The conference Human Interaction in the Age of the Internet brought together scholars from social psychology, communication, linguistics, anthropology and computational research at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on 11–12 May 2026.
Focusing on digital sociality, the event examined how platforms, metrics and machines have reshaped social life. Discussions addressed how conversation, public opinion, identity and conflict are formed through posts, comments, clips, memes and other distributed micro-utterances.
Organised by Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor Kevin Durrheim, the conference also explored how computational methods, including large language models, could help researchers understand new norms of interaction without reducing them to mere “content” or “information”. HSSH’s Matti Pohjonen contributed to the programme with a paper on generative AI as an epistemological laboratory.