OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
This event is held in collaboration with the Weizenbaum Institute.
Recently social media have been blamed for many ills of democracy. Yet in the most recent elections in India in 2024, YouTube, among others, was a vital channel for the opposition parties and for critics of the government, perhaps more so than traditional media. True, an essential factor in Modi’s and Trump’s first electoral victory was Twitter. But on that occasion, it was not disinformation, filter bubbles, polarization or algorithms. Rather, both candidates circumvented gatekeepers. How to theorize the role of online politics? I will argue that non-gatekept online media are here to stay as part of the public arena. They allow counterpublics to challenge elites and traditional media, for better and worse. This has given rise to populism in the US and India. The solution lies in restoring the reliability of the public arena; its impartiality, inclusiveness, and diversity – including the non-gatekept part. The solution does not rest on media alone; it also requires greater responsiveness of elites to citizens so as to deepen and broaden their rights – within, rather than against, the grain of distinctive political traditions, expanding them.
