Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: this room started life as a ChatGPT-generated question, and it turns out to be a genuinely sharp one — not what power mass media hold, but to what extent media shape our very understanding of power itself. Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Sabine and Jürgen trace it through Sabine’s own unsettling algorithm experience (one AfD speech watched out of curiosity, and suddenly Alice Weidel content keeps surfacing on every run), Jürgen’s distinction between a mass-circulation tabloid and a 3,000-reader local paper carrying the identical wire-service article, and his genuinely striking closing example of the two oldest, largest-circulation mass media of all: the Bible and the Quran. The room closes, as it often does, with a poem from Diana — and a lovely reminder from Jürgen that another hour just got “stolen from paradise.”
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Good morning, the host said, opening today’s room on the power of mass media, with the question: to what extent do media shape our understanding of power? She mentioned that this time, ChatGPT had been brought in much more heavily to help formulate suggestions and questions, even arranging them into a logical order. She found the question it landed on genuinely fascinating, because it isn’t really about what power mass media hold, or how they steer us, but rather to what extent media shape our understanding of power itself. She was curious whether this framing would even hold up, or whether the room would find itself stuck, or whether real insight would emerge. As always, everyone was warmly invited to join right from the start under the Power & Violence umbrella and look at this question together, sharing first impulses so the room could work through it in dialogue and see where it led. As a reminder for first-time visitors, the room is recorded throughout, so joining counts as agreeing to it being published. Three small room rules: a profile photo you can be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather not, or can’t speak right now, is welcome to use the chat instead.
Sabine opened: the first thing that came to mind for her was the classic algorithm effect — if she watches something two or three times, even if it didn’t particularly interest her, doesn’t align with her own views at all, suddenly YouTube starts showing her more and more in that direction. So even if she’s genuinely on the opposite side of an issue, she still gets influenced simply by seeing it repeatedly, and maybe it does nudge her a little. Her second thought: she suspects social media influences us even more than television, precisely because it keeps coming at you automatically. With TV, she has to actually get up and press a button first — it’s not automatic. She can dismiss these notifications on her phone too, of course, but it still feels more intense. So she thinks the social media space is considerably more influential than, say, having to pick up a newspaper and read an article, or press the TV button herself. And speaking of TV, with a lot of today’s shows, you almost already know in advance which direction they’ll lean — so it’s not quite as objective as some other formats, like the way the host runs things here.
Thank you so much, the host said — and the automatism certainly plays a role in things like which topics I look at, what I keep digging into, what even gets shown to me at all. Sabine had made a nice comparison with television, which she has to switch on herself, at least choosing which channel to watch. Still, she found the actual question genuinely interesting, because the real issue is whether the presence of certain algorithms, and certain topics being surfaced, actually shapes my understanding of power itself in some way. She found that a fascinating angle to look at the question from. Jürgen, good morning — what did he think?
Good morning to the host, to Sabine, and to everyone in the room, Jürgen said. He had two question marks on his face and one exclamation point representing a direct answer to the host’s question. To get his own bearings on what exactly was being asked, he wanted to position two questions. First: the umbrella theme is “power of mass media,” and the host’s question is to what extent media shape our idea of power. Are we drawing a distinction today, in this room, between “mass media” and “media” more broadly? That was his first question mark. His second, also tied to the heading: we’re talking about the power of mass media, and yet the host is asking about media’s influence on us. They’d had this exact distinction — between influence and power — come up before, in the very first room when this umbrella theme started, and he recalled they’d agreed it was genuinely difficult to separate the two terms cleanly, but had left it there at the time. Is that worth revisiting here? That would be his second question mark, since the host wasn’t asking how media use their power to change our idea of power, just to clarify. Now, to actually answer: the host asked to what extent media shape our idea of power — not why, not how, not with what, not when, but to what extent. And to that particular question word, his answer is “insofar as.” Media shape my idea of power either by my consciously recognizing that influence and accepting it, or by my not recognizing it and being unconsciously manipulated. That, for him, is the answer to the question posed — regardless of the specific means, timing, or purpose behind it. Thanks for listening.
