Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://www.weizenbaum-library.de/handle/id/1115

The Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society (WJDS) is an interdisciplinary, diamond open access journal that investigates processes of digitalization in society from the perspectives of different research areas.

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2023 - 20256

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    The Ideal Worker Revisited
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025) Gaitsch, Myriam; Schörpf, Philip
    This paper explores technostress in office work with a focus on gender dynamics. Employing an exploratory study design and focus group discussions, the research reveals that digitalization within organizations can lead to technostress through the emergence of techno-overload, techno-invasion, and techno-uncertainty. This paper highlights how employees, rather than organizations, develop individual strategies for coping with technostress, meaning that it is the former who are often burdened with managing technostress. Women, particularly mothers with dependent children, are disproportionately affected, juggling work and childcare through flexible schedules but facing invisible workloads and continuous connectivity. These challenges underscore a persistent gendered division of labor. We conclude that while digital technologies offer opportunities, an absence of consciously shaped strategies can heighten employee risks, particularly those related to gender disparities.
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    The Digipolitical and African Political Thought: A Theoretical Framework for Interpreting the Political in the Digital Age
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-01-16) Favarato, Claudia
    Today, digitality is pervasive across all spheres of human social and political life. To inquire into digital-engendered ontologies, this paper presents a theoretical framework undergirding African political thought for the study of the political sphere in digitality, or the digipolitical. This neologism refers to the political as an ontological category redefined via its intersection with the digital. This understanding rests on three premises: the characteristics of the digital, a sui generis virtual reality; the algorithmic architecture of the cyber socio-political space; and the onto-relational nature of the political subjects, which entails the interplay of the analogue with digital-humans. Regarding more recent disciplines and theories, such as posthumanism, this paper brings to the fore insights offered by African political thought, which has long emphasized reading individuals, communities, and structures of power through the lens of the political centered on the concept of relationality. I defend the assertion that the relational approach inscribed in African political philosophies offers valuable insight into digital political onto-relationalities, as it discloses power from in-between spaces and details its dynamics.
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    Editorial: Volume 4, Issue 2
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2024-12-03) Emmer, Martin; Iglesias Keller, Clara; Krasnova, Hanna; Krzywdzinski, Martin; Metzger, Axel; Schimmler, Sonja; Ulbricht, Lena; Vladova, Gergana
    This issue of the Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society brings together contributions that deal with the transformation of the public sphere in times of digitalization from an interdisciplinary perspective. Authors are Pu Yan and Ralph Schroeder, Paddy Leerssen, Damian Trilling, and Sercan Kiyak, Stefan Mertens, David De Coninck, and Leen d’Haenens.
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    Educational Impulses for Redesigning (Online) Teaching in the Post-Pandemic World: A Discussion and Evaluation of Lessons Learned
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2024-06-24) Knaus, Thomas
    This article reflects on the challenge of online teaching from the perspective of media didactics, a perspective that gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The qualitative-reconstructive study reflects on 65 multidisciplinary papers written during the pandemic. Together, these studies empirically examine the challenges, achievements, and failures of the first large-scale experiment in university teaching during that time and include quantitative empirical studies and qualitative first-hand accounts from university lectures that document how scholars adapted their courses from on-campus teaching to online teaching. Many approaches are innovative and creative, while some are not really new, at least from the perspective of media education. Still, many teachers with limited exposure to media-based or online teaching pre-pandemic broke new ground in their individual teaching. Of course, learning is an individual process. Nevertheless, expectations that university teaching would be fundamentally redesigned were almost inevitably destined for disappointment due to the pandemic’s suddenness, a lack of didactic knowledge, technical and organizational hurdles, and various other individual challenges. It is now clear that the emergency online semesters have permanently changed university teaching. Learning from both successes and failures, this article proposes the design and development of good (online) teaching for post-pandemic times. It bases its proposals on the documented experiences of teachers, on empirical data, and on three practical examples.
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    Peace Journalism in the Digital Age: Exploring Opportunities, Impact, and Challenges
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2023-12-20) Sehl, Annika; Malik, Muhammad Sultan; Kretzschmar, Sonja; Neuberger, Christoph
    The advent of modern means of communication opens up a wide range of possibilities for individual users, organizations, and governments to connect. This paper argues that the concept of peace journalism can leverage the potential of digital developments to maintain relevance in current times. Five areas of peace journalism’s possible synchronization with media digitalization are deduced and elaborated from a pragmatic perspective to facilitate conceptual advancement: (1) digital distribution, (2) utility of the potential of two-way communication, (3) exploration of new forms of digital storytelling, (4) curation of various digital sources of conflict actors and fact-checking, and (5) incorporation of virtual training and digital skills into journalism curricula. By addressing these aspects of media digitalization, peace journalism outlets can receive acclaim within modern journalistic circles while also attracting wider audience support.
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    Commodification and Disruption
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2023) Seidl, Timo
    There is little disagreement that digital technologies are transforming contemporary economies and societies. However, scholars have only begun to systematically think about how digitalization – the process whereby more and more of what we say, think, and do becomes mediated by digital technologies – is both driven by and transformative of capitalism. This paper argues that when one speaks about digitalization, one cannot be silent about capitalism. It reconstructs commodification and disruption as key features of capitalist development. It then shows how three digital revolutions – the platform, (big) data, and artificial intelligence revolutions – have ushered in a new wave of commodification and disruption, giving rise to digital capitalism. Finally, it discusses the challenges commodification and disruption pose in the form of redistribution of resources, rebalancing of power, rule adaption, and market re-embedding. The paper brings together a wide range of scholarship to offer a historically and theoretically grounded framework for how to think about and study the rise of digital capitalism.
The WJDS is a Diamond Open Access journal, with content open to anyone to read and reuse. It is free of any publication fees or charges to either author or reader. All contributions are published under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license. Publication rights remain with the authors, with unlimited use and reuse of articles.