Public evening lecture by Professor Dr Alexander Ziem (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

In social media, too, we are bombarded with information at a tremendous speed and incessantly. In order not to drown in the sheer flood of data, we are forced to sort and categorise perceptual data. Despite the high cognitive demand, this process takes place automatically and unnoticed. It is guided not least by frames that we have acquired and which guide the process of understanding below the threshold of perception. The lecture will argue that frames are intrinsically social in their function as templates of understanding in two respects: They emerge from social interaction and shape it at the same time, which is why they always operate as tools of interest-driven control and selective distribution of information (aka "framing").

Professor Dr Alexander Ziem holds the chair of "German Linguistics" at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, is head of the FrameNet construct of German (https://framenet-constructicon.hhu.de/) and is the main initiator of the "Digital Cultures" course. After teaching and research activities at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Basel, he was a Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (FrameNet) in Berkeley, California (USA) in 2013 and 2014, as well as head of various DFG projects. From 2011 to 2019, he was Director of the Research Training Group for CRC 991 "The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition and Science". He initially taught as a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy in 2019 and then at the Universities of Kyoto and Tokyo in Japan in 2025.