Centre for Internet Studies, Aarhus University, 25 years
 

Much has happened in 25 years and September 19^th we take stock of the development, looking back and forwards with a program featuring some of the most well-known Internet researchers, including Charles Ess and Axel Bruns, both former presidents of the Association of Internet Researchers.

Throughout the day we will have keynotes, a plenary panel and we will celebrate 25 years of Internet research with a reception at 4 pm. Full program below:

Place: INCUBA Science Park, Store Auditorium, Åbogade, DK-8200 Aarhus N. 
No reservation necessary for lectures, but for catering planning needs, please write to linaa@cc.au.dk if you plan to attend the reception.

PROGRAM:

10.00 Welcome! Jakob Linaa Jensen, Director of Centre for Internet Studies

10.05 Opening keynote.
Charles Ess, Professor emeritus, Oslo and Aarhus Universities: Will the Future have a History? Questions to Current and Future Internet Researchers 

11.30 The origin and history of CFI. Niels Brügger, co-founder of CFI, Aarhus University. 11.45 Plenary panel.
Anja Bechmann, Jakob Linaa Jensen, Jesper Tække (Aarhus University). Looking back and forwards. The Internet of today. Opportunities and challenges.

13.00 Lunch break

14.00 Keynote and open lecture.
Axel Bruns, Professor in the Digital Media Research
Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia: The Filter in Our (?) Heads: Digital Media and Polarisation

16.00 Reception (Lunch room, Nygaard building, Helsingforsgade 12, 8200 Aarhus N.)

Charles Ess. Will the Future have a History? Questions to Current and Future Internet Researchers
Internet history centers on modern technology as emancipatory – a topos central to 1960s’ “liberation technology” and early optimism that computers and networked communication would foster community and democracy – all now significantly overshadowed by “digital authoritarianism.” First recognizing how diverse cultural norms and communicative preferences shape the design, implementation, and responses to internet-facilitated communication foregrounds the question: how far do these technologies, especially in an age of tech giants and “techno-feudalism,” still threaten us with a “computer-mediated colonization”?

Still more ancient global philosophical / anthropological assumptions about being human – from 1990s’ “virtual communities” through feminist / posthumanist / post*de-colonial / transhumanist critiques, and interactions with e.g., virtual / AI- assistants, social media, sex robots, and LLMs – further undergird our ethics. Specific examples elucidate the ethical (and political) frameworks these diverse assumptions entail. I will emphasize relational selves and their correlative capability / virtue ethics and ethics of care.

I will also touch on matters of analogue / digital, scarce / ubiquitous computing, Internet Research Ethics, and “Digital Religion” and the on-going problem of “presentism,” our focus on the rapidly unfolding present and future – at the risk of obscuring or erasing our knowledge of the relevant pasts that have led us here.

Bio
Charles Ess is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo and former Professor of Media Studies at University of Aarhus (Denmark), where he is an honorary member of Centre for Internet Studies. He is well known for his pioneering work in digital ethics, information and communication technology (ICT), and cross-cultural perspectives on communication. His research has consistently addressed ethical issues in new media environments, including privacy, identity, surveillance, democracy, and the role of digital technologies in shaping cultural values. Ess has been a central figure in the development of computer and information ethics, with a particular emphasis on comparative and intercultural approaches. Among his key publications are Digital Media Ethics (2009, 2nd ed. 2014), which has become a foundational text in the field, and Philosophy of Information Communication Technology (2006). He has also edited volumes on Internet research ethics and contributed extensively to debates on democracy, identity, and trust in digital environments. In addition to his scholarly work, Ess has played an important organizational role internationally. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), where he was instrumental in drafting and advancing the AoIR ethical guidelines for Internet research, which continue to shape scholarly practice across disciplines.

Axel Bruns. The Filter in Our (?) Heads: Digital Media and Polarisation
Climate change, Brexit, Trump, COVID, Ukraine: there is hardly a major topic in contemporary public debate online that does not attract heated discussion, entrenched partisanship, widespread misinformation, and conspiracy theorists. Rational, evidence-based contributions often fail to cut through, while affective polarisation is prevalent, and difficult to overcome. The simplistic view of these developments is that digital and social media have disrupted the traditional public sphere, enveloped us all in ideologically homogenous ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and thereby ushered in the post-truth age – but such technologically determinist explanations have been rightly debunked for failing to account for the full complexity of the present moment in public communication. Hyperpartisans and conspiracy theorists, for instance, are abundantly aware of what their opponents think and say, but instinctively, reflexively reject those views: if there is a filter, it is located in their (and equally perhaps in our) heads, not their information feeds. Similarly, if global digital media platforms were predominantly to blame for the decline of societal cohesion and consensus, why are countries like the US considerably more deeply affected while other democracies remain more resilient? While these deep divisions are often misdiagnosed as evidence of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, then, they actually point to pernicious dysfunction at a discursive level: they are evidence of deeply entrenched polarisation and hyperpartisanship. This keynote introduces the concept of destructive polarisation, as a particularly pernicious form of polarisation that is distinguished by a number of distinct symptomatic features, and outlines how we might diagnose these symptoms.

Bio
Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society(2014). His current research focusses on the study of public communication in digital and social media environments, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information, and their implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere; his work draws especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he posts on Mastodon as @snurb@aoir.social and on Bluesky as @snurb.info.