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 conducts excellent, independent, interdisciplinary and fundamental digitalization research. It provides politics, business and civil society with well-founded findings and value-based recommendations for action and helps to ensure that digitalization and networking are not only better understood, but can also be shaped in a sustainable, self-determined and responsible manner.
The Weizenbaum Institute is supported by a research network from Berlin and Brandenburg, which includes Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin), Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), Universität Potsdam (UP), as well as the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). The Weizenbaum Institute was founded in 2017 and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the State of Berlin. It was named after the German-American computer science pioneer and critic Joseph Weizenbaum.
