31101

WiSe 21/22: Digital East. Eine Region im Netz der Daten

Katharina Bluhm, Susanne Strätling, Gasan Gusejnov

Information for students

If you would like to take this course within the framework of the Master program in East European Studies and receive credit for it, proof of active participation is required. We have therefore asked the lecturers to provide material (primary texts/secondary literature/image material of max. 20 pages per unit) in advance. On the basis of this material, you will formulate short questions/statements (approx. 100 words) in advance, which will be forwarded to the lecturers for their use. You are very welcome to contribute these statements to the discussion that follows. Please upload your questions/statements to the discussion forum for this session no later than the Monday before the lecture. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) close

Additional information / Pre-requisites

The lecture will be held online once again this semester. It will not be recorded! For access, please follow the QR code on the lecture's poster or click on the links provided.

Comments

The digital transformation is a global phenomenon – yet the world of data is far from homogeneous. Regional and local digital cultures that differ greatly from one another have emerged, displaying many distinct notions of digital publics, approaches to social media and ways of implementing digital governance or regulating data protection. What characterises Eastern Europe as a digital region? While research in recent decades has engaged extensively with the socio-political transformations in Eastern Europe, the question of not only how profoundly the digital shift has altered the region and continues to do so, but also how massively digital media have driven this transformation, remains largely unanswered. Here one could consider the role of social media in Euromaidan or the Belarusian state’s efforts to stop the protest movement there by slowing or shutting down the internet. The lecture series sheds light on this gap in research on Eastern Europe and takes an initial look at this area in the network of data. The landscape that is illuminated by this approach is a highly contradictory one. On the one hand, the promise of an open, democratic web, which dates from the 1990s, still resonates in the digitalisation of public administration in the Baltic countries, as well as in the establishment of open digital cityscapes with full wi-fi coverage on public transport and in public spaces. On the other hand, authoritarian penetration of the web can be observed, especially in Russia, which is seeking to establish a “sovereign Runet”, is waging a global cyberwar externally with bots and troll factories, and is internally instituting new censorship and surveillance measures. At the same time, digitalisation is both historically (consider the boom and success of cybernetics in the GDR and the Soviet Union) and currently a touchstone for the ability of many Eastern European countries to modernise, whether in the ubiquitous shift of education to the digital realm due to the coronavirus pandemic, in the health sector or in the thriving IT scene. However, Eastern European societies too are faced with the problem of unequal access to the internet, not only in terms of gaps in infrastructure, but also gaps in digital literacy. This problem is closely connected with the issue of digital citizenship, that is, the question of to what extent insufficient digital literacy leaves citizens unable to fully exercise their rights. In Eastern Europe, too, there are industries that are characterised by extensive digitalisation or the presence of online companies; often, however, these booming sectors are marked by precarious labour conditions (the gig economy) in which collective labour struggles are a rare exception. How do societies deal with these challenges? What digital civil society structures exist, for example, in the tech-savvy LGBT community, in demands for data protection and net neutrality or in initiatives to digitalise the culture of remembrance? Why are innovative digital products such as Telegram or Skype so successful in Eastern Europe? And what is behind the attempts of some of these platforms to bring cryptocurrencies such as Gram onto the market? close