Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the impact of media, emerging technologies, and education on the resilience of the so-called post-truth society. This book explores if a return to civic participation, enhanced critical media literacy, journalism for the public good, techno-interventions and lifelong learning systems can collectively foster a more engaged global citizenry.
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 sphere; 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.
The contributions from scholars, technologists, policy-makers and activists raise critical questions about the nature and power of knowledge in the 21st century. Readers are challenged 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 diverse perspectives by geography, sector, gender and world-views will widen the appeal of this work to an international audience trying to understand the resilience of the post-truth society.
Table of ContentsChapter 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 Information 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
