Oliver Zöllner

This chapter analyzes why fake news and conspiracy narratives have been able to embed themselves in much of digital everyday life. To this end, it will trace how concepts of truth have increasingly faltered in modernity, as well as the epistemic consequences of a resulting crisis of truth. The chapter’s central claim is that disinformation, lies, fake news and related phenomena are expressions of a nihilistic attitude in society. Focusing particularly on conspiracy narratives, right-wing populist media messages, and constructs of the untrue, the article details the extent to which shocks to the presuppositions of knowledge, and a pervasive nihilism based on kitsch – the sticky falsehood that seems so attractive – are identifiable as a system of posttruth that is by now deeply engrained in society.

In a large municipality in the Ruhr region, Germany's Rust Belt, a civic association established a public bookcase. Within a few months, the operator began stamping the deposited books as "loaned items" in an effort to prevent their resale, prompted by social media speculation about "looters" who allegedly took out excessive numbers of books. This internal neighbourhood discourse, mediated through digital platforms, escalated rapidly. The case exemplifies the local actors' inability to accurately assess the situation, particularly evident in their public condemnation of others for allegedly violating labelling norms. This misjudgment, compounded by counterfactual claims, results in an excessive and disproportionate critique. Such hyperbolic reactions obstruct most participants from recognising ethically appropriate conduct. At the core of this outraged debate lies a self-centered moralism that reflects broader societal tendencies toward exclusion or polarisation. The devalued books metaphorically represent marginalised individuals ("looters"). Through a reconstructive and systematic analysis grounded in ethical and economic theoretical frameworks, this chapter traces the dynamics of this discourse step by step.

This introduction to the Global Media Journal – German Edition’s Special Section on content moderation critically examines the governance challenges of regulating online content in the digital age. It argues that the removal of content deemed illicit, detrimental or otherwise unacceptable by established standards is often framed as neutral gatekeeping even though it operates within contested power dynamics that lack rigorous and sound frameworks to assess its real-world impacts on freedom of expression, safety, and social justice. The authors highlight historical parallels to pre-modern censorship struggles following the invention of the printing press, emphasising that digital public spheres require forms of robust civility, not mere technical fixes. Current practices of content moderation reveal deep tensions: platforms increasingly employ automated systems for this endeavour, yet this risks amplifying harmful content and creating ethical dilemmas, while low-wage, high-stress labour conditions for human moderators (“clickworkers”) expose systemic exploitation. The Special Section addresses these gaps through four case studies.

With the arrival of image generators based on artificial intelligence (AI), human image creation has been increasingly supplemented by machine-driven, automated technological operations. Drawing on sources from media theory (McLuhan, Flusser) and philosophy of technology (Heidegger, Anders), this chapter queries what an image is, analyses technology-based image generation, proposes a new understanding of ‘imagistic’ images, contextualises them in the debate about truth and kitsch, and finally sketches an idea of the changed anthropological role of humans as ‘shepherds of objects’ in processes of technological image generation. The latter appears as a program that we can call an affordance, i.e., a human−technology relationship based on imperatives that are gradually setting in and get normalised through habituation in everyday life-worlds. For humans, the shame of having ceded command to machines that are so highly proficient in pasting together and churning out images so highly unreliable might be persistent.

In the context of digitalization, processes of constant data evaluation are increasingly influencing people's identity/identities. In digitality, people act from within a subject position that can be understood as increasingly ‘relational’ (i.e., permanently linked with others) and thus also determined by others. This pattern induced by information technology has become an anthropological phenomenon in its own right and represents a challenge for philosophy. This chapter gives an overview of humans' somewhat diminished individuality, or their perception thereof, in the age of digitality with its all-abundant processes of data analysis and hence categorization, looks at human identities and how they are negotiated in digital contexts, and analyzes what forms of socialization and dominion are invoked.

This case study on the use of robotic and AI systems in care work contexts presents scenarios of the partial transfer of responsibility from (mostly non-professional) careworkers to machine entities. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of a non-representative sample of eight in-depth interviews with people nursing relatives at their homes, five scenarios are introduced that address different degrees of technologization in care ranging from purely human/manual care work to the integrated use of humanoid robots with AI support. The interviewees provide complex answers that outline varying concepts of everyday ethics pertaining to the use of digital and robotic systems in curative and nursing contexts. The results point at ethical challenges for people providing care work and deepen debates on gradual diffusions of responsibility.

