then, is a kind of new persuasion strategy. This was also seen during the last election. We could not really estimate how important these aspects really are, for instance, well-distributed fake news or block information and social bots. The next point is about the integration or the erosion of the audience. For democracy, it matters that we focus on the same topics. We need forums in order to discuss political issues. This can be seen in public broadcasting and state public broadcasting especially because this is their mandate. However, we now see a certain erosion of the audience. The empirical studies do not underline this when it comes to the passive and the active component. The passive component states that we only look at what we think is correct. By our own choice, we basically act. The other component is the filter bubble, which happens in the background and is protected by algorithms and works automatically. We do not yet have any empirical proof for this. These are things that we need to keep observing in the long term. We need to keep looking at this, but we do not yet have any empirical proof. Now, I would like to talk about the quality of information. This also is vital. The professional journalism so far made sure that we have a neutral, relevant and current information. The professional journalism is in an economic crisis, as we all know. However, we do not have any empirical proof for this either. We cannot prove that there is a reduction, a loss in quality of this information. However, we also see new innovative approaches, such as constructive journalism, web reports, and all kinds of new forms of journalism. I think there are quite a few experiments currently. However, media economists say that there will be a major problem, because not only the audience distributes elsewhere, but they do not read the professional journalism articles anymore. So this might lead to further losses. Citizens, laymen, and non-professionals are currently filling these gaps and might do so in the future as well. Now, I would like to talk about the quality of the discourse. There were major expectations to the Internet. There was a certain utopia that this would be a major forum in which everyone could participate, organized in a democratic way, where citizens could now agree upon things. Throughout the last years, we have seen the negative aspects by using the criteria for deliberative quality and rationality and coherence. We can see that there are certain limits to this. We need to ask ourselves how we can improve the quality of these discourses. Anonymous behavior, no social connections, the pressure to adapt to the existing opinion are all aspects of the Internet, which are not part of a deliberate discourse. Schweiger wrote about this in his book about the silent citizen. There's hardly anything that we can do against populist strategies and statements online. These statements are not filtered anymore, which leads to the fact that these persuasion strategies that I talked about can be implemented very well. My last point in this area is security or being open to being vulnerable. We see certain risks such as cyber war, cyber terrorism, cyber espionage and other aspects. State interventions that are meant to increase security often oppose the freedom of the citizens. I might have focused too much on the negative aspects. We said that we wanted to look at the ambivalence of the Internet. It's not all only negative, especially due to this shapeability of the Internet. We can try to take a different turn. This is the major challenge that we should face. This is the last part of my presentation as well. First, I would like to take a step back and talk about a time in which a lot was controlled. People thought that the media could be used in a way to serve the public good. In the 70s and 80s, when the cable and satellite new technologies were to be introduced, politicians thought that these technologies should first be tested in pilot projects in specific cities with a small number of households. Scientists should observe these pilot projects and present their results afterwards. Based on these results, the politicians wanted to decide if the citizen should be confronted with this. There were plenty of these cable pilot projects, but it was not possible to implement it in this way because the new technology was introduced before the studies were presented. It was an illusion already back then to estimate what the results would be and wait for the results. This holds true even more for the Internet. This is for the Internet. We see that there are developments happening which we can hardly control. But now it is up to us to think about how to use better instruments in order to shape the Internet. The first point has to do with science. We need to be able to explain what is happening online. We need to develop methods and approaches which allow us getting back to my field and communication studies. We've had very simple models for the Internet with the mass media and the audience. It was only a one-way street. Certain effects could only be seen among certain parts of the audience. This could be observed and studies could be evaluated. This is how we calculated and observed effects. However, this cannot be applied to the Internet. There are not simple casualties that we can use for this. I already talked about the return of the mass before. The recipient has become a user who communicates for themselves. We have long communication chains. When looking at the Internet, this mainly has to do with complex systems. For instance, networking, self-organization, dynamics, non-linear effects, butterfly effects, for instance. You might know this from popular literature where these phenomena are described. We can see similar things online. We need to start describing them and understanding them by implementing network analyses and trying to understand these