Technological change and innovation - especially digitisation and the increasing importance of digitally mediated communication - are megatrends that shape the future of societies worldwide. Almost everyone uses digital media to function well in their professional and daily life. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the ways government, health or elderly care, cultural or financial sectors work. Digital media shift information flows. Large platform monopolies influence the way we do business, provide care, share knowledge, enjoy culture, and negotiate with each other about what is fact and what is fiction. 

 

The Department of Digital Culture, Innovation and Communication investigates these social developments from a multidisciplinary perspective, combining theories and methods from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, and Communication Studies. In particular, we focus on digitisation and mediatization as cultural, historical and social phenomena and connect theories of digitisation and mediatisation with a range of practical issues, co-creation, action research and challenges in relation to ageing, health and care, cultural heritage, journalism, film, and others. Here, our research zooms in on the phenomena of datafication (that more and more social and cultural domains are mediated by algorithms and data), hybridisation (we investigate processes of digitisation by empirically mapping networks of human and non-human actors) and representation (we critically reflect on new forms of inclusion and exclusion brought about by digitisation and mediatisation).