Gabriele BALBI (Università della Svizzera italiana)

Mieke BAL (University of Amsterdam)

Bradley E. WIGGINS (Webster Vienna Private University)

After defining and discussing the reasons for taking a historical perspective on digital media, the talk will focus on three keywords that I have studied in recent years. Firstly, the keyword 'revolution': I will explore the meanings and history of the so-called digital revolution, contextualising it within a historical framework. Secondly, I will discuss maintenance as a new keyword for media studies. This is an urgent topic for digital media, requiring study from technological, infrastructural, political and economic perspectives. Thirdly, failure is often understudied in media studies, but it is crucial, especially given that new digital media emerge and are rapidly forgotten on a daily basis. These keywords are, of course, interconnected and can contribute to a new approach to digital media today.

Join us online on Zoom, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 1.015.

The need to visually pay attention to those people, termed "refugees", who are no longer safe in their own homes, is a crucial need in current society. I once heard a man in the street, clearly of foreign origin, murmur to himself: "they don't even look at me". That gave us (the young artist Lena Verhoeff and me) the topic for a film we had been asked to make, which we titled 'Refugeedom: a lesson in looking'. 

Join us online on Zoom, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.130.

This talk introduces hybrid folklore, political storytelling co-created by networked publics and artificial intelligence. Building on folklore’s evolution as a living, participatory cultural practice, it expands the field to account for AI-generated imagery, synthetic voices, prompt-craft, and platform recommendation systems as vernacular tools. Hybrid folklore compresses production time, standardizes aesthetic conventions, and generates new markers of plausibility in political narratives. Through contemporary campaign-season case studies, including AI-assisted satire and manipulated visuals, the talk examines how hybrid content shapes credibility, emotional resonance, and the uneasy boundary between truth and feeling. The political stakes highlight authorship, accountability, and algorithmic governance in today’s public sphere.

Join us online on Zoom, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 1.015.

Deepfakes are videos, images, audio, or other texts that are created or significantly altered using AI techniques such as deep learning. Deepfakes are among the most prominent examples so far of such synthetic media. This talk will give an overview of some of the main ways in which deepfakes are being used and some of the main issues that they raise. It will argue that deepfake videos are not just significant in their own right, but that they also offer important perspective on the wider digital media environment of the 2020s. Deepfakes did not just happen to emerge in the time of social media — they are a product of those media. Through two decades of everyday sharing on social media platforms, we have unwittingly created vast archives of images, video, text and audio. These data have been appropriated as raw material that enable machine-learning researchers to train AI systems to recognise, classify and create images for use in synthetic media. Deepfakes expand the social media environment in which the public and the personal converge. They are a logical extension of those social media business models in which all human experience becomes data to be exploited.

Join us online on Zoom, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.012.

The widespread uptake of digital platforms and GenAI services – from YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to ChatGPT and Midjourney– is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways around the globe. In this talk, Thomas Poell will analyze these changes in two steps. The starting point is his co-authored book Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2022), which examines both the processes and implications of platformization across the cultural industries. Subsequently, he turns to his current efforts to multiply our frames of reference in the examination of platforms, AI, and the cultural production.

Join us online on Zoom, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.012.

The growing pains of digitization involve intense struggles between two platform ecosystems fighting for information control: a Chinese-based and an American-based ecosystem. A handful of American Big Tech platforms have disrupted markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democracies. At the heart of the online media’s industry’s surge is the battle over information control: who owns the data generated by online social activities? While two large ecosystems fight for information control in the global online world, the European perspective on digital infrastructures is focused on regulation rather than building its own alternatives. With emerging technologies such as generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard), this infrastructural perspective becomes more poignant.

This lecture takes up two questions. First, how can we identify public values in platform societies across the globe? Values such as privacy, security, transparency, equality, public trust, and institutional soevereignty are important principles upon which the design of platform architectures should be based. Democratic principles and the common good are the very stakes in the struggle over platformization of societies around the globe. Second, the lecture focuses on what responsibilities companies, governments and citizens have in building such a sustainable platform ecosystem. Who is responsible for anchoring public values in an online world? Governments and civil society organizations try to negotiate public values on behalf of citizens and consumers. 

The two questions posed in the lecture reflect distinct cultural perspectives: how different cultural values influence the digital ecosystems, how local traditions and societal norms shape the perception of public values, and how cultural differences impact the regulatory approaches across the world.

Join us online on Zoom, or at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, room 2.136.

THURSDAY, DEC 5, 8:00-11:00, room 2.136

Maria Mäkelä: "My Story, Your Narrative: Personal Stories and Complex Issues on Social Media" 

The workshop offers a short introduction to social media as storytelling platforms and provides the participants with some narrative-theoretical methods for studying social media. We focus particularly on the problematic relationship between sharing personal stories and addressing complex, global and structural issues such as climate change and gender equality. Why and how personal stories go viral and grow into grand narratives that shape ideologies and promote polarization?

FRIDAY, DEC 6, 8:00-11:00, room 2.110

Stefan Iversen: "Prosocial Deepfakes? Synthetic Media and Contested Character Narration in Public Rhetoric"

The ongoing proliferations of digital systems for producing and modifying media through artificial intelligence algorithms call for reconsiderations of most aspects of what it means to communicate, let alone narrate. This module is based on the double assumption that we need new methods of narrative analysis to understand synthetic media and that the understanding of how synthetic media is changing contemporary public spheres needs narrative theory. We will address a contested synthetic media format, known as the deepfake but in contrast to most work on and debates about deepfakes, we will be looking at prosocial forms of synthetic media.