chains. There are certain first approaches for this. Actually quite an old approach which already considers these different aspects. This definitely is a major challenge. We also need to work together with experts from the field of informatics who can help us deal with this enormous amount of data in order to observe it better and receive better results. However, this is only the first phase. We have started certain research on Twitter because taking a look at the tweets is quite easy. However, we have not yet started to observe the whole online audience. The next question that we ask should deal with the tasks that we tackle. It's not about a control by others anymore, but power is distributed differently. Each and everyone who participates in it also has a certain responsibility, and especially the intermediaries have received a lot of power. There's no need to talk about the current discussions, for instance in Germany about the Network Enforcement Act. However, there definitely are different versions of distributing responsibility, which is quite complex. The recipients definitely are a major point, and then we need to ask ourselves what measures we can take. I don't think it is our task to give certain... to tell people how to act. This is not what science is meant to do. Many of these measures are difficult to foresee. We see nowadays that we need more leeway for experiments. The design of a simple block or the control by others are all important aspects, especially journalism must play a vital role. We need to start an information management that has not been necessary before the beginning of the Internet. You might know the youth offer of certain German state public broadcasters, which offer certain theories, certain shows for young people. And they do so in order to simply try new things. This interactive and participative interaction research is important for our goal and in order to design new offers. The term piecemeal engineering states that we cannot shape the future as a whole, but only go step by step. We need to change our approaches once we realize that something does not work. Over Schiemann wrote a book about the decision society. He said that in dependence of the complexity of a situation, you can implement a certain rationality. He offers lots of possible solutions in his book. I would now like to end my speech in order to have a sufficient time for our discussion. I do not want to talk about further recipients at this point. So I've tried to give you the bigger picture about the special characteristics of the Internet. I also try to describe the current state of the Internet and give certain solutions. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Mr. Neubeger, for this introduction, for this broad overview of your field of expertise. I would now like to get back to a few things that you have mentioned and maybe later on ask some more general questions. Before, as I have already mentioned, you can participate and ask questions either here in the room or on Twitter. Mr. Neubeger, you talked about the presumptive loss of trust happening in the media. The media usually are the biggest critics of media itself. I think I remember a study from England where the radio was considered especially positive, much better than one had thought. Lots of trust does not really exist. And you said the Internet can be shaped by everyone. However, looking at the biggest social network and we all know what we're talking about and think about what has happened there, for instance, that the change in the news feed meaning that media is not included in it anymore. Or as they have said, we will focus on local news because this is supposed to encourage people to participate locally. Then one could ask the following, isn't this controlled by somebody else? It's not shaped by the user, but somebody has a monopoly on it. And thereby the participation actually decreases. What do you think about this? Well, to talk about this thesis of the loss of trust, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to go more in depth into this. Institutions such as journalism have a comparably low level of trust. I remember the figures for journalism quite well. It has been the same for centuries. The trust in journalism has not been very high. And we now see a major, not a major decrease. It basically remains the same. There are plenty of studies, for instance, the Eurobarometer and also other studies in Germany. One was recently conducted by colleagues in Mainz, which underline an interesting result. On the one hand, they could show that there is a group which trusts journalism deeply. However, on the other hand, there is a group which doesn't and this group increases. So there is a decreasing group of people who are somehow in the middle. This study has shown a certain polarisation. This might be led back to the discussion itself because people think about if they should trust journalism or not. This is quite a well differentiated study. In Germany, we see a level as high as never before. The last study from Edelman, this barometer of trust, shows that Germany, also in comparison to other countries, has a quite high trust in professional journalism. But the trust in other media, in social networks, is quite low. There's another point that, however, this has been the same in Germany before, hasn't it? The skepticism is quite high compared to the United States, for instance. Well, those people who do not trust journalism anymore retreat to social media. There's one quite interesting point from a study by Jan Müller. He found out, which is quite interesting and counterintuitive, actually, because he found out that in authoritarian states, the trust in media tends to be higher than in democratic states. His explanation is the following. In democracies, you have a diversity of media, and this media is questioned all the time. Nobody really knows who to trust