Reimagining Social Media – YOUthDIG 06 2023

18 June 2023 | 10:00 - 12:00 EEST
YOU^thDIG 2023 Main programme

Session teaser

Modern information platforms (e.g. social media) have been shaping societies around the world for than 15 years. Yet, their operations have stayed largely unregulated which lead to a poor alignment between them and social norms and values. Representatives of those platforms have also been quite successful in convincing the public that their current form is the definitive form of social media. But is it so? In our session, we will look onto how democratic societies have adopted and aligned themselves with the new forms of media in the past. We will then brainstorm and discuss what are the learnings for our digital hyperconnected AI-driven world.

Format

The guest speaker would set the framework in the first 30 minutes, then the participants would work in groups, then there will be discussion and final results.

Further reading

• Jonathan Haidt's Google Doc "Social media and Politicial Dysfunction" (it's huge, but it provides a good birds-eye view on the current state of research on social media's impact on the society).
• Lookup "public service media" on Google/Wikipedia .

People

Focal Point: Regina Fuchsova

Moderator: João Gomes

Guest speaker Josef Holý has experience in both corporate and startup environments. Over the years, he transitioned from programming to UX design, Product management and AI. He has worked at companies such as Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), MSD, Avast, and Semantic Visions. In recent years, he has delved into the broader topic of digital manipulation, computational propaganda, and disinformation, in addition to the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence. He is a co-host of the Czech podcast "Canaries in the Net" and gives lectures at FIT CTU in Prague on these subjects.