The pandemic years poured terabytes of zoom sessions, scholarly talks and recorded lectures down the internet pipes, inundating an already blooming landscape of “user-generated ” (!) video essays, DIY tutorials and wildly short formats exploring novel digital educational practices, and challenging the epistemic privileges once exclusively held by journalism and academia.

For the first time perhaps, career academics would compete for attention and relevance with content creators in a space usually more concerned with clicks and sensationalism than academic reliability or journalistic ethics. Ivy heavyweights and brash Vlogers stream down our feeds, - scrutinising each other, remediating, mashing-up and phagocytizing each others´ materials, challenging each others views, competing for real-time pertinence in the explorative definition of a contemporary culture partly defined by their activity.

This intense, anarchic market place of ideas and positions highlights the expanding generational gaps and divergent epistemic practices in a rapidly evolving landscape where anything goes. What kind of pluralism is shaping up at the tip of everyone else´s fingertips?

Adding unseen layers of complexity in the overall perception of academia, social media is announcing a new era in the complicated relationships between science and society, making the online dissemination of (any) knowledge a matter of constant deliberations, problematising the self-evidence of narratives past, present and future. Meanwhile, these circulation processes seek to understand (and research) themselves too, as epistemic relativism cross lines with fake news and disinformation to destabilise the once unquestionable institutions of the public sphere.

The lectures listed below are built on the premise that every utterance or proposition can be or should be challenged on the spot. A talk delivered on or offline shall the beginning of an re-examination and engagement process fueled by curiosity and skepsis in the infinite network of rabbit holes the Internet can afford us to dig.

Topics range from a tentative history of audiovisual cultures constructed from a 21st century digital perspective, to a participant-obersever excursions through current culture industries, to science communication today or the pitfalls of activism in a the performative century.