Dancing in the dark

On the Internet, light and dark are often just a few clicks apart. On the one hand limitless communication, cat videos and a wealth of information; on the other: hostility, degradation and attacks on democracy. Prof. Thorsten Quandt, an expert on online communication, knows all about this digital duality. Sitting in a darkened room and surrounded by dozens of monitors, he talks about his life, his career and what motivates him. When asked why he has been dealing with online disinformation, cyberbullying and hate all these years, his answer is clear and devoid of resignation: “Someone has to take a look at it – objectively, and without wishing to have their prejudices confirmed.”

Thorsten Quandt does indeed take a look. Media were already playing a part early on in the life of the 54-year-old. “I wanted to become a film director, and so I enrolled at Bochum to do the film studies course.” In the completely oversubscribed course, he says, he was “one of 1,000 wannabe Steven Spielbergs”. This was no good, he thought, and so he switched to Psychology and Journalism. It was to be 16 years before Quandt transferred the centre of his working life from Bochum to Münster. It was, he says, a time marked by “guided coincidences” and he adds with a smile that he was “half-pushed and half-pulled”. The years saw him working as a radio journalist, then as a research associate and a PhD student in Ilmenau, Thuringia, followed by a post-doc position in Munich, an associate professorship at the University of Berlin and an appointment as professor at the University of Hohenheim.

Although what he loved most of all as a journalist were discussions over lunch, where a wide range of political opinions frequently clashed and caused much turbulence – as in the case of a local kale lunch he was involved in, which was “my absolutely favourite assignment” – and although in Ilmenau he had a “really exciting and wonderful time, while young and slightly naïve”, he finally ended up at Münster, where he has been a professor at the Department of Communication since 2012. He explains in a very matter-of-fact way that you go where the jobs are. With more feeling, he comments on how much he values Münster and the way the city and the university are interlinked. Quandt is no great fan, however, of offices, which he describes as “lifeless places”: he is not only an analytical social scientist, and in particular he loves the creativity of his job.

His preference for places full of life and ingenuity bore fruit in June. The European Research Council (ERC) approved his application for an Advanced Grant, which he had written one summer in France. He had already been awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2010 for his research into the culture of online gaming. This new grant will see him moving between public communication and virtual reality.

Tongue in cheek – and because a positive acronym was needed – he called his project “DANCE”, standing for “Dark Nerd Communities: A multi-method exploration of toxic degradation in the adolescent technosphere”. Its aim is to discover how online groups – young men in particular – function, how their values break down and a toxic, dangerous community is created. One of the topics involved is the so-called Incel movement, in which men aim to reclaim power by degrading women.

For many years now, Thorsten Quandt has demonstrated in his research that he not only has his finger on the pulse of our times, but that sometimes he is also a few steps ahead. He was an early believer in the Internet and guessed that it would stay with us and become a mass medium. This was why he has specialised in studying the digital world by proceeding in a rigorously scientific way. “The objects under investigation are people. The methods employed are taken from the natural sciences,” he says. What he is interested in with his latest project, he adds, are “the circumstances beforehand, and the breadth of the phenomena”, the rationalities of problematic behaviour, and how political, ideological or economic “entrepreneurs of hate” poison young people. Thorsten Quandt shines a light into another dark area of the Internet – people-oriented, avoiding stereotypes, and helping to preserve democracy. And preferably outside his office.

Author: André Bednarz

This article is from the brochure "Twelve months, twelve people", published in March 2026.

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