From 29th of Feb­ru­ary to 1st of March 2024, the annu­al con­fer­ence of the DGPuK spe­cial­ist group Media Lan­guage — Media Dis­courses took place in Karlsruhe. 

Com­mu­nic­a­tion in the digit­al space and on social media is access­ible and diverse: New actresses/actors such as influ­en­cers can build large com­munit­ies and some­times reach even lar­ger audi­ences than tra­di­tion­al media. Lin­guist­ic­ally ori­ented media research exam­ines how under­stand­ing and how a com­mon ground can be estab­lished in the digit­al space. Syn­thet­ic media and the increase in fake news and con­spir­acy nar­rat­ives exacer­bate these chal­lenges. Under­stand­ing is not always tied to facts but often to coher­ence. There­fore, the main ques­tion of the con­fer­ence was: How do dis­course par­ti­cipants per­ceive this com­mu­nic­a­tion and how should under­stand­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tion be assessed from the per­spect­ive of reception?

Vari­ous research­ers explored this ques­tion in their present­a­tions — includ­ing Dr. Fabi­an Ruth with his talk Evid­ence-Based Strategies for Audi­ence-Ori­ented Com­mu­nic­a­tion in Know­lege-Con­vey­ing Online Present­a­tions, Johanne May­er with Strategies of Pan­dem­ic Com­mu­nic­a­tion on You­Tube and Ins­tagram and Anna Köhler and Salina Weber from the RHET AI Centre with Chat­G­PT as the Ideal Tutor? A Ques­tion of eth­os.

Earli­er, dur­ing the open­ing remarks, Prof. Annette Leßmöll­mann provided a recap of the read­ing and pan­el dis­cus­sion of the pre­vi­ous day, which focused on the theme "Brave New Text World" and delved into lit­er­ary arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and its impact on soci­ety. The group spokespeople, Dr. Phil­ipp Niemann and Dav­id Pfurtscheller, emphas­ised their anti­cip­a­tion for inter­dis­cip­lin­ary exchange and poin­ted out the cur­rent (com­mu­nic­a­tion) tech­no­lo­gic­al devel­op­ments, which are poised at an intriguing crossroad.

Prof. Ker­stin Fisc­her from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Den­mark delivered a key­note speech on con­vers­ing with robots and com­mu­nic­at­ing with arti­fi­cial agents. Addi­tion­ally, she provided insights into her exper­i­ments involving social robots as arti­facts cap­able of pro­cessing and util­ising social sig­nals, and how these were per­ceived by study par­ti­cipants. The focus was on explor­ing how com­mu­nic­a­tion with social robots can be achieved.

In oth­er present­a­tions, such as Prof. Nina Janich's, the focus lay on expert­ise and (know­ledge) author­it­ies. In her talk titled Are the Experts Wrong? Epi­stem­ic Claims and Accus­a­tions and their Nego­ti­ation in Sci­ence Blogs, she described the nego­ti­ation of know­ledge in sci­ence blogs and the tac­tics used by blog­gers to attrib­ute or deny expert­ise. Examples of this include accus­a­tions of mis­in­form­a­tion, logic­al errors, research errors, or inad­equate justifications.

The con­fer­ence provided insight into the research of vari­ous research groups, includ­ing MIRKKOMM, DiPub­Health, RHET AI, and Jugend präsen­tiert, as well as doc­tor­al and habil­it­a­tion pro­jects, such as that of Dr. Nina Kal­wa.

Over­all, the con­fer­ence shed light on the diverse aspects of digit­al com­mu­nic­a­tion, from the role of influ­en­cers to the nego­ti­ation of expert­ise in sci­ence blogs. Research­ers presen­ted new find­ings and approaches to address­ing the chal­lenges in this field. A com­plete list of the present­a­tions can be found on the con­fer­ence web­site (provided only in German).

For fur­ther inform­a­tion about the con­fer­ence open­ing fea­tur­ing a read­ing by Jörg Piringer and a pan­el dis­cus­sion on gen­er­at­ive lit­er­ary AI, please vis­it: A Brave New World of Texts — read­ing and dis­cus­sion with Jörg Piringer