Attention: The lectures will be held partly in German and partly in English. Knowledge of both languages is necessary for participation.
The rapid spread of the Internet in society has promoted a far-reaching process of upheaval in civil society and the economy. Initially just a technical infrastructure, the Internet is fundamentally changing how people communicate and inform themselves, what their working world looks like and how they organize their leisure time, how political processes function, how opinions are formed and how values are created, and knowledge is imparted. The Internet thus has a profound impact on a country's civil society and economic development and its position in global competition.
This change also poses significant challenges for society in Europe. Here, too, the process of upheaval is encountering a society with evolved social relationships, an internationally successful economic system and people who, in their vast majority, support this society with a great deal of commitment and want to develop it further. The process of upheaval associated with the Internet and digitization will not take place on a greenfield site. A mature society must actively shape it. To preserve the social cohesion achieved, it is necessary, especially in Europe and other industrialized countries, to constantly accompany the emerging processes of change with political measures to exploit their social and economic opportunities and counteract distortions at an early stage. The technological changes and opportunities are hitting society with such force that even the crucial question of how society should look and function in the age of digitization is being asked only hesitantly, and the enormous creative potential is being debated and realized only very hesitantly. We want to help empower society to actively shape its destiny, even in the age of digitization, and not to be passive victims of misunderstood or unrecognized developments.
The Faculty of Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology, in cooperation with the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation and the Department of Computer Science at the CIT School of the Technical University of Munich, is organizing a public lecture series on the topic of digitization. The aim is to look at the issue from the perspective of different disciplines to achieve an overarching and interdisciplinary understanding of the subject. This year, we are focusing specifically on the topic of digital sustainability.
In the first part of the course, the students are introduced to the topic by means of lectures on various topics of digital sustainability. In the second part of the course, the students have to analyze and evaluate a hypothesis of digital sustainability based on the lectures.
