About the Conference
As digital technologies become increasingly embedded in the social fabric, their architectures and affordances co-shape individual and collective experiences across various dimensions. Interdisciplinary research highlights how people use different tools to nurture personal and professional relationships, enhance education, develop new skills, and foster healthier habits. Digital platforms, often powered by artificial intelligence systems, also serve as mediators for community connections, citizen-state interaction, and different forms of political participation, exerting growing influence on individual and collective well-being. This impact, however, is framed by imbalances in economic and political power related, for instance, to the global dominance of technology corporations and the capacity of nation-states to regulate and exert influence over the rapidly evolving digital markets.
The conference Empowering People in Online Spaces: Democracy and Well-being in Digital Societies, aims to examine these issues from a citizens and user perspective. It seeks to highlight theoretical and empirical research approaches focused on empowering people’s agency within online environments at both personal and collective levels. Ultimately, we would like to connect research that engages with the interface of digital technologies, democratic participation and individual well-being.
About the Weizenbaum Institute
The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society – The German Internet Institute is a collaborative project from Berlin and Brandenburg funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The aim is to better understand the dynamics, mechanisms and implications of digitalisation.
To this end, the Weizenbaum Institute investigates the ethical, legal, economic and political aspects of digital change. This creates an empirical basis for responsible digitalisation. On the basis of the research findings, action options are developed for government, the economy and civil society, in order to shape the digital transformation in a responsible interdisciplinary manner. Since September 2020, the Weizenbaum-Institut e.V. has been responsible for the administrative coordination of the collaborative project
