Media in its time - 1848 and 2023
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('MMM') }}
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('YYYY') }}
| Free of charge |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
As a result of the barricade fighting on March 18, 1848, the Prussian military fired on peaceful demonstrators. It was not until the morning of that day that press censorship had fallen and the bloody revolutionary upheavals of that day that current political events could only be communicated by leaflet. This was because the Berlin daily newspapers were no longer up-to-date.
Leaflets actively drove the process of shaping public opinion during the revolutionary days, including false reports. They were the congenial mass medium. Many authors hid behind pseudonyms. New printing techniques made it possible to print large numbers in a short time. The parallels to the dynamics of current opinion formation in social media are astounding.
Analogies and boundaries in the creation, dissemination and reception of news in 1848 and 2023 will be the topic of the panel discussion at the historical site, in the Mechanical Arena in the foyer of the Humboldt Forum.
In cooperation with the Deutsches Pressemuseum im Ullsteinhaus e. V.
Panel
Sigrid Weigel was director of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL Berlin) from 1999-2015; previously she was director of the Einstein Forum (Potsdam), on the board of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Essen), and professor in Hamburg, Zurich, Princeton, and at the TU Berlin. Most recently, her doctoral dissertation Flugschriften 1848 in Berlin. History and Publicity of a Popular Genre (1979) received a renewed topicality.
Katharina Nocun is a publicist. She studied economics and political science in Münster and Hamburg. Her work focuses on the tensions between digitization and democracy and the consequences of disinformation. Her texts have appeared in the SZ, Zeit-Online, Spiegel-Online and Handelsblatt, among others. The podcast Denkangebot produced by Nocun was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2020. Her first book, Die Daten, die ich rief (2018), deals with the topic of data protection and digitalization.