This volume looks into ethical principles for the integration of robotic and digital tools in medicine, healthcare and nursing and presents related case studies. Following up on integrated ethical perspectives in these fields has become urgent as innovations in digital and robotic systems are rapidly integrating themselves into new areas of use, particularly when linked with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The ELSI approach (ethical, legal and social implications) has established itself as a standard for analyzing the complex challenges, opportunities and risks of new technological applications. It is to be recommended in the development phase as well as in subsequent evaluation processes, especially when combined with a screening and assessment tool (SAT) that is integrated into research and technology development.

"Final sentences" of literary texts are often overshadowed by the much-discussed beginnings of those texts, even though the former are no less important. They can also be found as final notes in music. One famous example is the dramatic piano chord in E major at the end of the piece "A Day in the Life", the last track on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album (1967). It concludes a thematically and musically varied song that takes the listener through the highs and lows of a typical day by presenting associative peculiarities and oddities from newspaper coverage. The final chord follows an elongated orchestral orchestral glissando and a dramatic pause of about one second. It fades out for about 40 seconds. Such a finale was extremely unusual for a work of pop music at the time. It refers to the composer duo Lennon/McCartney's preoccupation with contemporary avant-garde music as well as themes such as alienation in modernity and changing perceptions of reality. The dramatic final chord of "A Day in the Life" not only hints at a kind of "avant-gardization" of the Beatles' output, at least in part, but is also a conceptual reference back to a reduction of sound and the origin or essence of music. At the same time, this final chord confronts listeners, in an almost brutal way, with the illusion of a life lived meaningfully. Plans and concepts that people might be pursuing are shattered, or end abruptly: in vain or in a deep void. The final chord of "A Day in the Life" can thus also be read as a nihilistic memento mori.

This chapter examines the ethical challenges posed by the increasing spread of artificial intelligence (AI) in people's everyday lives. The authors emphasize that despite the growing presence of AI systems, there is often insufficient understanding of how they function, which leads to sometimes unrealistic representations in the media oscillating between utopianism on one end of the scale and dystopian portrayals on the other. Following a critical examination of the concept of AI and its development, the authors emphasize the need for an AI ethics that develops a grounded vision of the good life and the good society in the digital age. They point out that important ethical principles such as freedom, autonomy, justice, transparency and responsibility must be taken into account when using AI. The article stresses that, despite all technological advances, human judgment and ethical reflection remain indispensable in order to shape the development and use of AI systems responsibly.

From the perspective of digital ethics, this book chapter outlines a model for dealing with the challenges posed by digital media environments in a responsible and appropriate manner. This concept is based on preliminary considerations of “digital citizenship”. At a time when digital technologies - the “data-sphere” - are being increasingly implemented and intensified, the question of humans' roles and skills in using these digital technologies in a sensible and meaningful way is becoming more and more urgent. In the age of European Enlightenment, Western societies had already assigned a central role to people's maturity, which was to be achieved fundamentally through literacy and education in order to create free individuals and, ultimately, citizens capable of making decisions. In contrast, in the current age of digitality, characterized by networking and immersion that has prevailed since the 1990s, many people experience and participate in such life-worlds primarily as consumers. In this role, they increasingly appear as economic objects that are constantly encouraged to produce data sets. Social networking sites and applications of generative artificial intelligence in particular exert a certain pull, the functioning of which many people are at best instrumentally proficient in, but not reflexively. Against this background, Zöllner's article outlines the contours of the concept of "digital citizenship" from an ethical perspective. This form of citizenship should enable people to lead a free life in digital and networked environments in which they are not merely subject to the exploitation interests of digital corporations.

This book chapter analyzes the marketing of luxury consumer goods (in particular, cosmetics) in the context of questions pertaining to authenticity, simulation, and the self in meta-modernity. It is based on case studies from Germany and East Asia, where a luxury brand company had set up pop-up stores in the guise of convincing-looking record shops, cafés and club situations in which semi-fake vinyl discs (with glossy fantasy sleeves printed just for the occasion, and the vinyl grooves being either 'empty' or containing royalty-free formulaic sounds) served as mere props for creating some notion of hipness and inviting visitors to take pictures of themselves. The article scrutinizes how high-priced cosmetics are marketed for urban, trend-oriented target groups, what role totemistic mock-up records and social media's image worlds - the "selfie culture" - play in this process, and what insights about the consumer self in modernity can be deduced from such simulations.

