GSSC Seminar Series
08 July 2025
Networked Media Control: Postdigital Publics and Commons
Stephan Packard (University of Cologne)
12:00-13:00
The accelerating fragmentation of public spheres accompanying the rise of social media as well as dark web, dark social, and more recently AI-driven alternative publics joins previous challenges to the Habermasian model of the public sphere, including the plurality of publics, unequal distributions of active and passive accessibility, and the historical contingency and idealisation of a civil public society. This talk reconsiders problems of the public sphere and starts with an approach that foregrounds issues of media control: who controls which communication, how are norms established and enforced, who is included and excluded in which communicative roles, and how are partisan interests naturalised through invisibilised rule-sets? On this basis, it reconsiders current accounts of postdigital transformations of the public spheres as well as their many alternative publics and formulates research questions for an interdisciplinary collaboration that can deal with cultural and positional diversity.
Stephan Packard is Professor for Popular Culture and Its Theories at the University of Cologne. His research interests include popular and pictorial culture and its histories; censorship and other forms of media control; transmediality; narratology; as well as concepts of fiction and virtuality. Recent publications include the joint volumes Being Untruthful. Lying, Fiction, and the Non-Factual (2021, with Fludernik), Comparative Comics Studies (2024, with Bachmann and Blank) as well as the special issue Innovative Methods in Multimodal Comics Research (2024, with Wildfeuer). Packard is among the chief editors of the ongoing interdisciplinary glossary on Digitale Selbstbestimmung (Digital Self-Determination).