Thank you so much, the host said — happy to draw that distinction. She’d noticed the same thing, two terms being used, “mass media” in the title and just “media” in the subheading, worth looking at more closely. And the other point: it’s not generally about what power media hold, but to what extent our understanding of power itself, the concept and how it takes shape, gets influenced through them. So, given the answer “media influence my idea of power either by my consciously recognizing it or being unconsciously manipulated” — do we maybe have some concrete examples? What is our understanding of power, and to what extent do media then affect how I interpret power, and is that where some form of influence is actually happening? She found that a genuinely interesting next step.
If he could add something briefly, Jürgen said, since the host had touched on interpreting one’s understanding of power: that’s where he sees a real difference from the term “exerting influence.” For him, power is fundamentally tied to something happening against my will and without my consent — I don’t want it, and whoever exercises power has the tools, competencies, capabilities, whatever it takes, to redirect that will in a concrete, traceable direction of their own. Perhaps he could note this down briefly: as he understands it, the very thin line distinguishing it from influence is that influence aims at shifting my attitude in order to produce a changed behavior from that. Power, by contrast, operates more directly, in opposition to influence. That’s his personal view, and he acknowledges it if someone doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, that distinction. Thanks.
Thank you so much, the host said — and, quick reminder for anyone joining for the first time, three small room rules to follow: a profile photo you can clearly be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio, and the room does get recorded, meaning anyone joining automatically understands the whole thing gets published afterward too. Anyone who doesn’t have a profile photo for whatever reason, or wants to participate anonymously, is welcome to do so via chat. Jürgen, she thought she understood his point, but her impression was that the question here needs to be looked at from a slightly different angle, since it isn’t about the power of mass media in and of itself — that’s not how she understands the question — but rather to what extent media shape our understanding of power. Not to what extent they exert power over us, in the sense of influencing us, but that they shape our understanding of the concept of power itself. She thought that’s a different level entirely. Did they see it differently than she did?
Jürgen said he’d tried to approach the host’s actual intent by turning the focus onto himself, essentially asking what the influence of mass media, or media, actually does to him. He believed he’d captured her intended direction that way, and conceded that, on a meta level, he sees two possibilities that could fall under “understanding”: one, through recognition and acceptance, and the other, through the possibility of being unconsciously manipulated in some specific area of political or social opinion being represented there. To sum it up again: this meta-level answer to the host’s question is that it does something to him — media influence him either consciously, in that he can follow and accept it, or unconsciously, through the tool of manipulation. That remains his understanding of the question.
Thanks, the host said. Sabine, thoughts?
This is genuinely not simple, what you two are raising, Sabine said. She leaned toward thinking it does happen — let’s take three examples. Take conspiracy theories about vehicle license plates or similar — that gets made very clear; barely a day goes by without the press or public opinion actively pushing back against something, making sure we all agree it’s not okay. German democracy — is there a question mark over it right now? That gets played up heavily in the media too, but is anything actually changing because of it? If she looks at who actually holds real power — something they’d touched on earlier this week too — the Googles, the BlackRocks and so on, you hear remarkably little about that in mainstream media. You really have to dig into some behind-the-scenes reading to get closer to that, say the host’s own “authors’ breakfast” content, which not everyone reads. So she leans toward thinking there is deliberate influence happening in that direction. She has a bit of trouble, though, with whether media actually change her concept of power itself — she keeps circling back to thinking it’s ultimately just a matter of frequency, how often something appears. But maybe that’s the wrong track again, like earlier.
There’s no right or wrong track, the host reassured her — they were simply working through this together, first checking whether they even share the same understanding of the question at all, since it came from a machine in the first place, it’s worth genuinely clarifying together what’s actually meant, or what we ourselves understand by the question. She found that genuinely fascinating. Jürgen, he’d raised that second point too, about the distinction between media and mass media — anything more to add there?
