Replace or repair?
Replace or repair? For participants in repair initiatives, this is a central question when it comes to giving advice on how to take care of broken things. When this question is posed online – in the hope of quick and location-independent help —, the conditions of its discussion change: instead of perhaps examining the objects in question manually, participants describe and analyse them in written posts or photographs. Importantly for my talk, they also become the subject of moderation, revealing the relevance of practical relationships between those giving and those receiving advice. While moderation is a cultural technique with a long history, online it has become a widespread, often controversial practice, including automated, often invisible processes of ordering and deleting known as content moderation. In my talk, I am going to reconstruct moderation practices in an online repair advice group and, on a more theoretical level, explore their embeddedness in the repair practices.
Ronja Trischler studied social and cultural sciences in Leipzig and London and received her PhD in Sociology in Frankfurt a.M. She has been a lecturer in Dortmund since 2022, having previously worked at the CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation and the Graduate School Locating Media in Siegen as well as the Department of Sociology at the GU Frankfurt. Her research and teaching focus on technology, media, and culture and their cooperative production, as well as theories of practice and qualitative methods. She is currently working on research projects on hackathons and digital moderation.
Der Vortrag ist auch Teil der RUSTLab Lectures am RUSTLab der Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Bildnachweis: Kilian Seiler (2019) https://unsplash.com/de/fotos/person-die-smartphones-unter-einem-beleuchteten-tisch-repariert-PZLgTUAhxMM
