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Practicing sovereignty. Digital involvement in times of crises
No full textDigital sovereignty has become a hotly debated concept. The current convergence of multiple crises adds fuel to this debate, as it contextualizes the concept in a foundational discussion of democratic principles, civil rights, and national identities: is (technological) self-determination an option for every individual to cope with the digital sphere effectively? Can disruptive events provide chances to rethink our ideas of society - including the design of the objects and processes which constitute our techno-social realities? The positions assembled in this volume analyze opportunities for participation and policy-making, and describe alternative technological practices before and after the pandemic.This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) under grant no. 16DII126 (“Deutsches Internet-Institut”)
Don’t Shoot the Message: Regulating Disinformation Beyond Content
Get PDFThis paper approaches regulatory strategies against disinformation with two main goals: (i) exploring the policies recently implemented in different legal contexts to provide insight into both the risks they pose to free speech and their potential to address the rationales that motivated them, and (ii) to do so by bridging policy debates and recent social and communications studies findings on disinformation. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework informs both the paper’s scope (anchored on understandings of regulatory strategies and of disinformation) and the analysis of the legitimate motivations for states to establish statutory regulation that aims at disinformation. Departing from this analysis, I suggest an organisation of recently implemented and proposed policies into three groups based on their regulatory target: content, data, and structure. Combining the analysis of these three types of policies with the theoretical framework, I will argue that, in the realm of statutory regulation that aims at disinformation. Departing from this analysis, I suggest an organisation of recently implemented and proposed policies into three groups based on their regulatory target: content, data, and structure. Combining the analysis of these three types of policies with the theoretical framework, I will argue that, in the realm of statutory regulation, state action is better off targeted at data or structure, as aiming at content represents disproportional risks to freedom of expression. Furthermore, content targeted regulation shows little potential to address the structural transformations on the public sphere of communications that, among other factors, influence current practices of production and spread of disinformation
Democratic legitimacy in global platform governance
Get PDFThe goal of this paper is to propose a democratic legitimacy framework for evaluating platform-goverance proposals, and in doing so clarify terms of debate in this area, allowing for more nuanced policy assessments. It applies a democratic legitimacy framework originally created to assess the European Union's democratic bona fides – Vivian Schmidt's (2013) modification of Scharpf's (1999) well-known taxonomy of forms of democratic legitimacy – to various representative platform governance proposals and policies. The first section discusses briefly the issue of legitimacy in internet and platform governance, while the second outlines our analytical framework. The second section describes the three forms of legitimacy that, according to this framework, are necessary for democratic legitimation: input, throughput and output legitimacy. The third section demonstrates our framework's utility by applying it to four paradigmatic proposals/regimes: Facebook's Oversight Board (self-governance regimes); adjudication-focused proposals such as the Manila Principles for Intermediary Liability (rule-of-law-focused regimes); the human-rights-focused framework proposed by then-UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; and the United Kingdom's Online Harms White Paper (domestic regime). Section four describes our four main findings regarding the case studies: non-state proposals seem to focus on throughput legitimacy; input legitimacy requirements are frequently under examined; state regulation is usually side-lined as a policy option; and output legitimacy is a limited standard to be adopted in supranational contexts. We conclude that only by considering legitimacy as a multifaceted phenomenon based in democratic accountability will it be possible to design platform-governance models that will not only stand the test of time, but will also be accepted by the people whose lives they affect
Students’ Acceptance of Technology-Mediated Teaching – How It Was Influenced During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. A Study From Germany
Get PDFIn response to the impending spread of COVID-19, universities worldwide abruptly stopped face-to-face teaching and switched to technology-mediated teaching. As a result, the use of technology in the learning processes of students of different disciplines became essential and the only way to teach, communicate and collaborate for months. In this crisis context, we conducted a longitudinal study in four German universities, in which we collected a total of 875 responses from students of information systems and music and arts at four points in time during the spring–summer 2020 semester. Our study focused on (1) the students’ acceptance of technology-mediated learning, (2) any change in this acceptance during the semester and (3) the differences in acceptance between the two disciplines. We applied the Technology Acceptance Model and were able to validate it for the extreme situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extended the model with three new variables (time flexibility, learning flexibility and social isolation) that influenced the construct of perceived usefulness. Furthermore, we detected differences between the disciplines and over time. In this paper, we present and discuss our study’s results and derive short- and long-term implications for science and practice
