Dominique Cardon and Denis Peschanski – 21/10/2014

History and democracy at the digital age

In this session, Dominique Cardon and Denis Peschanski discussed the theme: “History and democracy at the digital age”.

Dominique Cardon is a sociologist at the Laboratory of uses of Orange Labs, and an associated Professor at the University of Marne-la-Vallée. His work focuses on the uses of the Internet and the transformations of the digital public spaces, the amateur self-production and the analysis of the forms of cooperation and governance in the large online collectives. He now leads a sociological analysis of the algorithms organizing information on the web. In this lecture, he relied in particular on Fred Turner’s work, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, to show the genesis of computer-science and the web through their relationship with American culture of the 1970s.

Historian, director of research at CNRS, member of the Center for Social History of the 20st Century, Denis Peschanski especially studies the history of communism and the Vichy regime. Since 2011, he is the scientific coordinator of the Excellence equipment MATRICE (a transdisciplinary technologic platform for analyzing memory), and he joined in 2013 the scientific council of the Observatory B2V of memories. During this session, he focused on the conditions of production of social and collective memory, based on examples from the French memory of the Second World War. He also presented some trails of analysis to study the nature and functioning of memory within a transdisciplinary approach, through the MATRICE project.