Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society

From Fake News, Datafication and Mass Surveillance to the Death of Trust

Alex Grech

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800439085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This 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.

Chapter 1

Introduction to Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society

Introduction

Alex Grech

Abstract

This collection of essays has its roots in a collective desire to understand the workings of the post-truth society, and how education, media and technology may contribute to mitigating its worst excesses. This chapter introduces the origins of the book project.

Keywords: Media; education; technology; post-truth; polymath; sociology; social networks

post-truth. Adjective. Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

society. Noun. A large group of people in a defined territory, who live together in an organised way, and share a common culture.

“No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations.”Friedrich Nietzsche (1967). The Will to Power. Section 481.

“I think we are living through a frightening and deeply uncertain time, and though there are dementing and cynical voices out there, which are being emboldened and amplified by social media – that loony engine of outrage – they do not represent the voices of the many, or the good.”
Nick Cave (2020). The Red Hand Files. Issue #122 October 2020.

Origins

The genesis of this book is on record, in a whimsical video in June 2019¹ and the filmed proceedings of a two-day international conference on the island of Malta in October 2019,² convened with media scholars, blockchain experts, film-makers, philosophers, anthropologists, politicians, public prosecutors, data lawyers, bankers, activists, journalists, rock star technology editors and teenage students. The conference was activist by design. Assemble a bunch of brilliant thinkers and doers, get them to spar around the esoteric subject of the post-truth society in a historic building in Valletta and develop a collective manifesto to combat post-truths. By the end of the two days, the plan was to set up an interdisciplinary global network and reconvene in a different geographical context early in 2020 and explore pilot projects for collaboration.

The pandemic shelved many big ideas and plans. When the world closes down, the premise is that the failings of the post-truth society are swept away in the collective, urgent need to secure factual information, survive, adjust to a new age of social distancing and prepare for probable, impending economic collapse. Instead, with the pandemic in its first or second wave,³ this collection surfaces with contributions from some of the original cohort in far-flung places, and others who reached out after the conference. Perhaps a book is an unexpected but necessary deviation from the intended pathway but nonetheless a more permanent and resilient outcome in the age of the often temporary, fleeting and forgotten outputs in digital format.

From the moment that ‘post-truth’ became Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year of 2016,⁴ the term has been derided by academia. In reviewing a book on the subject, Hardoš (2019, p. 311) writes about a ‘vague, but very popular concept in our discourse... a distinct phenomenon that may be a moral panic, a conceptual muddle of lies, propaganda, and bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense), or merely a discursive shortcut for numerous disquieting social, political, and technological developments’. In opposition to this view, the point of departure for this collection is an interest in deconstruction, disconnects and possible solutions to the ‘manifestations’ of an ongoing, palpable information crisis through an interdisciplinary lens.

By manifestations, I mean the association of the post-truth society with a raft of social ills: the decline and fall of reason; the disruption of the public square; the spread of false and/or misleading information and fake news; culture wars; the rise of subjectivity; co-opting of language; filter bubbles, silos and tribes; attention economy deficits; trolls; echo chambers, polarisation and hyper-partisanship; conversion of popularity into legitimacy; manipulation by ‘populist’ leaders and nationalist governments and contempt for outsiders and fringe actors; algorithmic control; big data and personal data capture; targeted messaging and native advertising.

These terms have become part of the vernacular, with the blame for their proliferation frequently attributed to the affordances of social media platforms. Naim (2019) writes of the paradox of trust, where the crisis of confidence in government, politicians, journalists, scientists and experts (‘let alone bankers business executives or the Vatican’) is countered by ‘trust in anonymous messages on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp’. This view echoes a much-critiqued treatise in 2014 by Tom Nichols in The Federalist followed by a book in 2017 in which he associated the death of expertise with

a Google-fuelled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.

