13. November 2014, 19:00 Uhr, 

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW)

Jägerstraße 22/23

10117 Berlin

Am 13. November diskutiert Einstein Junior Fellow Anita Traninger den Stellenwert der Unparteilichkeit im Zeitalter von Internet und Social Media. Die Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.

Impartiality and the Internet

Round Table with Anita Traninger, Einstein Junior Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin

To some, impartiality means abstaining from judgement; to others, it means a certain quality of a judgement. The concept emerged in the seventeenth century as a significant value in different spheres of society. It was sustained by the philosophy of Leibniz and Kant. Today Kant has more than 40.000 “likes” on Facebook. However, “liking” as well as “trolling” on the web 2.0 points towards an emerging culture of debate that is more given to an over-simplified judgement and heated comment than to an engagement with and the discussion of dissenting views. How has the idea of impartiality changed with the emergence of the Internet? Is impartiality as an editorial judgement more and more replaced by the idea of free availability of information? What does and should impartiality mean in the context of social media? 

The round table will be introduced and chaired by Anita Traninger, Einstein Junior Fellow and director of the research project „Towards a genealogy of the notion of impartiality“.

Panel Participants

Dominique Cardon 
Sociologist in the Laboratory of uses of France Télécom R&D, associate professor at the University of Marne la vallée (LATTS) and expert on social media and the public sphere

Antonio A. Casilli
Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at Télécom ParisTech with specialization on computer-mediated communication and politics

Horst Simon
Professor of Linguistics, Freie Universität Berlin

Markus Hesselmann
Editor-in-chief online, Der Tagesspiegel