Gladly, Jürgen said — but first, one more thing: he felt a certain relief, and wanted to retract something. He’d said earlier “you ask” — but if it was actually the machine asking, that felt like a certain relief to him, thinking, okay, so we’re grappling with a machine here. But taking their discussion so far into account, he now thought the machine had actually posed a genuinely clever question, since it forced them to first get clear on what exactly they’re even talking about. Back to the media-versus-mass-media point specifically — that was another angle he’d had a question mark about but hadn’t mentioned yet. Do we define “mass media” based on the sheer size of the audience a given medium, a given carrier of information, actually reaches? Best example, to lay his own understanding bare: Bild is a mass medium for him, while the local Wasserburg paper is what he’d call an “exclusive” medium — exclusive not in terms of quality, but because maybe three or four thousand readers pick it up each day. Which raises the question, if he thinks it through consistently: does the sheer reach of a medium’s readership, whether mass-scale or small, actually determine whether my understanding of power changes at all — meaning, if he only reads the local Wasserburg paper, does he inherently end up with a different understanding of power than someone who only reads Bild? He hoped he’d made that distinction, and its implications, clear enough, since he thinks it matters.
That makes sense to the host, and she found the follow-up question genuinely fascinating too. Sabine, thoughts?
Sabine agreed with Jürgen — the Wasserburg paper obviously contains completely different content than Bild. Bild presumably frames things somewhat more aggressively in the end, making everything a bit more sensational, so whoever reads it might get steered toward a different concept of power than someone reading the more measured, explanatory version in the local Wasserburg paper.
Jürgen thanked both of them for their contributions, but wanted to raise something to consider: he’d increasingly noticed, in recent years, that regional papers often run articles from a large editorial network, with a note at the bottom of the piece. Once you’ve read that story in your local paper, you later find the exact same article running in Bild, or Der Spiegel, or Handelsblatt, because it was originally supplied by a paid staff writer at that network — essentially purchased locally. So if he takes that as a premise, and assumes that many of the articles he reads every day actually come from this same large editorial network, but he reads them because his local paper delivers them daily — does that actually make a difference to the resulting attitude, purely because it’s a smaller outlet versus a large one? That’s the question for him.
Sabine jumped in with a related memory: she couldn’t recall the exact context, but a journalist had once commented on LinkedIn about Bild, and got a genuine pile-on for it — even though the content of her comment was, Sabine thought, perfectly reasonable, people latched onto the idea of how dare she comment so broadly on something from Bild. And she thinks Jürgen is completely right that, logically, if the same article runs in both places, it should land the same either way. But she thinks people’s mindset is still that if Bild is lying around, oh god, you can’t possibly read that — even though everyone somehow has it on the table on vacation. So she isn’t sure his point holds 100%.
Genuinely fascinating, the host said, and she also tended to lean toward agreeing with Sabine, since we clearly carry different associations with different newspapers, and consequently make different automatic interpretations and judgments. And here’s a nice example: regardless of whether we personally read Bild or not, we might look at it very differently — but the moment I read the exact same content in a smaller regional paper instead, that assessment already carries a different weight for me, a different status. And that’s what she finds so fascinating, because technically it’s not different information reaching me at all. But purely because it’s coming from a mass medium versus not, that alone seems, as a first impulse, to genuinely make a difference to her, since she wouldn’t consciously engage with that question at all otherwise, and might not even notice if a small note somewhere flagged that the content was sourced elsewhere. How did Jürgen see it?
