059913 VO Foundations and Methods of Digital Humanism (2024W)

The digital era is a revolution most of us love: It shows a remarkable fit to how we live, think, feel, and dream, with great potential for extension. For most of us, it came more naturally and with much less pain than all our ancestors' industrial, political, or metaphysical revolutions, at least until now. It has been hailed as the harbinger of human creativity, social connectedness, economic opportunities, and, above all, individual freedom. All these achievements - while visible - have developed massive downsides and threats to human societies that have been thriving in dialectic conflicts or competitions between individual freedom and organized, solidarity-based action, institutions, and structures, i.e., democracies: Uncontrolled, global, monopolistic cloud empires exert surveillance capitalism, social connectedness is under threat of being poisoned by manipulation, human actorship faces new challenges, and individual freedom might be deprived of publicly guaranteed institutions like the rule of law or free elections.

“Digital Humanism” describes the movement within a multitude of academic disciplines to understand our society’s digital transformation and its challenges better. Specifically, it aims to understand the impact that novel digital technologies, algorithms, and AI will have on the people, cultures, institutions, and rules within our society; and how the latter do / can / should influence the digital sphere. It is also very much oriented towards creating technologies that ensure, rather than threaten, the democratic foundations of our society. The actual term “Digital Humanism” was coined by the philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin and by the professor of culture Nathalie Weidenfeld in a book they published in 2018, entitled “Digitaler Humanismus: Eine Ethik für das Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligenz” (see https://www.nathalie-weidenfeld.de/digitaler-humanismus-3/). It was then picked up in 2019 as a call to action entitled “Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism” (see https://caiml.org/dighum/dighum-manifesto/#vienna-manifesto-on-digital-humanism).

This Ringvorlesung aims to highlight the novel movement of Digital Humanism and strongly link it to an already existing long and rich tradition of studying the impact of digital technologies on society in various disciplines. We aim to highlight its multidisciplinary nature by presenting the approach and methods various disciplines bring to the table to create a deep understanding of the effect that digital technology has on society and its democratic institutions.
By acknowledging that digital technologies and their mechanisms are neither external to society nor the entirety of society, we hope to further an intellectual debate about the boundaries and definition of “Digital Humanism”.

It is a unique chance for the student to experience how many disciplines study and test digital technology. In addition to some foundational lectures, we will present nine different case studies: the nine projects funded in the first “Digital Humanism” funding call of the WWTF in 2020.

The units consist of expert lectures and subsequent discussions with students - so you are encouraged to bring your questions, share experiences, express criticism, and identify problems. Detailed information and further learning materials will be provided and announced via the associated Moodle course.

The primary language of instruction is German, but some of the courses are also held in English.