Hey! My name is Joachim and I am a PhD Fellow in Political Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. I’m very excited about visiting Civic Media for the term. In my research, I’m trying to figure out what the public sphere means, what it can or should do. Obviously, the public sphere has always been transformed by technology from printing to digital platforms, and technology has been of core concern to this field at least since philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 1770s tried to capture the fascinating essence of the public sphere: the structures of publication.

In public sphere studies, technology drives social change as well as creating new problems (and opportunities). I’m worried about technology for the problems that it may be used to solve: The fact that solutions are possible do not automatically make them good or desirable solutions. (For example, ’fall detection floors’ for elderly that decrease the need to help/check on them and thus reduce the amount of social interactions elderly people may have during the day.) Sometimes, solutions may just wipe out near-invisible but important aspects of life.

During our first class, I was reminded of an architect – Lars Lerup – who wrote a book called Building the Unfinished. Architecture, is Lerup’s point, is always unfinished because human actions make other interactions possible than the intentions of the architect. My guess is that technology may have this same feature of unfinishedness, and one of the things I am looking forward to in this course is to explore such aspects of technology in terms of driving social change.