anymore. This is exactly the situation in which we as responsible citizens should start to think for ourselves. Therefore, I think a maximum amount of trust in media is not necessarily good, because this is the case when all media report the same, and nobody differs anymore. Therefore, we should not only look at the amount of trust, but also ask other questions. I talked about securing the quality of the discourse, and I would like to connect this to the complex systems that you mentioned. The easy models of Habermas and others that you mentioned do not work anymore. We are faced with much more complex systems. So, how does it work in these complex systems, systems that are not linear anymore? How can we ensure quality of discourse in these systems? How can we regulate this without retreating to a top-down model? By reducing the complexity to answer your question with Lohmann. I think you can make arrangements where this proper discourse is being held, just to give you a rough idea. I think there is no need that every time everyone may join into the debate, because this causes the problem of lack of coherency, that people with very different views and motivation discuss very controversially. What we had in the past, and this is the comparison I'd like to make, is that it is already a huge gain if we have a group of 100 or 150 people who are sort of representative for the general public and have different views on a particular topic. If you bring these people together, of course, it's a pre-selected group. You have to know them before and let them discuss. In such a setup, the discourse might be really good better, because you can also have active moderators. As we know them from the radio and television, I know about an analysis of the quality of German media, and it talks about the common trees. More than 100 common trees were looked at. But there was not a single contribution by a journalist. So the editors, the journalists, did not join into the debate. And I think that's not a good idea. And you can also conduct field experiments and look at different arrangements and just wait and see what happens. This is what I tried to address when I talked about the joy of experimenting. Of course, that is also an issue of resources. Not everybody, not every agency or organization is in the position to give people the time and the resources to do that. But that is maybe one of the tasks that I referred to. Well, if I look at Deutschlandfunk radio, for example, that is something that is moderated in a very different way than Spiegel online is presented. Where people are warned, stay out of this, do not interfere any longer. The crowd will do the rest. So do not interfere, do not get involved. Well, I think the understanding of a journalist's role also will have to change because they need to begin to interact with their audience. Once they have finished their article, this is not the end of it. They need to engage in a conversation with their readership or their audience. That is the future. This will also be an important connecting link to the audience. I think this top-down approach, this journalism from the front, we tell you how you need to understand the world is not a very helpful approach. So journalism will need to change. It is also very time-consuming as a free journalist. I cannot really do this. I can only do this as an employed journalist. You referred to this group of 100 to 200 people who could be a representative audience. How will you bring these people together? What kind of regulating mechanisms can we use? Would they be served as a kind of a gatekeeper that you didn't mention before? Well, of course, we would need to optimise the framework conditions. If you look at Habermas and his criteria for deliberations, a number of criteria, that also contradicts themselves. There is a contradiction between the openness to everybody. Everybody can join in and that every opinion can be uttered at any time. And this contradicts certain timings for the discourse. Rationality is an important aspect that you listen to other lines of reasoning and that you qualify your own judgement. There is always a certain tension that is not easily dissolved. There are two extremes and we have the gate in between that allows everybody to join into the debate. And then maybe we can have the commentaries as on the internet. That is one approach. Or we say, well, there is only journalists can comment on that. I think we need to experiment more with these. One experiment could be that we select a group of people not completely at random. It should be specialised people. They should have an interest. They should be representative. In the U.S., for example, we have deliberative polls. That was even in the times before the internet. People were asked as responsible citizens that were taken seriously. They really wanted to know what they think. And that was a good experiment to see how people discuss with each other. Well, deliberation is an important notion with Habermas. I think the main difference is between Habermas and Habermas. Habermas says deliberation is something where you do not necessarily need institutional players. Worth has a different view. And I think this is still the crux. What is an institution? What is a non-institutional player? So how can you provide the necessary diversity in this sort of excerpt? Is this old-fashioned for the discussion that we have today? I do not really see the contradiction between Habermas and what you have just proposed. Well, I tried to argue with Habermas and to follow his line of reasoning. His ideal notion is a bottom-up development. The starting point should be not organized citizens than civil society representatives all the way up to the political parties who are then to take up certain topics and discuss them in Parliament. So he has a sort of a chain of different levels and he argues that we need to start with