On the 11th of March 2026, I gave my inaugural lecture as Chair in Future Governance, Public Policy and Technology at the University of Edinburgh.
The lecture took place as part of the University’s series of inaugural addresses to reflect on the themes that animate my research and teaching. It was titled “After social media: participation, power, and responsibility in digital politics“. The recording can be accessed with the SPS website, and an abstract of the talk is below.
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.
Cristian Vaccari 