Main Focus
Research on self-organized online discourse and how to empower democratic and autonomous decision-making through platform design and boosting.
Project page and team, here
Questions I ask myself:
When do quantitative increases in our communication cause qualitative changes in our collective behaviour?
How can the informative potential of the Internet be used to empower better informed and autonomous decisions?
What are ways to promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online, through design and context?
Previously, I did my PhD at the TU Berlin on empirical methods and theoretical models to describe the dynamics of collective attention from online data sets. At the LMU in Munich I studied physics with a focus on systems biophysics.
- Sociophysics
- Computational social science
- Social networks
- Information architectures
- Collective attention dynamics
- Opinion dynamics
Curriculum Vitae
- 2013, B.Sc., Physics, LMU Munich
- 2016, M.Sc., Physics, LMU Munich
- 2018, Dr. rer. nat., Theoretical Physics, TU Berlin
Selected Literature:
How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online: Ways to empower democratic discourse through better context and online environments.
Boosting people’s ability to detect microtargeted advertising: Teaching people to spot manipulative advertising strategies with a self-reflection intervention.
Accelerating dynamics of collective attention: How information overload and the attention economy is driving social acceleration.
Modeling echo chambers and polarization dynamics in social networks: How radicalization dynamics and homophilic social networks can lead to polarized discourse.
Technology and democracy: Report published by the Joint Research Center (European Comission) about understanding the influence of online technologies on political behaviour and decision-making
Selected Press Coverage:
Interview for Salon: Remember when the internet was supposed to be transparent and democratic? There's still hope.
The Guardian: Global attention span is narrowing and trends don't last as long, study reveals.
Vox: Yes, the internet is destroying our collective attention span.
Wissenschaft im Dialog, Panel Discussion: Fake News & Disinformation
Standpunkt for Tagesspiegel (in German): Empowern statt sperren
Interview for Wissenschaftskommunikation (in German): Schneller, kürzer, politischer
Interview for SWR2 (in German): Transparenz im Netz: So können wir unsere Online-Welt anders gestalten