Lukas Mozdeika will defend his thesis for the PhD in Social Sciences, specialization Journalism and Media Studies with "Interpassive Audience Dynamics in the Age of Pervasive Media: Youth Strategies of Political Expression and Participation in the Interactive Public Sphere."
The trial lecture lasts from 10:00-10:45 and the title is: "Discuss interpassivity from a societal, demographic, political, epistemological and temporal context”.
The candidate will defend his thesis at 12:00.
The public defence and trial lecture will also be streamed (zoom.com).
Webinar ID: 649 8987 1584
Passcode: 081124
The ordinary opponents are:
The leader of the public defence is Vice-Dean Steen Steensen, Faculty of Social Sciences, Oslo Metropolitan University.
The main supervisor is Professor Harald Hornmoen, Oslo Metropolitan University.
The co-supervisor is Associate Professor Steffen Krüger, University in Oslo.
This thesis examines the underlying causes of the oft-lamented concerns in the online public sphere such as political polarisation, hate speech, vitriolic irony and apathy or disengagement. I approach these maladies from a psychoanalytical perspective by applying the theoretical notion of interpassivity to rethink the central feature of the internet, namely, user interactivity.
The shift from passive audiences to interactive users involves navigating ideological divides and media limitations such as context collapse. While digital media affordances help mitigate such risks that rarely occur in users’ daily media practices, they introduce qualitative changes to participatory dynamics as of yet poorly understood among media scholars.
My empirical study traces the reasons for the self-censorship of political opinions among Norwegian young adults to the interactivity demand implicit in social media architectures which trades users’ fascination with media with expression strategies that frustrate desirable forms of participation and deliberation in the online public sphere.