I am delighted to share that on the 11th of March I will be giving my inaugural lecture as Chair in Future Governance, Public Policy and Technology at the University of Edinburgh.
The lecture will take place as part of the University’s series of inaugural addresses to reflect on the themes that animate my research and teaching. It will be titled “After social media: participation, power, and responsibility in digital politics“. Below is the abstract.
This inaugural lecture examines the transformation of social media into increasingly automated, individualized, and exploitative environments, which I call auto-media. These changes are reshaping the conditions of democratic citizenship, reducing opportunities for genuine user engagement while shifting responsibility for maintaining democratic norms in public communication from platforms, elites and institutions onto citizens themselves. Rather than causing democratic decline, these innovations amplify existing political dynamics and reconfigure the distribution of power among political elites and the public. As a result, sustaining democratic participation is becoming increasingly difficult: citizens who remain engaged must invest ever greater cognitive, emotional, and social effort, while many others withdraw from politics altogether. I suggest these dynamics may contribute to rising inequalities in participation and to a broader condition of democratic decay.
More details about the event, including time, location, and free registration, are available on the event page.
I hope to see colleagues, students, and friends from across the University and beyond there!
Cristian Vaccari 