this informal sector. And the question is how can you implement that on the Internet? We do not really have a full view of the Internet audience. We do not really know who that is. We sometimes have small groups, sometimes we have a big audience. And sometimes we have a situation where the mass media also dominating the Internet and their sort of influence trickles down to the bottom. Habermas was relatively optimistic. He thought that we could make it happen. What happens in the small social blocks with the participation of the citizens could be raised to higher levels step by step and make the whole process more permeable. That was the ideal view of it. Well, how can this work in practice? I think this is a mediation role for professional journalists. They have to draw people's attention to discussions on the Internet but it is also a call for other people who are somewhere in between so that this approach from the bottom to the top actually works. I think many people are worried about the echo chambers and the filter bubbles that you briefly touched upon. You said that from a scientific point of view there was no real evidence for that. You said we keep looking for them but we cannot find them in empirical studies. Why do we feel that the filter bubbles promote the disintegration? Why do we have this feeling that they have such a strong impact yet you cannot find them? Can you explain this effect? Why do we believe in them? Well, in the political arena we usually reason with certain theses and while the term echo chamber comes up, I didn't want to reject them all. There is this principle that usually like-minded people tend to clock together but they are not completely separate from the rest of the world. So I would only want to qualify this isolationist tendencies. It's not really a bad thing if people stay within their own group. If this were the case we wouldn't have these hate comments, these explosions of hate somewhere on the Internet. They only happen because people leave their filter bubble and of course there is a lot of criticism in the media and they have a lot of prejudice vis-à-vis the media. Maybe we should again look at the past. Echo chambers were there before. It was the people sitting around a table in a pub sharing the same opinion and agreeing with each other and this is something that is only transferred onto the Internet. Maybe it's just things that we didn't see as such in the past. When we talk about the hate speeches we come to responsibilities. We talked about the Network Enforcement Act very briefly. Well, we have here a lecture series that also wants to look at a European perspective of the topics that we are discussing. When it comes to the Network Enforcement Act this is a German Act that is much stricter at a German level than what is called for at European level. The Minister of Justice was very firm on that. At the European level the policy is much more liberal. What do you think? I think I said at the beginning, at the end of my talk, it's something that we simply need to test and try. The Network Enforcement Act, we could see that at the end of last year how this can be instrumentalized by politicians. So that needs to be discussed. What we need is transparency, we need to understand the filters and the criteria used and we need to be able to adjust and to question the decisions. So on the one hand we want to do something against these hate comments and the intermediaries indeed need to be held accountable. But on the other hand when we talk about censorship we must not overdo it and we must also be aware of the possibility of political instrumentalization of this whole process. So this is an open-ended process. We do not really know where we are going. We need to test it experimentally. That means to be able to adjust them quickly if necessary and not wait for the political process that may be a rather lengthy one. What I'd like to open the discussion to the audience, we have two microphones and Mrs. Werner will observe our Twitter feeds. So here in row two we have a gentleman who would like to take the microphone. Well, thank you very much. A very inspiring and exciting talk. You talked a lot about the public sphere, about audiences and in doing so you talked about democracy. Well the topic is democracy and public sphere but I'd like to focus on democracy now. Do you think there are peculiarities and ruptures when it comes to the democratic process in connection with the internet or which problems do you see as a result of the internet used by different people and which options do we have to use the tools to improve democratic processes? Well I think one aspect I touched upon in rather detail that is how public sphere goes hand-in-hand with democracy. Democracy is not just about finding a majority but it's also about forming an opinion. Citizens are to understand the pros and cons of issues and I think this is something that we discussed at length. So this is about how the internet touches upon transparency and democracy. Another point, this is something that you could also do on the internet in terms of e-voting for example and of course you can also look at the political institutions and ask which changes could occur there. For example more transparency of parliamentary discussions. I think the internet commission was quite a role model here by making public all their documents. It's important that even in the later phases of the political discussion which usually take place behind closed doors to have some sort of access to information and help continue to shape or form the opinion of the people. I'd like to focus on the positive aspects first. Then of course there are open data where you can gain better insight into administrative work. Again there are a lot of options for more transparency and to take the responsible citizen more seriously. This is maybe just to add to what I said before. I've seen