Tobias Lipinski
University of Bonn
The current discourse surrounding platform-based Social Network Sites (SNS) is marked by a striking duality: on the one hand, it is highly fragmented; on the other, it increasingly serves as an indicator of crisis. SNS today appear as manifestations of a “polluted media landscape” (Phillips & Milner, 2021), where hate speech is disseminated, fake news goes unrecognized and is often thoughtlessly shared. These phenomena converge in the emergence of so-called “shitstorms,” defined as “unforeseen, short-lived waves of outrage on social media” (Gaderer, 2018, p. 27).
The different approaches regarding shitstorms have yet to account for the epistemic nature of the shitstorm within its specific embedding on SNS. Particularly noteworthy is the convergence of numerous, individually critiqued phenomena within this unexpected, structurally fragile, and re- /decontextualizing occurrence. Shitstorms, then, may be understood as the “true scourge of networked society” (Gaderer, 2018, p. 42). An analysis of shitstorms thus adds a crucial dimension to a phenomenon that has so far received insufficient attention from perspectives grounded in the philosophy of language and action theory and will be examined from a phenomen-ontological perspective: At first, drawing on debates around shared content, the analysis will demonstrate that key mechanisms—such as sharing, liking, and commenting—are based on continual processes of de- and recontextualization, and help to form “smart mobs” (Vehlken, 2013), marked by a virtual, fluid form of collective intentionality and group agency. This may help situating Shitstorm within the logics of community formation on SNS. A credible response to these phenomena must therefore entail a critical interrogation of these “meta-contexts” (Davies, 2024).
Chair: Irene Lo Faro
Time: 03 September, 14:40 – 15:10
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 