The chapter "Zen-Buddhist Approaches" in the Digital Ethics handbook (Nomos Handbuch series) introduces a concept for applying ideas and maxims from Zen Buddhism to digitality, and the subdiscipline of digital ethics in particular, in a non-religious and critical way. It places Zen Buddhism in modernity by drawing on Byung-Chul Han's "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism" (2022; original German edition 2002) and uses that work's main chapters – "A Religion without God", "Emptiness", "No one", "Dwelling nowhere", "Death" and "Friendliness" – as a structure for identifying key phenomena of modern, 'digitizing' society such as the gradual replacement of linear-hierarchical relationships; the massive and yet invisible presence of digitality; overcoming ego and desire; renouncing one's self as a form of property and self-presentation; finitude and flexibility; and selfless open-mindedness; all of this illustrating, by way of a multitude of examples, Zen Buddhism's concept of learning to live with paradoxes, an idea that is certainly worthwhile pursuing in digital modernity.

The chapter "Confucian Approaches" as part of the Digital Ethics handbook (Nomos Handbuch series) is an introduction to Confucian thought models applied to phenomena of digitality that are critically viewed from the perspective of digital ethics. After a general introduction of the relevance of non-European thought models for grasping the modern world, the book chapter looks at political, cultural and technological disruptions in antiquity that may serve as a blueprint for understanding contemporary changes and ruptures. This critical assessment is followed by an outline of Confucianism's concept of virtues and humans' position in society. Subsequently, Confucianist principles in online and offline contexts and their related practices are discussed and linked to current political debates such as the People's Republic of China's recent rediscovery, and instrumentalization, of Confucianism as a tool of power both domestically and in the international arena.

This chapter in the Digital Ethics handbook provides an overview and systematization of what digital diplomacy - a subdiscipline of public diplomacy employing social media and other digital tools - is about, and links such practices to models of (digital) ethics. It places public diplomacy within the context of 'soft power' and the ethics of international/global communication and subsequently develops a framework for analyzing digital diplomacy proper. In particular, the ethical concepts of the 'noosphere' and 'noopolitik' are critically assessed and applied to various examples, focusing on key values such as liberty and democracy.

The Digital Ethics handbook (Nomos Handbuch series) provides an overview of the challenges and specifics of ethics in the context of digitality. Renowned experts contribute chapters on I) Philosophical perspectives and theoretical approaches to digital ethics, II) Values of digital ethics, III) Discourses of digital ethics on related phenomena, IV) Systems and technologies of digital ethics, V) Fields of practice of digital ethics. With contributions by: Regina Ammicht Quinn | Ben Bachmair | Klaus Beck | Kathi Beier | Dieter Birnbacher | Dagmar Borchers | Stefan Brink | Peter Bröckerhoff | Rafael Capurro | Hans-Henrik Dassow | Jan Doria | Nicola Döring | Alexander Filipović | Christian Fuchs | Rüdiger Funiok | Maike Gossen | Petra Grimm | Armin Grunwald | Björn Haferkamp | Martin Hähnel | Jessica Heesen | Martin Hennig | Clarissa Henning | Michel Hohendanner | Dietmar Kammerer | Matthias Karmasin | Antonia Kempkens | Nina Köberer | Vanessa Kokoschka | Hans Krah | Larissa Krainer | Susanne Kuhnert | Jan Mehlich | Catrin Misselhorn | Julia Maria Mönig | Regina Müller | Sebastian Müller | Horst Niesyto | Claudia Paganini | Matthias Pfeffer | Marlis Prinzing | Lars Rademacher | Tilman Santarius | Christian Schicha | Marcel Schlegel | Stefan Selke | Ingrid Stapf | Kai Erik Trost | Nicole van Geel | Frederike van Oorschot | Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla | Eva Weber-Guskar | Verena Weigand | Micha H. Werner | Klaus Wiegerling | Christiane Woopen | Oliver Zöllner

By way of an introduction, this chapter analyzes social networking sites on three levels: the micro level of individuals, the meso level of corporations and the macro level of social processes and effects. At the first level, it is above all the 'affordances' of social media, i.e. their functions shaping and emphasizing their uses, that is problematic and can invoke a loss of autonomy. At the meso level, corporate business models give rise to problems of data protection and surveillance. Using social media may seem free, but users pay with their data and are thus transformed from customers to products - a dehumanizing process. On the societal level, processes of disinformation become prominent in an overarching system of 'surveillance capitalism' (Zuboff 2019), and the increasing heteronomy of users can impair democratic decision-making. The article concludes by outlining ethically based approaches to how digital technologies could be shaped in the future.

