Social media – or digital, participatory and shareable media – are fundamentally transforming our Politics. They do so by changing the ways in which we find out about political ideas and arguments, and how we come to understand and identify with them. The result is not just a more volatile and angry politics but one which tends towards reactionary and authoritarian forms.

Wonderful World has invited Alan Finlayson to give a talk to explain the rise of «ideological entrepreneurs, people who make a living promoting political ideas online, and how the organisation and aesthetics of digital media platforms lead such entrepreneurs to create a politics which instead of inviting people to think of themselves as citizens working together for the common good, urges them to be truth-seeking heroic individuals fighting to bring salvation to a fallen world.

Lecture by Alan Finlayson, Professor of Political & Social Theory University of East Anglia Professor, with particular expertise in the theoretical and practical study of political rhetoric, a field which - in the form of Rhetorical Political Analysis - he has done much to establish within British Political Studies, he oversees the website British Political Speech

Commentator: Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen, writer, commentator and professor of Intellectual History at Nord University, Bodø

Host: Kamilla Østerberg, philosopher and editor of the philosophical online journal Salongen