He was a bit surprised, Jürgen admitted — or he owed an apology if he’d chosen the wrong words, since he hadn’t meant to take a clear position or state a conclusion. He’d meant it purely as a question: is it actually the same thing? And to answer his own question directly now: no, it isn’t the same thing. Even if the article is word-for-word identical, down to punctuation and sentence structure, with no hidden manipulation, and even if I’m told at the end, “you’re reading the local Wasserburg paper, but this piece comes from Bild” — there’s still a meaningful difference. And that was really his intended point. Which brings them back to the host’s original question: to what extent, meaning what does it actually do to me, if I’m operating across these different spheres? His initial thought, without elaborating further just yet, is that the mass factor genuinely takes hold here — specifically, feeling part of a mass readership, in the millions rather than three thousand, if I evaluate that positively. That does something to me. And that, for him, is really the crux of today’s machine-generated question. He hoped he’d expressed that clearly. Thanks.
Wonderful, the host said — and she genuinely had understood it as a question, which is exactly why she’d bounced it back to him at the end, so he could answer it for himself, and for all of them. Sabine, anything to add?
Sorry, then she must have misunderstood, Sabine said — but she thinks they’re not actually that far apart on substance, almost in agreement that the power of media, in the end, is likely tied to circulation and to people’s own willingness to read a given paper. Because if Bild runs a small piece on something, the willingness to actually read the whole thing is far greater than if she had to pick up Manager Magazin and get through ten pages. So she thinks the power of media, in the end, comes down to circulation on one side, and reader willingness on the other.
Jürgen wanted to add one more thing: he recalled they’d touched on this topic before, in a different context — the power of media — where the Precht and Welser book had come up. They’d gotten into a specific angle there, about how media operate today, especially under the influence of social media. There’s a term from that book he thinks is genuinely important, because it applies to both sides — to media themselves, and to each of us individually. Precht and Welser talk about a kind of “bystander situation” — if he remembers correctly — meaning: if I come across some incident, best example being an accident, I initially just stand there, do nothing, and after a while orient my behavior according to the group, the crowd. That leads to an ease of identifying with the majority — I no longer feel any need to expose myself, to hold my own opinion, because once I notice that many people think a certain way, it becomes much easier to just say, I’ll go along with that too, more or less unreflectively. And he sees this “grouping,” if he can call it that, as a real danger on our side, as readers — the crowd pushes me, more or less consciously or unconsciously, in a certain direction, simply because I know that many people hold this opinion, this attitude toward power. And on the other side, media operate fully aware of this dynamic, deliberately using exactly this position and approach. He wanted to add, quite deliberately, that what largely falls by the wayside in the process is any real reflection on truth. Thanks for listening.
The host wanted to pick the social media angle he’d raised back up specifically, because she thinks something additional happens there on top. With television or newspapers, something gets printed or aired once, and it’s essentially the same copy everywhere — we all see the same thing. Whereas on a social media platform, wherever I’m consuming news in some form, I don’t necessarily see the same thing at all — back to the algorithm point Sabine raised at the start. Regardless of the platform’s overall reach, I might be moving through entirely different channels, or rather, different pieces of content — videos, say, taking video as the medium here — that I can engage with in completely different ways, including in the context of individual news stories made accessible through various users sharing them, rather than purely through a news agency. And here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, because once these algorithms kick in, I get bombarded increasingly and more intensely with the same, or similar, content. And it becomes effortless, say on YouTube, to keep clicking through the sidebar into more videos going in exactly the same direction of thinking — not opposing views, but reinforcing the same direction. And in that moment, if this keeps getting shown to me constantly, something happens to me — I find myself increasingly settling into a certain bubble. And if I don’t consciously counteract that, even with the kind of reflection Jürgen just mentioned, it becomes even more important that I actually apply it, because otherwise I might genuinely feel, since there are so many videos on this topic all pointing the same direction, that there are enormous numbers of people who think or see things exactly the way I do — without having any real sense of how many people that actually is in reality, aside from maybe numbers I can look up, like how often a video was liked or similar. What did people think?
