Christian Fuchs

Christian Fuchs was born in 1976 in the 5,000-inhabitant village of Waidhofen an der Thaya in Austria, where he lived and went to school until he was 18, when he moved to Vienna. The village is located in a structurally weak, deindustrialized, predominantly rural part of Northern Austria. He has written about how people living there are socially disadvantaged and that, as a consequence, communications has a peripheral status.1 He studied informatics at the Vienna University of Technology in the years 1994–2000 and obtained an MSc. He became interested in the societal and political-economic implications of information technology and specialized in this field of study during his MSc and PhD at Vienna University of Technology's Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, which specializes in social informatics. He wrote a dissertation entitled "Aspekte der evolutionären Systemtheorie in ökonomischen Krisentheorien unter besonderer Berücksichtigung techniksoziologischer Aspekte" ("Aspects of evolutionary system theory in economic crisis theories with a special sociological consideration of technological factors") and obtained a doctorate in technical sciences in 2002. His dissertation analyzed the role of computer technology in theories of economic crisis. From 2001 to 2004 he was a research assistant in the project "Human Strategies in Complexity. Philosophical Foundations for a Theory of Evolutionary Systems" at the Department of Design and Assessment of Technology. From 2000 to 2006, he taught sociology and philosophy of information technology as an hourly paid lecturer in the same department.