Title: Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society: From Fake News, Datafication and Mass Surveillance to the Death of Trust
Editor: Dr Alex Grech, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta
Publishing: Emerald Publishing, pp. 334, Series: Digital Activism & Society: Politics, Economy And Culture In Network Communication
The post-truth society is associated with a raft of terms that challenge the very notion of what should constitute a democratic and inclusive society: the decline and fall of reason; the disruption of the public square; the spread of misleading information; fake news; culture wars; the rise of subjectivity; the co-opting of language; filters, silos and tribes; attention deficits; trolls, polarisation and hyper-partisanship; the conversion of popularity into legitimacy; manipulation by “populist” leaders, governments, and fringe actors; algorithmic control, targeted messaging and native advertising; surveillance and platform capitalism.
Education, the media and technology are traditionally lauded as forces to democratise knowledge and advance the pursuit of truth. Yet these days they equally appear to contribute to the echo-chambers of siloed groups with varying agendas that coalesce around dogma, power and desperation. The production and consumption of knowledge in a hyper-connected and techno-centric world continues to blur the lines between truth, half-truths, and falsehoods. The perpetrators of (mis)information are governments, media, corporations and individuals: in many respects, we are all participants in the current state of affairs, the so-called downward spiral toward tribalism, populism and extremism.
This new collection of 20 essays from scholars, technologists, policy-makers and activists in ten countries raises critical questions about the nature and power of knowledge in the 21st century. It challenges readers to question their own role in perpetuating certain narratives and to also understand the lived context of people on all sides of a given debate. The approach is pointedly interdisciplinary, with perspectives that are diverse by geography, sector, gender and most importantly, world-views. There are also tensions, particularly between those who believe that the way to solve trust issues is to build solutions on decentralised technologies and those who push against technological determinism, and predicate an investment in new models for education.What the contributions have in common are that they are the product of people with inquisitive minds and an activist bent, questioning the adequacy of the tools of their trade against the ongoing wave of misinformation. The book argues for a return to civic participation and social justice, critical media literacy, journalism for the public good, techno-interventions and personalised, lifelong learning systems that can collectively foster a more engaged global citizenry.
Contents
- Chapter 1. Introduction; Alex Grech
PART 1. Repurposing Education for the Post-Truth Society
- Chapter 2. Post-truth Society: Toward a Dialogical Understanding of Truth; John P. Portelli and Soudeh Oladi
- Chapter 3. Macro Authorities and Micro Literacies: The New Terrain of Politics; Bryan Alexander
- Chapter 4. The Learning Challenge in the 21st Century; Harry Anthony Patrinos
- Chapter 5. The Pre-Truth Era in MENA, News Ecology and Critical News Literacy; Abeer Al-Najjar
- Chapter 6. Critical Literacy is at the Heart of an Answer; Emma Pauncefort
- Chapter 7. Societal Reorientation via Programmable Trust: A Case for Piloting New Models of Open Governance in Education; Walter Fernando Balser, Steve Diasio and Taylor Kendal
PART 2. Repurposing Media for the Post-Truth Society
- Chapter 8. Fact to Fake: The Media World as It Was and Is Today; Michael Bugeja
- Chapter 9. Post-News Journalism in the Post-Enlightenment Era; Hossein Derakhshan
- Chapter 10. How Can Wikipedia Save Us All? Assuming Good Faith from All Points of View in the Age of Fake News and Post-truth; Toni Sant
- Chapter 11. Public Rebuttal, Reflection and Responsibility. Or, an Inconvenient Answer to Fake News; Ruben Brave
- Chapter 12. The Kony 2012 Campaign: A Milestone of Visual Storytelling for Social Engagement; Massimiliano Fusari
- Chapter 13. Post-truth Visuals, Untruth Visuals; Gorg Mallia
- Chapter 14. Reflections on the Visual Truth and War Photography - A Historian’s Perspective; Anna Topolska
- Chapter 15. It is Time for Journalists to Save Journalism; Lina Zuluaga and Phillip Long
PART 3. Future-proofing for the Post-Truth Society
- Chapter 16. Karl Marx and the Blockchain; Devraj Basu and Murdoch J. Gabbay
- Chapter 17. Two Sides to Every Story. The Truth, Post-truth, and the Blockchain Truth; Joshua Ellul, Alex Grech, and Gordon Pace
- Chapter 18. Decentralised Verification Technologies and the Web; Allan Third and John Domingue
- Chapter 19. How Do We Know What is True?; Natalie Smolenksi
- Chapter 20: Social Technologies and their Unplanned Obsolescence; Daniel Hughes
