Author: Dr. Stephan Pflaum

Teaser What happens to our way of feeling and acting when nearly every interaction is mediated, measured, and saved? Georg Simmel’s classic optics—money, number, speed—explain the “blasé” stance of the modern city and help us read today’s platform metropolis (Simmel,… read more / weiterlesen Money, Number, Speed: Georg Simmel for the Platform Metropolis

Teaser George Herbert Mead helps us see why social life both binds and rubs. The self forms in interaction: the impulsive I collides with the socialized Me; their dialogue produces a self that can cooperate—or grind. In this post I… read more / weiterlesen Mead’s I/Me/Self: Friction, Membranes, and Role-Taking

Queer Counterpublics: From Sesame Street Questions to Stadium Chants Can an innocently phrased question about Ernie & Bert open a path into serious theory about publics, counterpublics, and queer world-making? Yes—if we treat it as a live case for how… read more / weiterlesen Motivation Letter to Students

Teaser Long before “foundation models,” Manuel Castells argued that we live in a network society where power flows through programmable networks and the codes that route communication. Read from today’s AI moment, much of his analysis lands with force—though some… read more / weiterlesen Manuel Castells as a Forerunner of AI-Era Sociology: What He Got Right, Partly Right, and What Doesn’t Fit

Teaser He’d frame AI inside the network society: power flows through programmable networks and codes of communication; identities resist and reconfigure, yet infrastructure quietly steers whose signals travel furthest. To keep agency alive, we must contest who programs the programs,… read more / weiterlesen Manuel Castells on AI & the Programmable Network Society

Teaser He’d warn that AI amplifies the culture industry’s standardization under a veneer of personalization. The playlist feels bespoke, the feed looks “for you,” yet the logic is pseudo-individualization: the same under the sign of the new. Emancipation, for Adorno,… read more / weiterlesen Theodor W. Adorno on AI & the Culture Industry 2.0

Teaser What happens to politics when attention is optimized, truth becomes a probability score, and action is replaced by “engagement”? Hannah Arendt distinguished labor, work, and action—with action as the plurality-creating practice that sustains a public realm. Read through Arendt,… read more / weiterlesen Hannah Arendt on AI & the Fate of the Public Realm

Ernie loves the playful “why not?”, Bert defends the steady “we don’t do it like that.” Between them a tiny public forms—norms are tested, roles negotiated, boundaries drawn. This page turns Sesame Street’s odd couple into a living lab for… read more / weiterlesen Questions about Ernie & Bert – Recommended Reading Order

Note: This is a fictional, AI-generated dialogue and analysis, produced under the Social Friction methodological framework. The voices of Habermas and Minkoff are conceptual reconstructions based on their published works. The ‘responses’ of Ernie and Bert (and other figures) are… read more / weiterlesen On the Street: Counterpublics in Conversation — A Fictional Interview Experiment (Enriched Teaching Version)

A Small Defense of Friction If you ask a child about Ernie and Bert, you don’t get a treatise on the public sphere. You get questions. Are they friends? Lovers? Roommates with a rubber-duck problem? The charm is not the… read more / weiterlesen Questions about Ernie & Bert – a Conclusion to Queer Counter Publics

Teaser Counterpublics aren’t automatically emancipatory. Since 2015, grievance-driven right-wing formations (Trumpism, AfD milieus) have leveraged platform affordances and movement entrepreneurship to harden into anti-pluralist publics that target queer and migrant safety. A democracy-protective design keeps speech plural and fortifies guardrails—transparent… read more / weiterlesen 9. The roll-back: right-wing counterpublics and reactionary friction

Teaser Following Alexandra Chasin’s critique of “marketed gayness,” parts of the queer movement risk swapping visibility-as-redistribution for visibility-as-consumption. The fix isn’t a boycott of culture; it’s organizational: keep hybrid forms (care + advocacy), fund the slow work of translation (from… read more / weiterlesen 8. Market Capture and Its Discontents

Problem space. Both artists use spectacle to move rap’s center. But the identity lever differs: whiteness (Eminem) often lubricates mainstream passage in a Black-formed genre, while queerness (Lil Nas X) often thickens frictions around legibility, broadcast standards, and moderation. Eminem’s… read more / weiterlesen 7. Lil Nas X and “Industry Baby”: queer counterpublic & Eminem’s whiteness over market

Teaser AI doesn’t just “mirror” the world; it encodes erasures. When queer lives—especially at the intersections of migration, race, class, and disability—are sparsely represented in training data, automated systems misrecognize, downrank, or silence them. Under scarcity, harms multiply for “double… read more / weiterlesen 6. AI Biases: Building a Queer Counterpublic Under Data Scarcity (v1.2, enriched)

Teaser Stadiums are high‑intensity norm‑policing machines—chants, banners, ritualized masculinity. On match days, queer fan groups and allies often form enclave counterpublics (safe clusters, alternative chants, visual signals) while satellite counterpublics organize online (storytelling, bystander training, reporting tools). This essay turns… read more / weiterlesen 5. Football/soccer: queer counterpublics in male-dominated arenas

Teaser The periodic public fascination with Ernie & Bert is not trivia. It is a soft‑focus case of visibility politics: how audiences read intimacy, how institutions manage ambiguity, and how counterpublics translate lived experience into rules that travel. This essay… read more / weiterlesen 4. Sesame Street as parable: the Ernie–Bert question