more hands raised but of course I didn't spot them. Well where are we? I think I saw a lady in row 5 and then immediately behind her. Well the topic is democracy and the public sphere in the digital society. I recently attended an event. I did not control it myself but it was about fake news and a professor said that the untrue statements were much more liked before the US presidential election than the 20 true statements. So more people must have shared and liked the untrue comments. So this must have an impact on our societies. And I have another question because I also feel that I myself am in a filter bubble. I mean isn't Google sort of almighty because it really controls what we do, all our requests, all our searches are stored and the algorithms are applied and the way information is displayed that is something that you can actually purchase. I know my question is somewhat confused but I hope you can sort it out. Yes first on Google you can buy advertisements but there is a certain control in Germany and has been for the last 15 years. That's the voluntary self-control how to indicate exactly that something is an advert in order not to be confused by the consumer. Also with a view to Google the question of the personalization there are tests where different people searched for the same terms and came up with different results. My colleague Birgit Stark in Mainz placed 100,000 requests with Google together with her team and depending on the usual search behavior people came to different results. So this is the empirical answer that we have but it's difficult to actually prove the filter bubble effect. Of course you are correct in stating that a lot of data is collected and stored and we do not exactly know what Google does with these data, whether they are doing field experiments or whether they are already controlling us with the data. There are some studies on Facebook already so we have some insight into that for example that you can actually control moods depending on whether you provide more positive or more negative news feed and that has an impact on the follow-on comments by the people. Another study was on the I voted button so you could signal to your friends that you did vote and sort of inspire them to vote as well. So this may be a tool to influence possibly election results. There is a similar study on Google search in a lab experiment. There is indeed the possibility to manipulate something if people search for candidates for an election and depending on whether you post positive or negative statements first this can have an influence on how the people vote. We as academic researchers have not enough influence. We do not have any insight into the data that Google collects. We do not know what they do with the data and we do not know which research they themselves conduct. They do have quite a lot of experts dealing with it but we do not know a lot about it. We have a couple of more questions in the audience. Albert Reinhardt, I have been following this discussion for quite some time I think we as a society as representatives of culture seem not to see is to learn about social phenomena. So far we always thought that we need to adapt to developments but now we are faced with a new situation. The older generation is somewhat lost. They do not know which way to go. So it is not just learning and storing the information but now you have a new approach to learning, open learning we call it. The algorithms are already being optimized so the question is why shouldn't young people that would be the elite according to Luhmann the elite of the young people who are sufficiently different from the existing society if they as an age group would engage at different political level, at local level, regional level etc. If they were to provide motions or bills for political decisions it is about political interaction, political involvement and that is something that we do not see in many schools these days. So without knowing the system and being familiar with the system I easily feel left behind and if I am not taught to work with the system at school then people do not grow up to be responsible citizens. I think it was quite reasonable what you said. I am not an educational scientist. So I do not really know how learning democracy can be done at school but I think the internet offers opportunities to get to know political processes in a playful way and to start at a very early age maybe in a game situation so that young people learn more about democracy early on but that is not my field of expertise. Let's have a look at Twitter and our tweets Mrs. Werner, you need a microphone. All those who joined us through the live stream also should be heard. Everybody? No, we have selected questions. Question of principle Mr. Neuberger, can you actually talk about the internet as a medium? Can we distinguish online and offline world? Well, one of my favorite questions, is it indeed a medium? There are different views on that. I think this debate is rather irrelevant. I said it in my talk, you can discuss technological and institutional media. Some people may say it is a technological platform but what it is actually transformed into and what it is used for is so heterogeneous that basically the internet is a variety of individual different media. We have the field of professional journalism on the internet. We have social media, etc. But usually only describes what is its present object of research and probably you would have to come up with a model, a layered model. Second question, can we distinguish the offline and online world? Well, I think this again is a simplification that we can no longer use. We see these two worlds merging and also in the past people never used the terms correctly. Online means that there is a constant connection between sender and receiver. So basically radio and TV were also online media whereas a newspaper would