Digital echo chamber: Goethe Lecture on 20.08.2019
On Tuesday, August 20, Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther, Professor of Legal Theory, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure and Co-Director of the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders" at Goethe University Frankfurt, spoke on the topic: How free are we in the digital echo chamber?
How free are we in the digital echo chamber?
As soon as we are online, we cannot prevent our data from being collected. Private and state organizations use our data to create personality profiles, whether for the purpose of observation and surveillance or to create incentives for consumption through targeted product advertising. This creates a kind of hall of mirrors around us that confirms our wishes and beliefs and predicts our future behavior with increasing accuracy. Something similar happens in digital social networks, not only by collecting and analyzing the behavioral data produced, but also by the fact that we mainly exchange ideas with like-minded people who share and confirm ("like") our wishes and beliefs, our view of the world.
The lecture explored the question of whether and in what way our freedom changes when we increasingly move in such echo chambers and digital mirror cabinets of our own selves - or whether freedom does not also include the experience of contradiction, resistance, dissent or even failure.
More about Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther
Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther is Professor of Legal Theory, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law at the Faculty of Law at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He has been co-director of the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders" since 2007.
He is a member of the board of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and a Distinguished Fellow of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at Goethe University in Bad Homburg.
In 2018 he received the Prof. h.c. (Profesor emerito) at the Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá / Colombia.
Klaus Günther studied philosophy and law in Frankfurt. From 1983 to 1996, he was a research assistant and university assistant in Frankfurt, including in a DFG-funded working group on legal theory (Leibniz Program) with Jürgen Habermas, where he received his doctorate in 1987.
After his habilitation in 1997, he was offered professorships at the EUI in Florence and at the universities of Rostock and Zurich, which he turned down.