Sabine agreed completely. Something had happened to her personally that she found genuinely extreme: she knows someone who’s now in the German parliament, part of the AfD, who gave a welcome speech, and she watched it once and afterward thought, wait, everything he’s saying isn’t actually wrong — it was genuinely a good speech. And ever since, she keeps getting fed content from Alice Weidel. She’d watched one YouTube video, and she finds that genuinely wild — she hasn’t watched anything else since, but it keeps showing up, say while she’s out jogging, because she never turned that feature off, and suddenly there’s Alice Weidel again, and she thinks — and this made her genuinely reflect — what happens if you don’t actually have a firmly settled opinion, and keep getting shown this content, and occasionally think, well, that’s not so bad, he’s not entirely wrong? It feels to her like some giant rake sweeping across a lawn, gathering up everything still standing there. And she has the feeling that’s exactly where we are right now.
Genuinely fascinating, the host said. Jürgen, thoughts?
If he could answer a bit provocatively, Jürgen said, it’s the same underlying situation as with artificial intelligence, a topic they’d covered before: he still has the option to pull the plug. If it’s getting on your nerves, deliberately put a bit provocatively, then simply don’t watch it.
Jürgen, she agreed with him completely there, Sabine said, but that wasn’t really her point. She has no problem with it herself, and if she did, she’d just switch it off — she has her own opinion. Her real concern is about the many people who are somewhere in between, who then happen to catch a broadcast from this particular space and think, that’s actually not bad, let me look into that further. That’s what she means — being pulled in almost like through a funnel. That’s where she sees the problem right now. Maybe nine speeches aren’t good and one is, but that one speaker is at least saying more right now than the other side, which is just tearing itself apart internally.
And if we widen this out further, the host added, thinking about target audiences — we also have younger people using the internet, social media channels. This doesn’t apply to her own son yet, but she knows many of his classmates already have internet access and are allowed to use it, and so on. Parents themselves often put on a YouTube video too, without necessarily monitoring everything that then gets shown. And that, agreeing with Sabine here, can genuinely lead, especially with people who don’t yet have a fully formed opinion, whose opinions are still developing, to a genuinely massive kind of “steering,” purely through the algorithms at play, pulling them further and further in one particular direction without necessarily realizing it, or not yet being equipped to differentiate at that stage. Jürgen, anything more to add?
Gladly, Jürgen said, and he shared his genuine delight, because this loops right back to the original question: to what extent does this power of media actually do something to us? Sabine’s example, and its effect on young people, on adolescents who don’t yet have that base of experience, or the knowledge to judge what’s important, unimportant, or simply wrong — that places, for us, a genuinely strong new weight of responsibility onto our shoulders for these young people, if not an entirely new kind of responsibility exactly. To offer an example from his own youth: nobody ever worried about which media he drew on to form his opinions, whether he read newspaper X or Y — because, he thinks, either the danger that undoubtedly comes from social media simply wasn’t present back then, or it perhaps wasn’t recognized even if it existed. But the fact remains, and Sabine put it perfectly, that this is a genuinely huge problem, which immediately raises the question: what can actually be done about it? They’d touched on this before too, in terms of countering social media’s influence, and had landed back on education. Of course — education is, for him, the meta-level answer to everything. But the essential precondition is that someone takes responsibility. This kind of awareness, or this particular type of education, is more necessary today than it used to be — he was willing to stick his neck out and claim that. It’s absolutely central today in shaping and educating young people and adolescents, and there has to be genuine responsibility behind that, some of which lies with us ourselves. Thanks.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and of course they had to land back on education, which she found genuinely fitting. She wanted to glance at the chat too, to see if there was anything else worth picking up. One question: is TV a mass medium, or is it more powerful, or is it actually print? And another comment: we often interpret the exact same information differently depending on who’s presenting it, even across different media. A question she found interesting: aren’t mass media already largely aligned with each other to a significant degree? A follow-up: on which topics is no dissenting opinion tolerated, or immediately condemned? Where is genuine discussion simply not allowed in the media — this room on Clubhouse excepted? Thumbs up or thumbs down often suggests an opinion that happens to confirm my own, but that can be massively wrong. That’s a genuinely fascinating point worth picking up too. And then: what power do mass media actually have, and which do you mean, or could you give an example to clarify? Maybe they could pick up on one or two of these. Sabine, Jürgen, go ahead.
