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Roundtable with Clara Iglesias Keller (HIIG / Rio de Janeiro State University), Julia Pohle (WZB), Cornelius Puschmann (Hans-Bredow-Institut Hamburg) and Camille Roth (CNRS / CMB).

Moderation: Christian Mihr (Reporter ohne Grenzen)

Digital spaces have progressively become a significant part of the public space as a whole, and the dynamics of deliberation, communication and information in these spaces are key to understanding contemporary political and democratic processes.

The conference explores political epistemologies of big data. Political epistemologies are practices by which societies construct politically relevant knowledge and the criteria by which they evaluate it. Big data is the practice of deriving socially relevant knowledge from massive and diverse digital trace data.

It is now widely supposed in many democracies that the modern political campaign needs to be “data driven” to consolidate existing support and to find potential new voters and donors.  The capture of data on political opinions and affiliation permits the construction of profiles on individual voters and the “micro-targeting” of increasingly precise messages to increasingly refined segments of the electorate.  To what extent should modern campaigns be allowed to “know” the electorate?  The answer to this question relies to some extent on privacy and data protection rules, based on principles

Why is it that we describe our societies in terms of networks? Academic and popular literature usually suggests that computers and the internet produced the network society. However, there is another story to be told. Vincent August reveals how social and political thought deliberately enforced cybernetic network ideas to re-shape the way we think about society and politics.