In January 2023, Bernd Lechler from the Südwestrundfunk came together with Prof. Jeanette Hofmann and other professionals to explore the question of whether digitalization is making us lonely. You can listen to the insightful discussion, in which a psychologist also joined in, here:  "Smartphone and I - Are We Becoming Digitally Isolated?"

Germany has acquired somewhat of a reputation for lagging behind when it comes to digitalisation, in particular its public administration. When compared to leading countries, such as Estonia or Denmark, this gap may be as much as 20 years, says Prof. Jeanette Hofmann. In her conversation with Julia Stamm, Jeanette Hofmann shares insights on why this is the case and where Germany’s biggest challenges lie when it comes to enabling effective knowledge transfer between science and policymaking. Drawing on her extensive experience as part of scientific enquiries and other processes intended to transfer scientific insights into policy decision-making, she points out where positive steps forward have already been taken and where inherent dilemmas make progress tricky. She also highlights possible ideas for scaling "lighthouse” project successes to wider scale transformation.

Jürgen Habermas caused a bit of a furore with his slim volume "A New Structural Change in the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics," in which he criticizes how social media damage the self-perception of the political public sphere. Thorsten Thiel and Philipp Staab (HU Berlin) examine Habermas' theory of the public sphere ("Social Media and the Digital Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere"). They take a new look at Habermas' classic diagnosis of the structural change of the public sphere and reactivate the political economy dimension of his analysis. They show that under the conditions of the digital constellation, the central problem is no longer the immobilization of citizens as consumers, but the permanent activation under the primacy of the commercial, which stands in opposition to the emancipatory promise of collective self-determination.