Sabine wanted to circle back to something for Jürgen first: is it education in this moment, or is it more about raising awareness? Rezo came to mind for her — everyone probably remembers his speech going viral online, and the established politicians were essentially powerless, because they had no idea how to respond to it. Some tried doing something on social media themselves, but it just didn’t land the same way. And that’s part of the problem — some people are simply far better at working these media than, say, some scientist during Covid who might have made a TikTok. Except they never would have, because first they’d have said that’s not my platform, and second, they’d have said I genuinely can’t do this, since I’ve never done it before. And that’s part of the problem — it snowballs, compounds, and comes across at a mass scale in a way a normal, solid newspaper article simply can’t match. Jürgen, want to pick that up directly?
He was genuinely pleased, Jürgen said, that this topic had circled back to education and responsibility once again. On Sabine’s question, education or awareness-raising — he found that a genuinely good question, one he’d love to sit with further, but his spontaneous first reaction was: depending on how you define “awareness” as a term, awareness is a key precondition for actually advancing an educational mission within one’s own responsibility. And crucially, not just raising awareness in the person I’m trying to help educate, but my own awareness too. That said, he thinks this deserves its own dedicated room entirely. But he had, perhaps toward the closing round, or right now if preferred, two examples of a mass medium that has explicitly —
Before he switched topics, the host asked if she could briefly add something on the education-versus-awareness point first, so they didn’t lose the thread, and then she’d gladly hand it back for his example.
Of course, Jürgen said, happy to.
In her view, the host said, it isn’t really an either-or — both are genuinely needed. Awareness matters, and Jürgen had already laid the groundwork with his terms, which she found genuinely important here too. Awareness is important, but awareness alone isn’t enough. That’s where we come back to those overarching key competencies — I need the actual skills, the capabilities, to do something with that awareness. Now I’ve been made aware of something, but what does that actually mean in practice? And that’s where we need the foundation of education, to be able to properly step into research, reflect on it, weigh things for ourselves, and so on. So her answer to the question is: it needs both, awareness and education. And now a third dimension comes in too — even with both awareness and education in place, that doesn’t mean I still won’t keep falling into certain traps, because now we’re back to neuroscience and brain research, since we act emotionally in so many situations. Processes running in the background, biochemically speaking, happen so fast that we sometimes don’t even register them. So there are unconscious, even physical — biochemical, she was searching for the right word — processes at play here too that need to be factored in. With that, Jürgen, his example, please, unless he wanted to add anything else first.
Without going into further detail, Jürgen said, he wanted to put something into the room: it’s genuinely remarkable that two mass media hadn’t been mentioned yet — two that have, throughout all of human history, arguably shaped humanity’s understanding of power on the largest scale of circulation there has ever been. He meant the Bible and the Quran. Anyone who genuinely goes deep into either finds that both take a clear position on power, both define power, and both see the purpose and mandate of power in essentially the same way. On a meta level, as he understands it, there’s no real difference there. And the audience reached, that’s exactly why this matters to him — he wanted to underline it strongly — we’re no longer talking Bild-newspaper scale, or Handelsblatt scale. We’re talking, at minimum, on par with social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and similar — billions of people. Except this particular “circulation” has existed for two millennia already, and has, crucially for him, explicitly and unambiguously stated what power is, where it comes from, and what purpose it’s meant to serve. That was another point he wanted to throw in.
Thank you so much, the host said — she’d just let that sit for now, genuinely great point. And with that, she wanted to bring Diana into the conversation too, and then they could draw connections across everyone’s contributions. Diana, good morning — what did she think about the power of mass media?
