HCAS Conference: Human Interaction in the Age of the Internet

Human Interaction in the Age of the Internet brings together scholars across social psychology, communication, linguistics, anthropology, and computational research to explore how digital infrastructures are reshaping social life.

The conference focuses on three intertwined questions:

1. Interaction: What happens to sociality when conversation is mediated by platforms, metrics, and machines?
2. Language: How do narratives, identity, and public opinion form through distributed micro-utterances—posts, comments, clips, and memes?
3. Models: How can computational methods (including LLMs) help us understand these shifts—without reducing them to “content” or “information”?

This is a meeting about the new norms of interaction that organize belonging, truth, civility, and conflict in connected worlds.

The conference is organized by Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor Kevin Durrheim at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

09:00–12:00 Group session: introductions + 2-minute provocations; constellation mapping and session formation

12:00–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:30 Session 1 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

16:00–18:00 Session 2 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

09:00–11:00 Session 3 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

11:30–13:30 Session 4 (5 × 8-min starters + extended discussion)

13:30–15:00 Lunch

15:00–17:00 Plenary: open discussion + harvesting “what emerged”