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This event has been postponed. A new date will be announced shortly.Ìý

"Towards a Phenomenology of Digital Conflict"

(University of Hamburg)
Friday, April 4, 2025
3:00-4:30 PM
Leacock 927

Abstract:ÌýOnce praised as a beacon for open exchange and the promise for a truly deliberative polity, the Internet, with its echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and uncivil communication practices, is now often considered a threat to the very foundations of liberal democracy. Online discourse seems helplessly polarized and abrasive—and political conflict in the digital world (subsequently ‘digital conflict’) insurmountable. Technology ‘pessimists’ in the phenomenological literature explain these shortfalls by the very nature of the virtual: disembodied digital spaces simply do not allow for meaningful encounters between persons (e.g., Dreyfus 2009; Fuchs 2014). If meaningful engagement is precluded, so is resolving our quarrels. Other scholars hold that the body and other-understanding still ‘reach into’ the digital world (e.g., Ekdahl & Ravn 2021; Osler 2019, 2021), albeit potentially in a modified form. The work of such ‘optimists’ suggests that dysfunctional conflict is not inevitable. Yet, these authors focus on the harmonious aspects of online sociality or on ludic forms of competition (e.g., videogames). How does political conflict, i.e., strife where matters of existential concern are at stake, complicate the picture? This paper presents some initial findings of the three-year research project ‘Virtual Battlefields: Political Conflict in Digital Spaces’ currently running at the University of Hamburg. Based on qualitative data from interviews with politicians, activists, and journalists, it relies on an existential-phenomenological account of political conflict construed as a co-occurrence of different types of normative claims. How do digital places have to be structured, so that the different forms of normativity of the political world—i.e., me-reasons, thou-reasons, we-reasons, they-reasons—can come to the fore? This paper gives some tentative answers to this question.

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