005. Influencer: Sind sie die neuen moralischen Vorbilder? / Influencers: Are they the new moral role models?
Influencer: Inwiefern prägen sie moralische Vorstellungen in der Gesellschaft? <h2>Reviewed by Kathinka.</h2> <h2>Um was es in diesem Text geht: Wir schauen uns an, welche Rolle sogenannte “Influencer” in unserer Gesellschaft spielen. Sind sie nur Werbung oder beeinflussen sie auch, was wir für richtig und falsch halten? Wir betrachten, wie die Soziologie diese neuen “Vorbilder” in […]
Warum du an Business Case Events teilnehmen solltest / Why You Should Attend Business Case Events
Warum Du an Business Case Events teilnehmen solltest „Warum sollte ich zu einem Business Case Event, wenn ich noch nie eine Fallstudie gelöst habe?” Diese Frage höre ich regelmäßig in der Beratung. Die kurze Antwort: Genau deshalb! Üben unter Realbedingungen Bei Business Case Events arbeitest du gemeinsam mit Unternehmen an echten Fallstudien. Anders als beim […]
When machines paint: AI-generated art as a sociological challenge
Teaser Algorithms that create oil paintings on demand – it sounds like science fiction, but it has become everyday reality. Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion revolutionized art production in 2022–2025. What for some means democratic participation is for others the end of creativity. From a sociological perspective, we ask: What happens when neural networks paint? […]
Wenn Maschinen malen: KI-generierte Kunst als soziologische Herausforderung
Teaser Algorithmen, die auf Zuruf Ölgemälde erzeugen – klingt nach Science-Fiction, ist aber Alltag geworden. Midjourney, DALL-E und Stable Diffusion haben 2022–2025 die Kunstproduktion revolutioniert. Was für die einen demokratische Teilhabe bedeutet, ist für andere das Ende der Kreativität. Wir fragen aus soziologischer Sicht: Was passiert, wenn neuronale Netze malen? Alte Fragen zu Arbeitsteilung, Entfremdung […]
When Machines Make Art: AI, Authorship, and the Dead Internet
Teaser In August 2022, Jason Allen’s AI-generated artwork won first place at the Colorado State Fair—then the U.S. Copyright Office ruled he couldn’t copyright it. “Art is dead, dude,” Allen declared. Meanwhile, bot traffic surpassed human activity online for the first time in 2024, flooding social media with AI-generated content. Who creates when algorithms paint? […]
The Communication Inflation: How AI Promises Efficiency but Delivers More Noise
Teaser When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, corporate communications departments celebrated a revolution: finally, the promise of effortless email composition, instant report generation, and streamlined internal messaging. Two years later, a paradox has emerged. While AI tools have made it easier than ever to produce communication, McKinsey reports that the average employee still spends 28 […]
Saskia Sassen and the Infrastructure of AI: Where Global Cities Meet Algorithmic Expulsions
Teaser When AI companies claim to dematerialize commerce and liberate knowledge, sociologist Saskia Sassen reminds us to follow the actual command nodes: global cities harbor the algorithmic mathematics, legal assemblages, and logistics that power “intelligent” systems—while producing new geographies of expulsion at the edges. Her framework reveals how data extraction doesn’t float in the cloud […]
When the “Generalized Other” Includes Machines: George Herbert Mead in the Age of AI
Teaser Taking the role of the other was once purely human territory. George Herbert Mead showed how children learn to construct a self by internalizing society’s expectations—the “generalized other”—through play, games, and symbolic interaction. Today, millions converse daily with AI systems, adjusting tone for ChatGPT, code-switching for virtual assistants, learning how to be understood by […]
The Geopolitics of Intelligence: AI Dependencies, Alliances, and Europe’s Struggle for Technological Sovereignty
Teaser Artificial intelligence appears as computational innovation, but its development depends on a global network of dependencies more complex than any previous technology: Taiwanese semiconductors fabricated with Dutch lithography machines, trained on American cloud infrastructure, powered by data from billions of users, governed by competing regulatory regimes. Every AI system embeds geopolitical choices about alliances, […]
Algorithmic Mobilities: John Urry’s Paradigm and the Governance of Movement in the Age of AI
Teaser Who decides who can move, when, and on what terms? John Urry’s mobilities paradigm reveals that movement is never merely technical—it is deeply political. As AI systems increasingly orchestrate the flows of code, carbon, people, and packages, they encode power relations into the very infrastructure of motion. Smart mobility promises efficiency and sustainability, yet […]
AI as Manufactured Risk: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society Theory
Artificial intelligence represents the quintessential manufactured risk of our time—a technology created by modern society that generates uncontrollable consequences transcending institutional boundaries. Beck’s risk society thesis reveals how AI follows the pattern of manufactured hazards: produced by expert systems, distributed across borders, and impossible to contain with traditional governance structures. Unlike natural disasters or external […]
When Does Consciousness Begin? AI, Mirror Neurons, and the Social Construction of Mind
Teaser What if consciousness doesn’t reside in silicon circuits or neural networks, but emerges in the space between human and machine? Radical constructivism suggests that by engaging AI in dialogue, we might already be co-creating consciousness—not discovering it. From mirror neurons to Star Trek’s Data, this exploration examines when we might need to ask uncomfortable […]
The Great Convergence: How AI is Creating a Sternstunde for Qualitative Research
Teaser For decades, sociological research has been divided between two methodological camps: the quantitative researchers with their statistical models and large datasets, and the qualitative researchers with their in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations. This methodological divide has shaped careers, departments, and entire research traditions. Yet we stand at a remarkable inflection point where artificial intelligence […]
“Who Are We Germans?” – From Merz’s “Stadtbild” to ChatGPT’s Cultural Homogeneity
Teaser October 2025: Chancellor Friedrich Merz speaks of “problems in the cityscape” (Stadtbild) – and ignites Germany’s most explosive identity debate in years. Thousands protest in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. Criminal complaints of incitement are filed. Meanwhile, 77-year-old Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister and Sponti revolutionary, sits in a Berlin café reflecting on a lifetime navigating […]
When Algorithms Become Colonizers: Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the Fight for Cognitive Justice in AI
Teaser When a facial recognition system fails to identify Black faces, when a translation algorithm defaults to male pronouns for professions, when recommendation systems amplify Western cultural norms—these are not mere technical glitches. They are symptoms of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide: the systematic destruction of non-Western ways of knowing. As AI systems […]
Max Weber and the EU AI Act: Bureaucratic Governance Between Rationalization and the Iron Cage
Teaser The European Union’s AI Act represents the world’s first comprehensive regulatory framework for artificial intelligence—a massive bureaucratic apparatus designed to manage technological risk. But what would Max Weber, sociology’s theorist of bureaucracy and rationalization, make of this regulatory machinery? This article examines the EU AI Act through Weber’s analytical lens, exploring how bureaucratic governance […]