Oliver Zöllner

How WhatsApp Rules the Everyday: An Empirical Study on the Ambivalent Use of Messenger Services. Based on qualitative interview fieldwork, this study analyzes the partly paradoxical perception of WhatsApp as a technology that both facilitates and complicates the everyday life of people, and that is seen as an instrument that allows for dominating others as well as being dominated by others. The widely used messenger service thus can make people happy as well as unhappy, depending on context, situation and degree of reflection. The authors use the collected interview data to develop a heuristic model that is suitable for initiating further research and reflection on the role of digital media in everyday life.

Our thinking about existence in the space between man and machine has basically only just begun. But what was science fiction just a few years ago has long since entered our everyday lives: Care robots, war robots, sex robots, and similar entities. Will machines develop into ethical actors with consciousness in the future? Will they be able to morally guide their own behavior? This also touches on broader questions of responsibility: Who will make decisions in the future? There have long been dystopian visions of a threat to the world from vastly superior artificial intelligences as well as utopian hopes for a new digital world in which the human spirit makes itself immortal. In this volume, ethicists, literary scholars, sociologists, and futurists set out in search of relevant questions and conceivable answers. It is about the human-machine relationship, possibilities of acting wisely in the machine age, autonomous and connected driving and its dilemmas, and work and working in the future. At the end, there is a plea for a new way of thinking about education in the digital age.

Digitalization has set in motion social processes that are having an impact on our democratic fabric. These include phenomena that affect the media system itself, such as a weakening of quality journalism, a strengthening of disinformation and populist media, and an increasing power of opinion of intermediaries (such as Google, Meta, et al.). As a result, processes can be observed that directly affect our understanding of democracy: these are, in particular, tendencies that lead to the destabilization of democratic opinion- and will-forming and thus call democratic negotiation and decision-making processes into question. Surveillance technologies that encroach on our fundamental values of privacy and autonomy can be just as dangerous to democracy. The authors reflect from ethical, media studies, philosophical and legal perspectives on the significance of current developments for our democracy in a digital world, and what normative requirements and options for action exist.

This article analyzes why "fake news" and conspiracy narratives -- henceforth, "sticky falsehood" -- have been able to embed themselves so prominently in our digital everyday life. To this end, the essay traces the concepts of truth that have increasingly faltered in modernity as well as the normative consequences of this development and classifies them from media-historical, communication-sociological, and philosophical perspectives. The article's central thesis is that disinformation, lies, and "fake news" are expressions of a nihilistic attitude in society. In seven analytical steps, the author sets out various aspects of a "crisis of truth," focusing in particular on conspiracy theories, right-wing populist media offerings, so-called postmodernism, and constructs of the not-true. He details the extent to which shocks to the presuppositions of knowledge and a nihilism of "kitsch" -- the "sticky" falsehood that seems so attractive -- are observable. At the end, the article also outlines possible solutions for dealing with disinformation and truth crises.

Using the example of physical sound carriers (vinyl records and compact discs) and streaming services (Spotify et al.), this article analyzes how these refer to different relations of proximity, work, and world. While vinyl records and CDs as physical materials are still close to their users and the situation in which they are used, streaming services, which appear to be largely dematerialized, replace this proximity with a retrieval of files from further away. While records and CDs capture a work in a certain way and, as classic storage media, offer a material frame for it, streaming largely dissolves this work character and offers relatively fluid playlists instead. The consumption of resources (oil, electricity, etc.), which is inherent to all three media formats under consideration, is more or less a blind spot for music recipients, or is largely negated in a nihilistic habitus of technology appropriation. Completely out of sight is the fundamental transformation of things such as sound carriers or music systems from objects to be used to systems that "use" people, as Martin Heidegger (1949) put it in his approach to the philosophy of technology. This happens by exploiting the human being as a resource in the digital realm and turning him/her into a servant of the technical system, for example by permanently logging and storing his/her data in streaming and evaluating it for commercial purposes. If, on the other hand, vinyl records are seen by their users as a resistant media format, this attitude is also nihilistic, because it negates the considerable consumption of resources by this media format as well as the dialectical fact that -- in the context of its form as a collectible and investment item -- it has long since reached out to digital platforms for identifying and realizing its value as well as for buying and selling, and is increasingly dependent on them.