Presented by Dr. Thorsten Quandt, professor of communication studies at the University of Münster.

Participation in online media has seemingly lost its innocence: What once started as a hopeful promise for media and society in the 1990s, developed into the object of public fears and concerns among media and tech companies. Trolling, bullying and strategic manipulation seem to be very common in comment sections and social media these days. Accordingly, malevolent and dysfunctional forms of participation have sparked the interest of research, and have been recently labeled as “dark participation” (Quandt 2018). Thorsten Quandt, professor of communication studies at the University of Münster (Germany), will present some prominent examples of dark participation, discuss the analytic concept, and present some recent empirical studies, including interview studies with community managers, representative surveys of users, and large-scale automated content analyses.     

Dr. Quandt was the chair of online communication and interactive media at the University of Hohenheim from 2009-2012. From 2007-2008, he was an assistant professor of journalism research at the Free University Berlin, where he also served as a guest professor in 2006. Furthermore, he has been working as a lecturer and researcher at various other universities, including the LMU Munich, the Berlin University of the Arts, and the Technical University Ilmenau. He was also a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Oxford, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and a visiting scholar at Indiana University-Bloomington. He (co)published more than 150 scientific articles and several books. His work was awarded with several scientific awards, including various Top Paper Awards and the dissertation award of the German Communication Association. His research and teaching fields include online communication, media innovation research, digital games, and journalism.