Weizenbaum Institute

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://www.weizenbaum-library.de/handle/id/950

The Weizenbaum Institute conducts excellent, independent, interdisciplinary and fundamental digitalization research. We provide politics, business and civil society with well-founded findings and value-based recommendations for action and help to ensure that digitalization and networking are not only better understood, but can also be shaped in a sustainable, self-determined and responsible manner.

The Weizenbaum Institute was founded in 2017 and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space and the State of Berlin. It was named after the German-American computer science pioneer and critic Joseph Weizenbaum.

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    Weizenbaum Panel’s Literature Digest: November 2025
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-12) Büttner, Paula; Mosca, Giuliano; Weizenbaum Panel Research Group
    Der Literatur Digest ist eine monatlich erscheinende Zusammenstellung des aktuellen Forschungsstandes zu Themen an der Schnittstelle zwischen Digitalisierung und Politik. Er präsentiert die neuesten Erkenntnisse zu Fragen der politischen Partizipation und guter Bürgerschaft in Zeiten der Digitalisierung.
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    Weizenbaum Panel’s Literature Digest: October 2025
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-11) Büttner, Paula; Mosca, Giuliano; Weizenbaum Panel Research Group
    Der Literatur Digest ist eine monatlich erscheinende Zusammenstellung des aktuellen Forschungsstandes zu Themen an der Schnittstelle zwischen Digitalisierung und Politik. Er präsentiert die neuesten Erkenntnisse zu Fragen der politischen Partizipation und guter Bürgerschaft in Zeiten der Digitalisierung.
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    Weizenbaum Panel’s Literature Digest: September 2025
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-10) Büttner, Paula; Mosca, Giuliano; Weizenbaum Panel Research Group
    Der Literatur Digest ist eine monatlich erscheinende Zusammenstellung des aktuellen Forschungsstandes zu Themen an der Schnittstelle zwischen Digitalisierung und Politik. Er präsentiert die neuesten Erkenntnisse zu Fragen der politischen Partizipation und guter Bürgerschaft in Zeiten der Digitalisierung.
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    Weizenbaum Panel’s Literature Digest: December 2025
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2026-01) Büttner, Paula; Mosca, Giuliano
    Der Literatur Digest ist eine monatlich erscheinende Zusammenstellung des aktuellen Forschungsstandes zu Themen an der Schnittstelle zwischen Digitalisierung und Politik. Er präsentiert die neuesten Erkenntnisse zu Fragen der politischen Partizipation und guter Bürgerschaft in Zeiten der Digitalisierung.
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    The platform matters: cross-platform differences in data donation willingness, behavior, and bias
    (Taylor & Francis, 2025-12) Wedel, Lion; Ohme, Jakob; Mayer, Anna-Theresa; Gaisbauer, Felix; Fan, Yangliu
    Data donations are a method to access user-level digital trace data, as they provide fine-grained measures of content exposure on social media. The interest in data donation as a data collection method is accompanied by a broad uncertainty about the reasons that drive the donation of data by users. The current literature lacks comparative analysis across various platforms. This study investigates platform-specific predictors for data donation behavior of a non-probability quota sample of German social media users (N = 2,296) for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and the resulting non-response biases. Based on the analysis of 340 data donation packages, we find that participants are less likely to donate TikTok data compared to the other platforms. Gender is the main driver during the willingness step for drop offs, while political leaning is a key predictor for all platforms except Facebook during the donation stage. Data donors tend to self-report less active social media usage with news and political content than those who do not donate data. Our findings highlight the importance of considering platform-specific differences in expected donation rates, biases, and the potential for discrepancies between indicated willingness and actual donation behavior when designing and interpreting data donation studies.
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    Editorial: Special Issue: Well-Being in the Digital World
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-12-18) Baumann, Annika; Gladkaya, Margarita; Krasnova, Hanna; Krause, Hannes-Vincent; Meythaler, Antonia
