Participants of MCB 2018

“I visited a session about failure, and the example was about female magazines of how some years ago the women were only brought in when talking about the top executives but now the discourse has changed, and the focus is more on how woman are struggling with their work and home life balance. So they can also be an example of failers, not only extraordinery superwoman. So they are not presented as ideals but as a girl next door”.

“I find the talks about data protection and privacy very important because there are not so many events and conferences where people discuss them. I visited a workshop where they made me an encrypted email, and I hope it will become more common to use encrypted communication tools for communication. So that using them will become a norm in our society”.

“I found many interesting projects, for example, the one where smiling at the camera told you which party you vote for. The technology is exciting behind it because it can analyze your face, the mimics and what you do with your face, like smiling. There are a scanner and database based on that information which tells which is like you. And that shows you which party you vote for. You can do it for not only voting but also for all other things.

Additionally, there was an exciting presentation “The political tragedy of data-driven- determinism” from Mushon Zer-Aviv. It was about utopy of how the future will be. And the main idea that I took with me from there was the importance of pluralism, that everyone has a different view on future. There is no one leader, but instead, we are all leaders and the community matters”.

“I learned about the monopolizing of Youtube which is very interesting to me. I have learned a lot about how to use and make my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube more successful. For example, if I have a channel on Youtube – how can I have more followers or how to make a post on Instagram. The first thing if you want to post something, you need to think if the people are attracted to this video or photo or not”.

“One thing that was useful for me was the presentation about live videos on Facebook. It was kind of impressive to hear what is the central core of making live videos and what you should avoid doing”.

“The most inspiring thing was the diversity of the topics. So you could listen to presentations and sessions that were about – difficult to say in English because I only attended the ones in German – things that go a little bit deeper and not just on the surface, that was cool! And also the choice of the speakers because I think it was diverse and a lot of women which I thought was cool. And the opportunity to connect during the workshops. It was very interesting that a lot of speakers focused on the problem that we have in Germany with right-wing parties at the moment. I think it was fascinating that a lot of speakers included that because that is the problem that we have to deal with. Especially in context with media, how we deal with people online who do a lot of hate speech and who unite online against refugees or left-wing people. Especially in that context, it is interesting”.

“Richard Gutjahr is a German journalist for TV mostly. He had a pure chance – he was near in attack of Nice in France where the truck drove into the group of people and then by another pure coincidence – a week later – he was back in Munich where he works, and there he was nearby where the guy tried to shoot people. And because the internet is a really weird place, where trolls created the conspiracy theory. And he had a super-interesting way of looking at how do you deal with these talks. He said that ten years ago you could just stay quiet, and it would go down but these days, he said, it does not work anymore. Instead, you should actively fight these trolls with all options that the law gives you. He used examples of how to fight back to spread of misinformation. It was super touching beacuse it went really close to the guy beacuse he was attacked by years and years and all that wave of hate and you can imagine yourself in that situation. It was hopeful to hear that he was actually able to fight those trolls and be back in his life and in a way to win that situation”.

“The core issue for a lot of talks seemed to be a mixture of technological solutionism and political activism. We heard a lot of discussions about the Facebook scandal and online privacy which were down to political solutions and political activism. In half of the talks, it was quite clear on which level the solutions should be applied according to the speaker. And in some presentations, I think it has collaborated very well what has to happen in the legislative process and what also needs to happen on the part of us as users. This is something to think about”.