Digidem Digest - Issue 34 (February 2021)
No full textThe Digidem Digest literature radar was a monthly curated overview of the latest publications with relevance to the research group "Democracy and Digitalization" at the Weizenbaum Institute. Their research focused around the interrelation of digitalization and democratic self-determination, asking how liberal-democratic societies appropriate digital technologies and how democracy is changing within the digital configuration. The present articles and publications were chosen by observation of leading journals within the field - a list can be found at the end of each newsletter
Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelt in und nach der COVID-19-Krise: Thesen und Handlungsempfehlungen
Get PDFEs gibt Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass die durch die COVID-19-Pandemie ausgelöste Krise zu strukturellen Veränderungen der Arbeitswelt geführt hat, die in engem Zusammenhang mit Digitalisierungsprozessen stehen. Einige Veränderungen sind in industriellen Produktionsprozessen, der mobilen Arbeit und auch der Plattformarbeit zu erwarten. Damit solche Veränderungen sich positiv auf die Arbeitswelt auswirken ist politische Gestaltung gefragt. Beobachtbar ist, dass einige Unternehmen ihre Digitalstrategien überdenken, teils forcieren und vermehrt mit neuen Möglichkeiten experimentieren. Hier ist es notwendig, Betriebsrät_innen und Beschäftigte frühzeitig in die Gestaltung neuer Ansätze einzubinden. Am offensichtlichsten hat sich die Arbeitswelt in der Krise durch die digitale Kommunikation im virtuellen Raum verändert. Menschen die bereits im Homeoffice arbeiten, sind jedoch verschiedenen Schwierigkeiten ausgesetzt. Virulent sind Fragen der Geschlechtergerechtigkeit, die Vermischung von beruflichem und privaten, sowie die Ausstattung des häuslichen Arbeitsplatzes. Aufgrund der Erschütterung der regulären Arbeitsmärkte nahm auch über digitale Plattformen vermittelte Arbeit zu. Die prekären Arbeitsbedingungen der Plattformarbeiter_innen haben sich während der Pandemie noch zugespitzt, gleichzeitig ist international aber eine politische Regulierung der Plattformarbeit in Sicht, die inzwischen auch in Deutschland in Ansätzen stattfindet.This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII111, 16DII112, 16DII113, 16DII114, 16DII115, 16DII116, 16DII117 – „Deutsches Internet-Institut“
Documenting Computer Vision Datasets: An Invitation to Reflexive Data Practices
Get PDFIn industrial computer vision, discretionary decisions surrounding the production of image training data remain widely undocumented. Recent research taking issue with such opacity has proposed standardized processes for dataset documentation. In this paper, we expand this space of inquiry through fieldwork at two data processing companies and thirty interviews with data workers and computer vision practitioners. We identify four key issues that hinder the documentation of image datasets and the effective retrieval of production contexts. Finally, we propose reflexivity, understood as a collective consideration of social and intellectual factors that lead to praxis, as a necessary precondition for documentation. Reflexive documentation can help to expose the contexts, relations, routines, and power structures that shape data
Jahresbericht 2020–2021
No full textUnser Berichtszeitraum fällt in eine Zeit, die einmal mehr im Zeichen der COVID-19-Pandemie stand. Trotz der damit verbundenen Herausforderungen waren die vergangenen Monate für unser Institut besonders ereignisreich und über die Krise hinaus prägend. Mit diesem Jahresbericht möchten wir Sie, im Rückblick, an den wesentlichen Entwicklungen, Forschungsergebnissen und Aktivitäten unseres Instituts teilhaben lassen
Digital democracy
Get PDFFor contemporary societies, digital democracy provides a key concept that denotes, in our understanding, the relationship between collective self-government and mediating digital infrastructures. New forms of digital engagement that go hand in hand with organisational reforms are re-intermediating established democratic settings in open-ended ways that defy linear narratives of demise or renewal. As a first approach, we trace the history of digital democracy against the background of its specific media constellations, describing continuities and discontinuities in the interplay of technological change and aspirations for democratisation. Thereafter, we critically review theoretical premises concerning the role of technology and how they vary in the way the concept of digital democracy is deployed. In four domains, we show the contingent political conditions under which the relationship between forms of democratic selfdetermination and its mediating digital infrastructures evolve. One lesson to learn from these four domains is that democratic self-governance is a profoundly mediated project whose institutions and practices are constantly in flux
Beyond “Industry 4.0”. B2B factory networks as an alternative path towards the digital transformation of manufacturing and work
Get PDFThis article uses theoretical and empirical evidence of variations in digitalized manufacturing to revisit Piore and Sabel’s 1984 work on flexible specialization and to criticize the inherent one-sidedness of the Industry 4.0 discourse. This is juxtaposed with empirical findings on platform-mediated business-to-business factory networks, in which flexibility is facilitated by the digital interconnection of a far-flung network of small-scale manufacturers rather than by sophisticated production technology. The effects on work are equivocal; they entail the potential for a craft-like and skill-intensive paradigm of small-scale manufacturing that can upgrade work, but also for a race to the bottom in price-sensitive industries