Antisocial Social Media? A Short History from Digital Hermeneutics to Artificial Intelligence

Timetable

The course is scheduled for summer semester 2026/2027, detailes will be given in February 2027. Place: Collegium Historicum, Morasko. 

Module aim (aims)

This module aims to provide students with critical tools to analyse social media as a key site of contemporary social, political, and epistemic conflicts. In times of ongoing social crises and the growing influence of digital platforms, the course examines how meaning, historical narratives, and authority are produced, circulated, and contested online.

Drawing on approaches from digital hermeneutics, media history, and critical studies of artificial intelligence, the module traces a short history from early forms of online interpretation to today’s algorithmic and AI-driven media environments. Students will explore how social media function both as spaces of communication and as antisocial infrastructures that amplify division, misinformation, and polarisation.

A central aim of the course is to analyse memory politics, conspiracy theories and AI agents as transnational digital phenomena. Through selected international case studies—such as the Ukraine–Russia memory war, postcolonial and decolonial discussions, anti-vaccination movements, COVID-19 misinformation, and AI-related issues - students will examine how the past, truth, and expertise are negotiated and negated online.

By the end of the module, students will be able to critically interpret digital narratives, assess the societal impact of digital media and AI, and apply basic strategies for the deconstruction and verification of online content.

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

Basic English, basic knowledge on digital (social) media, no technical skill is required.

Syllabus

1. From Web 2.0 to Platform Society

A short history of social media and participatory culture (Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, Instagram). Algorithms as interpretive and filtering agents: ranking, visibility, bias, echo chambers, filter bubbles, personalisation, and clickbait economies. How platforms shape attention, authority, and social interaction.

2. Digital Hermeneutics: Methods for Interpreting Online Meaning

Digital hermeneutics as a practical analytical framework. Close reading of digital texts, images, memes, interfaces, and platform affordances. Context collapse, remediation, virality, and the problem of authorship in networked media. Introductory hands-on analysis of selected social media content.

3. Memory Wars Online: Theory and Analytical Tools

Social and cultural memory in digital environments. Historical policy and politics of memory. History as conflict (casus belli), negotiation, and identity formation in international and local contexts. Methods for analysing historical narratives on social media.

4. Memory Wars in Practice: International and Transnational Case Studies

Political actors, institutions, and users engaging with the past online. Remediation, partisanship, and global audiences in debates involving Ukraine and Russia, Poland and Germany. Decolonisation and postcolonial memory on social media: Black Lives Matter and transnational digital activism. Student-led comparative discussion.

5. Conspiracy Theories as Digital Interpretive Frameworks

A brief history of conspiracy thinking. Science, pseudoscience, and epistemic authority in the digital age. “Born-digital” versus remediated conspiracies. Platform logics, affect, and community-building. Analytical tools for identifying conspiratorial narratives online.

6. Conspiracy Theories Online: Selected Case Studies

COVID-19 misinformation, anti-vaccination movements, and “Big Pharma” narratives across platforms. Trust, expertise, and institutional failure (e.g. Google Flu). Pseudo-historical conspiracies. Comparative analysis with memory-war narratives.

7. Artificial Intelligence as an Interpretive Actor

Introduction to AI, large language models, bots, and artificial agents in social media environments. Automation of meaning, authorship, and expertise. Continuities between algorithmic curation and generative AI. Ethical and epistemic challenges of AI-mediated knowledge.

8. AI, Fake News, and Digital Verification Practices

AI-generated texts and images, hallucinations, deepfakes, and synthetic media. Practical strategies for verification, source criticism, and interpretive scepticism. Prompting as a hermeneutic practice: how queries shape AI output. Applied workshop with generative AI tools.

9. Is the Internet Dead? Platform Memory, Archives, and Decay

The Dead Internet Theory as a diagnostic narrative. Bots, disappearing content, broken links, and unstable digital archives. Comparing knowledge infrastructures and interpretive authority: Google, Wikipedia, and ChatBots. Concluding synthesis and reflection.

Final assignment - project finished with a short essey on a chosen case study in social media.

Reading list

1. E. Rutten, J. Fedor, and V. Zvereva. Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist
States. Routledge, 2015.

2. E. Rutten. “Why digital memory studies should not overlook Eastern Europe’s memory wars”. In: Memory
and Theory in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 219–231.

3. C. Duncombe. “The politics of Twitter: emotions and the power of social media”. In: International
Political Sociology 13.4 (2019), pp. 409–429.

4. I. Maly. Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence New Right Activism and Terrorism in the Attention Economy.
Routledge, 2024.

5. P. Matuszewski and G. Szabó. “Are echo chambers based on partisanship? Twitter and political polarity
in Poland and Hungary”. In: Social media+ society 5.2 (2019),

6. T. Birkner and A. Donk. “Collective memory and social media: Fostering a new historical consciousness
in the digital age?” In: Memory studies 13.4 (2020), pp. 367–383.

7. B. Di Fátima and J. R. Carvalheiro. “One’s Heaven Can Be Another’s Hell: A Mixed Analysis of Portuguese
Nationalist Fanpages”. In: Social Sciences 13.1 (2023).

8. J. Grabowski and S. Klein. “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust”. In: The
Journal of Holocaust Research 37.2 (2023), pp. 133–190.

9. Kata, Anna. "Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm–An overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement." Vaccine 30.25 (2012): 3778-3789.

10. Neha Puri, Eric A. Coomes, Hourmazd Haghbayan & Keith Gunaratne
(2020) Social media and vaccine hesitancy: new updates for the era of COVID-19 and globalized
infectious diseases, Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 16:11, 2586-2593

11. Walter, Yoshija. "Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory." AI & SOCIETY (2024): 1-2.

12. Hajli, Nick, et al. "Social bots and the spread of disinformation in social media: the challenges of artificial intelligence." British Journal of Management 33.3 (2022): 1238-1253.

13. Capurro, R. (2010). Digital hermeneutics: an outline. AI & society, 25(1), 35-42.

14. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).

15. Weidinger, L., Mellor, J., Rauh, M., Griffin, C., Uesato, J., Huang, P. S., et. al. (2021). Ethical and social risks of harm from language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.04359.