M.16. Digital Transformation and Democratic Regeneration: The Essential Role of Critical Education in the Age of Algorithmic Capitalism
The expansion of digital media is profoundly reshaping democratic culture, transforming modes of political participation, collective imaginaries, and the quality of social time. The contemporary information ecosystem exhibits an amphibious character: while it broadens and simplifies access to knowledge—particularly through the growing use of generative artificial intelligence—it simultaneously intensifies disinformation, polarization, and algorithmic profiling. Digital society also produces new forms of discrimination that disproportionately affect women and marginalized groups. Algorithmic biases entrench structural inequalities, while platforms facilitate gender-based harassment and hate speech, making an intersectional analytical approach indispensable for examining how race, gender, class, and sexuality are being reconfigured within digital power relations. These dynamics are closely intertwined with shifts in labour paradigms and the organization of social time. The transition from Fordism to AI-driven economies redefines foundational dichotomies—individual and collective, care time and work time, labour and consumption—that underpin digital capitalism and lie at the heart of the current democratic crisis. Grasping platform logics requires critical reflection on how algorithmic management is transforming work, leisure, consumption, and intergenerational and gender relations, calling for renewed recognition of non-work and creative leisure. Within this context, formal and informal education assume a crucial strategic role. Schools remain essential intermediary spaces for strengthening dialogical democracies. The panel invites contributions on the following themes:
• Media education, digital literacy, and democracy
• Generative AI, platforms, and educational processes
• Intersectional approaches in digital education
• Disinformation, polarization, and the cultivation of critical thinking
• Labour, social time, and education in the platform economy
• Schooling, digital citizenship, and critical education