Lecture by Prof. Andreas Hepp: "Why communities cannot be digital - and yet digital media and their infrastructures are fundamentally changing processes of communitization"

ZeMKI member Prof. Andreas Hepp will give a lecture at the conference “Digital Communities – Social proximity from a spatial distance” on Thursday, July 18, 2024.

The international conference is organized by the Institute of Social Science at Kiel University (CAU) in cooperation with the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Association and the German Sociological Association (DGS), Section Sociological Theory, and will take place in the “Seeburg” – the CAU’s “beacon of science”.
The lecture by Prof. Andreas Hepp will take place at 2 pm and is entitled “Why communities cannot be digital – and yet digital media and their infrastructures are fundamentally changing processes of communitization”.

To the conference program

Abstract:

Why communities cannot be digital – and yet digital media and their infrastructures are fundamentally changing processes of communitization

The presentation discusses the concepts of community and communitization with regard to digital media and their infrastructures. A distinction is made between two basic forms of communitization, namely local and translocal. However, both are increasingly entangled with digital media and their infrastructures: they refigure with the deep mediatization of society. Based on this distinction, different communities are then examined in more detail in relation to media: as local communities, interpretative communities, families, circles of friends, peer groups and cliques; as translocal communities, the nation, Europe, diasporas, communities within popular culture, social movements and religious communities. The presentation concludes with topics currently dominating media and communication research: today’s “polymediality” of the communicative construction of communities, platform collectivities and technology-related communities.