ENLIGHT+ Workshop: Meaning in the Digital Age (MIDA)
Recent advances in artificial intelligence and the omnipresence of social media create new kinds of language use and users. Consider, e.g., AI chatbots, X, trolls, hoaxes, fake news, clickbait, blogs/vlogs, juice-channels, fanfiction, webcomics, emojis, multimodal communication on Tiktok or Instagram, etc. These novel discourses are not niche anomalies (ChatGPT had one of the fastest growing userbases of all time, every world leader uses X or Instagram). We seem to naturally adopt these technologies, without needing instruction manuals. Yet, many of these modern discourses are potentially deceptive in the sense that they move between fact, fiction and deception (e.g., when I talk to ChatGPT, am I pretending to be talking to a person?) and/or involve novel understudied forms of communication (e.g., what do I mean when I send a laughing emoji?). Society requires philosophical and linguistic explication to ensure autonomous and epistemically resilient users.
Researchers at several Enlight partner universities are working on discourses of the digital age in different projects across various disciplines. We want to bring these related strands of research in linguistics and philosophy together with an interdisciplinary Enlight workshop to discuss work on discourses of the digital age such as
- fake news, online deception, dogwhistles, trolling
- (fan)fiction, (web)comics
- (mis)communication with AI bots
- emojis and (multimodal) communication on social media
MIDA is a two day workshop, in person at the Groningen Faculty of Philosophy, with talks by the researchers mentioned above. Talks will be open to anyone interested. The goal of bringing these researchers together will be to create an interdisciplinary network and explore possibilities for applying for grant funding or other research collaborations on these important topics.
Everyone is welcome to attend, just send an email to one of the organizers, Emar Maier e.maier rug.nl or Merel Semeijn m.semeijn rug.nl.