Good morning, Diana said — and as always, as everyone knows by now, she likes to express things through a poem. She offered one on the power of media, roughly translated here: is the power of media truly vast, or do they merely carry the news that’s cast? There are several ways to view this at play, and here’s a few thoughts to light the way. How large that power of media proves shows in how, as a journalist, you can barely move on your own — because if you don’t deliver the text the publisher had in mind, you lose your income, your very ground to stand on. Isn’t that already an answer to the question of power? During the pandemic, you could see it too, how many outlets marched in the same direction — there the power of media was genuinely vast, or was it simply propaganda in disguise? Among the media that hold real power are also Twitter, Instagram and the rest — news spreads there faster than almost anywhere else, and telling what’s genuine from what isn’t becomes genuinely hard. And through AI, this power, this platform, only grows larger still. How great that power really was showed itself the day Trump called people to the Capitol, and the crowd stormed it soon after. So these media are not to be underestimated — through deliberate messaging, they can whip a crowd into sharpening knives. The one thing that truly matters, in the end, is helping people learn to handle these media with conscious care — that everyone understands these media can be manipulated, deliberately stoking certain messages. So question every piece of information, and form your own opinion from within. Then the power of media may still be vast and considerable, but you decide whether it actually shapes you, and what other sources remain open to you for real information. Thank you.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said. Sabine, Jürgen, anything to add to that?
You can barely add anything to that, Jürgen said — it’s a summary of everything. Truly wonderful, Diana, genuinely great. Sabine offered her closing word: she found the room genuinely wonderful. She’d thought at first she was completely on the wrong track, but in the end she’d learned something — we need education first, in order to later understand awareness, and to keep reflecting along the way. She wished everyone a good day.
Thank you so much. Jürgen, best to continue directly from there.
He fully echoed the praise Sabine had just given, Jürgen said — remarkable, outstanding, wonderful, beautifully put, thank you Diana. And if that’s to be the closing word, he was happy to join Sabine there too. It’s genuinely remarkable that a single machine-generated question led to such a wide spectrum of views and insights. And, as he says every time, this was another hour stolen from paradise. Thanks to everyone for participating, for listening, and a good day to all. Thanks.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and she could only echo that, Diana, truly wonderful, thank you so much for that. She wanted to briefly add to what Jürgen had just said, about “an hour stolen from paradise,” and how genuinely wonderful it is that this became possible even with a machine involved, as everyone had just seen today. For anyone who joined later: she’d mentioned at the start that both today’s room title and the question they’d worked through had been generated by ChatGPT, under the Power & Violence umbrella theme. And even though the question, to what extent do media shape our understanding of power, might have felt a bit disorienting to some at first, they’d very deliberately chosen to leave it exactly as posed, without reformulating it in any way, just to see where the room would land by the end. She found that genuinely fascinating, and thinks it’s worth noting, here and elsewhere, that genuinely, in whatever sense you want to interpret that word for a machine, “clever” questions can get formulated this way. Genuinely remarkable, she found it. Diana, her highlight or closing word for today?
Thank you so much for the kind words, Diana said. It’s just a talent of hers, writing things down like that whenever she’s in a room like this. Her closing word: in the near future, or even today already, we all need to handle information very consciously, need a clear head paired with heart and reason, and shouldn’t rely on just one single source. That’s what she has to say — because media hold real power, and they only hold that power if we let them. Thanks for a lovely room.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — truly great, everything that came together today, the different angles, the examples, the distinctions drawn between terms, right down to first understanding what we even mean by the question itself. She found it a genuinely fascinating room, and topped off with Diana’s closing poem, beautifully summed up and put into words once again. Heartfelt thanks for that. Tomorrow they’d continue with cyberbullying — how does violence manifest in the digital world — that’s the question they’d dig into. She was genuinely looking forward to welcoming everyone back tomorrow morning at 8am in the Deep Talk Club, if anyone had the time and interest. With that, she wished everyone a wonderful day and looked forward to tomorrow. Until then, ciao.
