For over a year, all of AU’s conferences have been virtual. At the end of May however, the doors of the Lakeside Lecture Theatres will be opened for a conference where you can participate in person. The MatchPoints conference will focus on how digitalisation affects society, culture and everyday life – for better or worse.

2021.05.05 | Ida Hammerich Nielson

Life on campus is slowly beginning to return.

On 27 May, Aarhus University will take another step in the reopening of the university’s normal activities when the annual conference MatchPoints takes place.

The plan is to hold the MatchPoints conference over the course of three days as a hybrid conference, with the possibility of participating both in person and virtually. Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, who is the academic director of this year’s MatchPoints conference, explains:

“The conference has four in-person tracks, one of which will be professionally livestreamed and will enable viewers to interact with the speakers. Whether you participate in the conference in person or virtually, you will experience a number of interesting debates about how digitalisation has changed our society, and, maybe more importantly, that these changes show no signs of slowing down. The participants will meet debaters and keynote speakers who will participate either in person or virtually.”

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen looks forward to welcoming all participants – both in person and virtually – to the conference in the Lakeside Lecture Theatres The conference will be held in accordance with the government’s current guidelines for social distancing, hygiene and not least the number of participants. There are also many places to get tested on campus. 

“I think it’s great that we will hopefully be able to give the conference the vitality that will make the experience something special. And of course we’re focused on ensuring safety, so the participants can focus on the academic content,” says Mads Rosendahl Thomsen.

The detailed planning of the conference will be adjusted in line with the possibilities and limitations that the Covid-19 situation brings. Stay up to date at matchpoints.au.dk, which will be updated regularly with news about the conference and the Covid-19 situation. You can also register here.

MatchPoints conference 2021 Democracy and Culture in the Digital Age
Are social media destroying democracy? Can digital technologies curb climate change? Will artificial intelligence make humans redundant? These are some of the questions that will be discussed at the MatchPoints conference at Aarhus University on 27-29 May under the title “Democracy and Culture in the Digital Age”. The conference will focus on how digitalisation affects society, culture and everyday life – for better or worse. The MatchPoints conference is open to researchers, IT developers, journalists, politicians, government officials, doctors, teachers, students and anyone else who wants to understand how the internet has transformed our society.

Warm up for MatchPoints with podcasts about social media, politics and fake news
What does digitalisation mean for our democracy? Two of the MatchPoints conference’s keynote speakers give samples of their presentations in two podcasts. Listen to award winning author Anne Applebaum explain why social media has a negative effect on politics – and why Europe in particular has a chance to do something about the problem. Listen to political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s specific examples of how users can fight against fake news and get more control over the information overload on websites like Facebook.