have been regarded as an offline media. Today people use offline media to discuss everything that is not the internet. There's another question. What incentives can we make so that social media offers change their behavior because often they have a certain business model? How can we monitorize forums? This is for somebody who is the moderator and ensures high level discussions. Are business models possible? I doubt it. There are very few examples where people paid in order to participate in a discussion. I think this is problematic because it enables certain limitations. Only specific citizens can participate in these models. But this is in contrast to journalistic articles. Usually there was a newspaper edition which could be bought by the citizen and who then received a final journalistic product. He was willing to pay for it. What about a discussion that goes on and on for weeks and months? Therefore, I think that we should think about other ways of financing. I talked about this when talking about the public broadcasting, where this is a major task as well. I think these forums should be moderated independently. This should not be the task of parties or of other political institutions. I think it's good to have independent operators of these platforms. There's another question from Ute. Your descriptions dealt with the culture sphere here and its institutions. What perspective for studies would you have thinking broader? International comparisons are restricted to Europe, Northern America, parts of Asia and other continents are hardly ever considered. This is indeed a deficit. At our institute in Munich we have an international survey of words of journalism. Harnisch has developed the biggest network, I think, with 80 countries involved. They all received the same questions and therefore this survey allowed to interview journalists everywhere in the world. This is what we've seen for journalism and it might create better results. Of course, one might assume that in certain cultural areas and also language areas, the answers are restricted to a certain field. However, there are different levels of outreach. The United States are often at the forefront when it comes to using social media. Germany is some rather left behind. There are surveys in 36 countries by the Reuters Institute. This is quite interesting looking at their results. However, in Northern America and Europe and Southern America and Asian countries we see that they also participate in these surveys and this gives us a better insight into what's happening. I would like to allow another question from the room before going back to Twitter quickly. We have around 12 minutes left before our time is up. I will need three minutes at the end in order to summarise a bit and end our discussion. Please one question from the room. Alexander, space from the Pirates Party, I have one quick question. You talked about the filter bubbles. I think the internet gives us the opportunity to inform yourself about an opposite opinion. You're not only in the print filter bubble, you can also click elsewhere and find out more. Have you done research on how often this happens? This is basically the counter thesis. We do not retreat into the echo chamber and only discuss with like-minded people and support one another. Yes, there are surveys about this. There's a new study by Fletcher and Nielsen. They worked with the data from the Reuters Institute. It was based on Google. There are other Facebook studies which state that Facebook does confront us with topics that we did not look for. It's called serendipity effect and it also depends on how you use the internet. The internet can provide a certain surprise effect for us because we keep finding out about things that we were not looking for. Therefore, I tried to quantify this aspect. I think we also need to differentiate better in service. We need to differentiate between groups. Take into account the socio-demographic background, the behavior and attitudes. We can't generalize here. There are surveys describing what you just said. Is there another question in the room? Thank you very much for this interesting lecture. I have one very quick question. Does the digital society produce new inclusion or exclusion models? Or are the existing models reproduced? What can the comparative media research contribute to not only keep this aspect as an abstract, but also take a look at individual media and state that the all-inclusive approach of the internet does not hold true? That is what would interest me with respect to the socio-demographic background, and not only the political perspective of digital divide, which is not empirical enough. Well, the research on digital divide is quite differentiated already. The question of political participation was something that I talked about as well. However, since the internet does offer something on every topic and gives us opportunity for every way of living, we must ask these questions. Everyone can find, for instance, a cheap journey online. These are also aspects that concern equality and inequality. How do we use this medium? I'm afraid I do not know the majority of the surveys. The inclusion and exclusion models are reproduced, definitely. Social-demographic background does count, and what also counts is the differentiated behavior and attitude towards internet. In the field of political participation, we see that young people, independent from their level of education, are very much involved. Their educational background does not have much of an influence. So, all in all, I think we could say, considering especially one study in Germany about the political participation from Emma Fuller-Wolling, who did very profound research on this, and they state that lots of things are reproduced, and there's only a minor group of participating active people, because the internet does not allow everyone to participate actively