This chapter analyzes a pivotal music production – British band Radiohead's seminal album "OK Computer" (1997) – as a document of its time and contemporaneity, focusing on its modes of reflection of attitude and practice from a philosophical perspective. After scrutinizing the details of the album's production values, music, lyrics, and artwork, the article distils the 'habitus' of the work and compares it with related musical documents. These findings of reconstructive social research are subsequently deepened with insights from reconstructive ethics, the similarities and overlaps of which are pointed out. It is argued that the Radiohead album retrospectively appears as a clairvoyant document of anger and despair voiced in an evolving setting of the dehumanization, exploitation, and subjugation of human beings in a world increasingly dominated by corporate and technological power, formulated at a time when large-scale digitalization was still in its infancy. The frequent vagueness of the songs and their lyrics, their ambiguity and indecision, reveal their inherent nihilistic tendencies. Radiohead's "OK Computer" summarizes what 1997 felt like and reflects a transformation process towards digitalized practices that is by no means complete even 20 or 25 years later.

In the context of digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI), data protection and digital ethics are trending topics. However, they are rarely considered in conjunction even though they are inextricably linked. This volume sets out to close this gap. Informational self-determination is an expression of a European understanding of values, particularly with regard to smart technologies and AI applications. In addition to socially relevant dimensions of data protection and digital ethics, the authors of this edited collection point out and analyze the influences of networked technologies on the experience and manipulation of modern reality and its rootedness in the everyday.

In his article "Political Landscape (with Castle Ruins): A Pictorial Document of Identity Discourses in East Belgium", Oliver Zöllner uses Ralf Bohnsack's (2013) "documentary method" to analyze a PR picture taken from a brochure of a regional authority as a pictorial document that encapsulates underlying discourses of identity, or rather identities in the plural, within the German-speaking Community of eastern Belgium, one of the three linguistic Communities of the federally organized kingdom. The analyzed image of a young woman in front of a castle ruin captures the "habitus" of the relatively small population group, the article argues. This habitus draws on partly conflictual and unclear interpretations of the past and future of the German-speaking population on the one hand, and on the debate about 'belonging' and 'demarcation' in a borderland (where the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and France are in proximity), on the other. To paraphrase art historian Martin Warnke (1992), the analyzed photograph is an example of a political image that sets a stage, or landscape, for further scrutiny. The darkness of the past, which is embodied by the dark castle ruin in the background of the picture, is in stark contrast to the shiningly bright figure of the young woman in the foreground whose features of fertility symbolize a future for the German-speaking minority. The picture's combined narratives, complex as they are, may represent inroads for progressive perspectives of ethnic or regional identity committed to the "emancipatory principle of intercultural tolerance and cosmopolitan openness", which can be seen as the essence of 'Belgitude' (Sepp 2010: 22).

Digitality requires new ethical approaches in the context of an all-encompassing mediatization. At the same time, the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) brings forth additional new challenges, as do questions about the ecological responsibility of digital technologies. This edited volume presents a broad range of topics and case studies linked to the sub-discipline of digital ethics. What all contributions in this book have in common, regardless of the their academic or philosophical perspective, is a focus on the question whether human beings are taken into account appropriately when new technologies are developed and applied.

This article ("Looting or Sharing?") is located at the intersection of societal and ecological discourses, and analyzes local actions from the perspective of digital ethics. The case study is centered around a public bookcase (or free library) in a neighborhood in the Ruhr area, a post-industrial and partly impoverished metropolitan district in Germany. The rather banal local actions - people take books from the public bookcase as is the proclaimed objective of having such an institution in the first place - eventually morph into highly polarized discussion threads on a local social media platform that are charged with bitter accusations of "looting" (i.e., allegations of some people taking out too many books) and rife with outrage (i.e., allegations of some people selling books taken from the free library on secondary markets). This debate reflects a conflict that points to larger social divisions and rifts. This is analyzed empirically (via a discourse analysis) and philosophically (drawing on Aristotle as well as contemporary debates on moralism). When the free sharing of books, i.e., the recycling of otherwise unused goods, gets scandalized by some residents of the neighborhood as "looting," as the accusations on social media proclaim, this conflict suggests a self-referential moralism among the online discussants. Epistemic fallacies combined with irrational counterfactual claims lead to immoderate hypercriticism. This is a finding that can be observed in many online debates and points to larger disruptions in the digital arena.

