Fachbereich 04: Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften - Angebote des FB 04: für "Virtual International Programme" (VIP) - Geschichte

The advent of the internet and digitalization in Eastern Europe unfolded concurrently with its post-socialist transformation. Following the 1989 “Fall of Nations” in East Central Europe, the political and economic crises in the Soviet Union, and its eventual dissolution in 1991, new independent states emerged across the region. This massive restructuring of political and economic life coincided with the advent, dissemination, and simultaneous segmentation of the internet.
Scholars usually associate the internet's early history with “freedom, decentralized control, the claim of the universality of technological development” (Gritsenko et al. 2021: 3 – 4). In the post-socialist space, the link between the liberating force of technology and the end of the Soviet restrictive state and its censorship of freedom of expression was, for many, perhaps even more obvious and straightforward. Yet, similarly to political and economic transformation, the effects of the internet introduction were manifold and, already, in its early years, they included the spread of misinformation, xenophobia, and the consolidation of anti-democratic sentiments and movements.
During this course, we will look for the responses to the question of how the rise and development of the internet were built into the history of post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe, paying attention to different local histories and cultures of the internet, in all their multimodality and multivocality, The zoom link to the remote participation is as follows: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87093779342