all of a sudden. That's not the case. I would like to allow one last question from Twitter before I have the last two and summarize our lecture. The media does play a role here because it only allows short questions. One user would like to know what potential would an internet ID have in order to limit anti-democratic statements. I'm rather skeptical. As far as I'm concerned, I think this means that you don't act anonymously, that you must declare who you are, you must show your identity before you can contribute. Generally, it's good to show who you are when acting online. This does increase responsibility. So you do not simply have the opportunity of leaving a certain situation without any consequences. However, I do not want to go too much into detail. We know situations where it can be negative to show your own name because you can be identified. For instance, in authoritarian states where you are threatened when declaring who you are. Or sometimes it's enough to show your status. So no, that is not a solution for me. There's another question from Facebook. What is the new role of research against the background of alternative facts and fake news? This answer could take two hours. Last Friday, I was at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. There was a working party which dealt with this question with the new digital relations between public and democracy. Of course, they tried to analyze the problems. First, the attacks against research, which make us assume that there is a loss of trust. There are alternative truths, conspiracy theories and others online. These are probably defensive reactions. On the other hand, we should not forget the opportunities, both for research itself, because there are new forms of publishing, of discussing, which increase quality and lead to more transparency. This is also a way of having citizens participate more in politics. But this also influences the relations between science and the broader public. At this point, I would like to underline the positive aspects. We have the opportunity to allow citizens to inform themselves better. For instance, they read a certain paper before going to the doctor and misunderstand something. But they can inform themselves better. And there are also moral questions that are closely connected to a lot of topics. These questions can then be discussed with a broader audience and together with citizens. I have two quick questions. Maybe you can answer them as quickly as possible. This is a question regarding the future. We always try to think about the power of a decision of the individual. We talked about the joy of trying experiments of lawmakers, for instance, when it comes to comments of journalists and users, or when it comes to new audiences, which are only part audiences. All this was described quite in detail. How do you do it? Do you comment on things? Do you participate? Yes. This is quite a complex question for me. There are colleagues of mine who do so quite intensively. I helped a graduate work on a PhD thesis, which dealt with the presence on Facebook and Twitter. And ResearchGate, for instance. In these social networks, it's not only about underlining your publication, but also about networking. I would like to underline that, yes, this is important, and young people seem to think that this matters for their career, but this also includes certain problems. You think you create social capital by networking and connecting to others and also being present 24-7. This is supposed or considered to have a very positive influence on the final result. I've understood that you yourself try to stay back a bit, but the young people shouldn't. There's one last question that I would like to ask. You quoted Castells the first lecture that we had. It's not the medium forming the message, but vice versa. Many people, ordinary people, do not necessarily or sometimes do suffer from hate speech, not only public people do. So Facebook has an influence on them as well. I would say the step from text to link to video does play a certain role. The video can have a more direct connection and effect. It can also increase the potential of feeling connected and of addiction. All the things that you propose, these experiments for shaping the audience can they be implemented in a monopolistic society? You mentioned two aspects. On the one hand, the role of effects and in what way they are supported by visualization. On Twitter you only have 140, oh now it's 280 letters that you can use. So this leads to a certain pointedness. These platforms therefore support very emotional, also aggressive messages because they generate more clicks. Economically speaking, this can be beneficial. This is exactly the risk that we see these days. We are confronted with these media. We did some surveys on in what way public broadcast and journalism use these activities and confront themselves with this limit. 40% less traffic is what we have already mentioned. Yes, this is what we talked about, but also regarding the consequences. These social media decide upon the restrictions and limits. This is how you reach young people, this is how you reach the citizens. For instance, thinking about the amount of money that was invested in a European search engine. I think there are reasons for why this is not happening, but we should be careful. Not everything should be done on these platforms. When it comes to the future algorithms and artificial intelligence, we will hear a discourse by Elena Esposito from Bielefeld. She will talk about the theory of systems and the future of algorithms. This is something that we talked about in brief at this lecture as well. Before ending this lecture, I would like to give you a little gift. It's a black box, maybe a grey box, rather. I would like to give this to you and thank you very much for this very interesting lecture. Christoph Neuberger, thank you very much.