This article seeks to analyse the images that accompany the hybrid musical genre of the 1960s and 1970s called Anatolian Pop in Turkey. Anatolian pop music developed in a globalising-localising context, a ‘liminal’ place and space of both domestic and international cross-cultural communication. It is equally located at the intersection of rural and urban environments and thinking, a space the autors call 'rurban'. The rurban character of Anatolian Pop is for one part present within the music, but also in its materiality, e.g., in the images produced alongside this music: for record covers, magazines and films that show musicians, fashion garments, accessories, and instruments. These images can be read as documents of particular social, temporal and/or spatial relationships, and can thus be analysed in the context of the sociology of knowledge. Mainly based on a sample of a 1970s Turkish weekly pop-culture magazine, the article examines how the interplay of rurban fashion and music works, and how these discourses were framed in the photographic images. The authors also investigate the visual and discursive links between Turkish "kostüme avantür" (costumed adventure) films of the period and Anatolian pop music. Thus, the objective of this analysis is to uncover the incorporated habitus of the period, i.e., the sometimes unconscious and unreflected patterns of behaviour and valuation in a society, of which 1960s/70s Turkey is a very telling example.

Can the military engage in symmetric dialogues with their publics as part of their public relations activities? Is it conceivable that a branch of the armed forces no longer relies on traditional modes of communication modeled on the one-sided, top-down command structure aimed at persuasion so typical of the military? This book analyzes the communication concept of a special agency of the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr Academy for Information and Communication, founded in 1990 (right after the end of the Cold War, as it seemed then) as the successor to the disbanded Academy for Psychological Defence. The new organizational unit set out to develop a dialogic PR model which inherently drew on theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and his seminal work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In line with this theory, as the study reconstructs in detail, the Academy's concept, or main strategy, was decidedly un-strategic in that it did neither pursue predetermined communicative outcomes nor seek to persuade members of target groups. The concept was rather focused, first and foremost, to negotiate mutual trust and understanding between dialogic partners -- a key feature of a discursive public sphere and in line with ideals of a liberal democracy. From the beginning, the Academy was aware that any dialogic relationship of this kind would be fragile, including the risk of being "unsuccessful," thereby displaying an open attitude that is remarkable for any military institution. This book analytically reconstructs the Academy's communication strategy, its theoretical sources and underlying motifs. The study is based on extensive document analyses, on-site research and interviews with commanders and staff.

This research article introduces the concept of public diplomacy within the framework of international relations and transnational communication. It looks at how Germany, by way of her international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, addresses Arabic-speaking target groups in post-9/11 public diplomacy, and how "dialogic" such mediatized endeavors can be. For this end, the article presents a critical analysis of the requirements of dialogue drawing on Habermas’s (1984) Theory of Communicative Action. What transpires is a determination of Deutsche Welle as an organization to at least present a quest for dialogue as a projection of Germany’s national values, policies, and self-image. The invocation of "dialogue" via Deutsche Welle's Arabic-language radio, television and online channels may reflect a reassertion of the very self-image Germany feels most comfortable with: that of the Open-minded Society of Consensus as one of the country’s grand narratives.

In this essay written for a general audience, the idea and concept of the metaverse is introduced and analyzed with particular emphasis on future forms of human interaction and sociality. The current state of exploitative data capitalism is criticized and used as a reference for questioning the dehumanizing view of people as mere data points in a possible "Metaverse" as envisaged by the likes of Meta, Inc., and other companies. The essay concludes by asking what could be a good life in virtual environments.

This article analyzes a photographic PR handout that was widely circulated in media the world all over in 2013, depicting the future heir to the British throne, Prince William, and his wife, Catherine, presenting their new-born baby to the world. This photograph is scrutinized in great detail employing Bohnsack's documentary method, a strain of reconstructive social research, alongside analytical methods that have their origin in art history. In particular, the article analyzes the iconicity of the seemingly 'private' snapshot, and reconstructs what constructs of dominion are at play in the picture and its inherent social contexts. This royal picture, the article argues, displays forms of the sacred. In turn, it also profanates what is sacred about it by reverting to modes of bourgeois self-representation that panders to the general public and tries to win it over, or back, to the idea of monarchic rule, however symbolic the latter may be. In the analyzed picture, power is manifested by way of a specific habitus of the iconic protagonists that glosses over and negates crises and rifts in British society.