Denis Newiak – författare

Corona als inszeniertes Unterdrückungsinstrument, geheim gehaltene Impftote oder kinderbluttrinkende Politiker: Spätestens seit dem Ausbruch der Covid-19-Pandemie haben Verschwörungsideologien Hochkonjunktur und schaden durch ihren Dogmatismus dem sozialen Frieden und der demokratischen Willensbildung. Sogenannte Verschwörungstheorien (conspiracy theories) erzeugen systematisches Misstrauen gegenüber den legitimierten politischen Institutionen und können zu gesellschaftlicher Polarisierung, gefährlichem Populismus und extremistischer Eskalierung beitragen. In Kinofilmen und Fernsehserien waren Verschwörungsideologien schon immer Thema, setzen sie sich doch durch ihre filmischen Mittel seit jeher mit der Beziehung zwischen Realität und Illusion, Wahrheit und Fiktion, Wirklichkeit und Traum, Sinn und Wahnsinn auseinander. Serien und Filme dienen dabei nicht nur als Diskursraum gesellschaftlicher Selbstverständigung, sondern unterbreiten auch durch ihre komplexen Narrative, Figurenkonstellationen und Ästhetiken eingängige Erklärungsansätze für das Entstehen und die Verbreitung von Verschwörungserzählungen. Zugleich unterbreiten sie dabei zum Teil erstaunlich konkrete Vorschläge zur Handhabung solcher kollektiver Wahnvorstellungen. Was können wir aus den fiktionalen Welten von Serien und Filmen für den Umgang mit diesem ganz realen Gegenwartsphänomen lernen?

Modernity presents itself as an age of increasing social disintegration: secularization and rationalization, urbanization and globalization, individualization and digitalization make it difficult for communities today. Modernity comes with desirable promises that make it attractive, but it does not come free: Its price is escalating modern loneliness. Denis Newiak tells a cultural history of modernization that, from industrialization to the late-modern network society, produces ever new and harsher experiences of loneliness.

Television series enjoy an unbroken - popular as well as scholarly - attention. It is surprising, however, that in works on seriality in media and cultural studies, approaches to television studies and television history still play a rather minor role. Yet seriality should always be thought of in terms of television, since the two have always been inextricably interwoven - economically, technically and aesthetically. But what else constitutes the serial in television and how does it change its face in times of digitalization, streaming and interactivity? Is it possible to think of a genuine serial theory of the televisual - and what, in turn, can be learned from this for seriality beyond television? The essays in this volume contribute to shedding new light on the serial as a core principle of television and to providing new impulses for a television theory of the serial on the basis of diverse examples from the current range of television series. 

Corona as a staged instrument of oppression, secretly kept vaccination deaths or politicians drinking children''s blood: at the latest since the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, conspiracy ideologies are booming and harm social peace and democratic will formation through their dogmatism. So-called conspiracy theories generate systematic distrust of legitimate political institutions and can contribute to social polarization, dangerous populism and extremist escalation. Conspiracy ideologies have always been a topic in movies and television series, as they have always dealt with the relationship between reality and illusion, truth and fiction, reality and dream, sense and madness through their cinematic means. Series and films not only serve as a discursive space for social self-understanding, but also, through their complex narratives, constellations of characters and aesthetics, offer catchy explanations for the emergence and spread of conspiracy narratives. At the same time, theymake suggestions, some of them astonishingly concrete, for dealing with such collective delusions. What can we learn from the fictional worlds of series and films for dealing with this very real contemporary phenomenon?