The first age of social networks was a gigantic global success with a new form of human interconnectivity and communication, but also dark underbellies of destructive disinformation and propaganda. What can we learn from the first age, about business models, blueprints, algorithms, and echo chambers, and do better in the next?
"Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." – Mark Zuckerberg
(coming more soon)
Digitization offers completely new opportunities for knowledge processing and networking that we as a society can use. This also means leaving the attention economy behind and, for example, placing strategic social megatopics on resubmission. To achieve this, science and journalism need to move closer together to think in terms of joint information platforms.
A media order that emphasizes the remoteness of the media from the state, seeks to secure diversity, protects public-law systems from market power, and seeks to prevent monopolies of opinion as well as economic cartels is still a good foundation for a modern or even technically revolutionary media world. We think future-proof concepts that protect and further develop this foundation.
The digital structural change of the public sphere has radically changed the way we communicate and brought us new challenges – from disinformation to information overload. News literacy, including digital literacy, is thus the new foundation of the knowledge society. We help to implement it from politics to civil society.