    Securing individual well-being represents an important societal goal. While governments across the world have introduced multiple initiatives to ensure and promote mental health, support for vulnerable population groups remains insufficient, highlighting the need for innovative approaches. Digital technologies offer the potential to enhance well-being. At the same time, their use can also result in numerous (unintended) risks. To enrich and stimulate scientific discourse in this area, this special issue presents five interdisciplinary contributions positioned at the intersection of digital technology use and users’ well-being. Topics include the effects of addictive design and dark patterns, the supportive role of online mental health communities, measuring eudaimonic virtues in technology interaction, gendered experiences and strategies for managing technostress at work, and dynamic practices of digital disconnection. Together, these papers contribute to a better understanding of the complexities behind technology use, provide a foundation for policy development, and aim to enhance societal awareness of how digital tools can shape users’ mental health and overall well-being.
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    Pay Cashless and Be Clueless About Your Data?
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025) Jessen, Marek
    This article analyzes the use practices of payment data along the payment processing chain in Europe. By first mapping the key actors involved in digital payments and their data use practices, this research offers novel insights into the multiplicity of actors that intermingle when a digital payment is made. The findings are interpreted through an adaptation of Zygmuntowski’s data governance trilemma, which seeks to balance three objectives in the context of payment data: preserving privacy, monetizing data, and enabling law enforcement. The article shows that the widespread interest in data does not stop at payment data. Preserving privacy is difficult to pinpoint due to the opacity, lack of transparency, and complexity of the data processing behind a digital payment. Meanwhile, monetizing data is a core practice for many actors, although it is pursued with varying levels of vigor. The growing availability of data poses significant risks, as information initially collected for payment processing may be used to enable law enforcement. Promising alternatives such as Wero and the digital euro could help curb the dominance of non-European players, increase transparency, and offer data-minimizing payment options.
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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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    Generative AI and Changes to Knowledge Work
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025) Butollo, Florian; Haase, Jennifer; Katzinski, Ann; Krüger, Anne K.
    The application of generative AI (GenAI) tools has led to widespread speculation about the implications of technological change for the future of knowledge work. This article provides insights on how the use of GenAI affects work practices in the fields of IT programming, science and coaching based on expert interviews and a quantitative survey among users of GenAI. Specifically, we ask about perceptions on skills, creativity, and authenticity, which we regard as key qualities of knowledge work. Our results belie the expectation that human expertise and skills lose importance. Our study rather shows the contrary: debates and experiences with genAI help to sharpen and value the core of the professional identity. Our study thus also highlights that professions consist of more than the sum of single work tasks. They contain experiential and tacit knowledge about how to frame, prepare, and interpret work steps that are difficult to replicate by machines. However, there are also concerns that professions could be hollowed out and especially that the quality of products and services could deteriorate as automated ‘good-enough-versions’ of the former offers become commonplace.
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    Disconnecting in a Digital World
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025) Pohl, Merle; Wessel, Lauri; vom Brocke, Jan
    How individuals use or refrain from using mobile digital technology in their habitual daily practices has significant implications for their well-being. Closely related to digital well-being is the sociotechnical phenomenon of voluntary digital disconnection; a deliberate form of non-use that varies in frequency and duration. While this concept foregrounds intention, disconnection may also arise incidentally in everyday life. This study explores the phenomenon through an information systems lens and draws on sociological practice theory to examine how digital disconnection is enacted in practice, based on qualitative data from 12 interviews and 5 observations. The findings suggest that digital disconnection unfolds continuously over time, both with and without deliberate intention. Therefore, we propose digital disconnecting as a broader term that encompasses not only deliberate non-use, but also emergent, unintended forms of disconnecting. Our analysis further demonstrates that digital disconnecting unfolds along a continuum of dynamic and interrelated dimensions: temporal, mental-emotional, technical, and spatial. Importantly, regarding the spatial context, we found that places – and the placing of a digital device within them – matter for enacting digital disconnecting. Our findings further the existing understanding of disconnection strategies by highlighting that individuals may strategically use places and device placement to enact disconnecting.