That is quite a departure from the early literature on social media, when the technology was celebrated for its potential for innovation and positive change within the social world, a tool for the democratisation of information and political mobilisation through the wealth of networks (Benkler, 2006); the emergence of horizontally engaged smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002); cultural production (Jenkins, 2006); produsage (Bruns, 2007); a revitalised public sphere (Shirky, 2011) – or at the very least, a private sphere (Papacharissi, 2010). Castells (2009), a primary promotor of the network society, believed that mass self-communication would empower connected citizens to a personalised soapbox without the permission of information gatekeepers such as publishing houses and powerful intermediaries.

This optimism slowly dissolved into weariness and suspicion of online discourse and business practices on social media platforms. Social media platforms are increasingly associated with defective online mobilisation (Tufekci, 2017), the applications of big data science (O'Neil, 2017; Schneier, 2015), surveillance capitalism (Fuchs, 2017; Zuboff, 2015), black-boxed algorithms (Pasquale, 2015) and a veritable Pandora's box of social ills and the erosion of truth. Writing about the death of truth, Kakutani (2018, p. 88) observes: ‘The Internet doesn't just reflect reality anymore; it shapes it’. This has much to do with the permeability of social media and the willingness of platform owners to harvest user data to be made available for targeted marketing purposes to those who can pay, irrespective of who their identity or motives.

Those in power, whom we trust within democratic systems of political representation, or those whom we do not know – from Russian trolls to the Cambridge Analytica of this world – have long invested in new media to disseminate misinformation and undertake targeted mass surveillance of citizens, without risk of impunity. We edge towards a world where reality has become a matter of personal opinion – as opposed to a compendium of informed knowledge – even if we hesitate to call this a compendium of ‘facts’. We are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social, partisan and sectarian lines. Baudrillard (2010) might associate this as a ‘moment’ of stupidity – since he claims stupidity is one of the attributes of power, the accursed share of the social (including stupidity) which would take us back to the ‘power figures’ of primitive societies, and explain why the most limited, unimaginative individuals stay in power the longest’ of primitive societies.

The blame game also extends to old media – to its permeability to lies, to its need to remain relevant to a digital audience and compete with social media, sell advertising and still appear to be ‘politically correct’. For instance, LBC gave Nigel Farage access to prime-time radio slots under the guise of providing a platform for alternative voices, irrespective of whether these were the voices of lies and racism. On 7th June 2020, James Bennet, a senior editor at The New York Times, was forced to resign amid a furious backlash over the newspaper's publication of a controversial and unfiltered comment piece penned by a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, a junior senator for Arkansas and a fierce ally of Donald Trump.⁵

In practice, the new media ecosystem has long incorporated old media in its hub, with commentary and repurposing of ‘news’ not restricted to the online media platform of the news media collateral, but now extending to the personal broadcast systems available on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, blogs and podcasts – to name a few. In the open bazaar of ideas, opinions and chaos, far from the wisdom of the crowd, big data and the algorithms provide an outlet for the post-truth society's worst excesses. For Couldry and Hepp (2017), the social world is a communicative construction, manifested by ‘mutual transformations of the media and the social world’ (p. 3) where communicative actions, practices, forms and patterns of action contribute to the construction of the social. Media and communication shape the social, and that digital media, digital communication and digital data introduce a new kind of interdependence, where the interdependence comes to depend on the media; media, in fact, becomes constitutive of the social. The dominance of few social media companies as unelected, unaccountable referees of the public sphere makes the problem of regulating attention in an age of information glut challenging, at best (Tufekci, 2020).

In response to this chaotic environment, this collection is based on the following foundation premises:

• The post-truth problem is real. It is not an imaginary issue, but a palpable ongoing crisis that is undermining the foundations of society and is getting worse. Yuval Harari (2019) devotes one of his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to the subject; the common good, trust, responsibility, ethics and civic engagement are under attack from the actions of unknown third parties. It may not be possible to have consensus on the attributes of ‘truth’; but truth does matter. The political and socio-cultural landscape we inhabit today is permeable to truth decay, through a regime of misinformation pumped out in industrial volume by trolls and from the mouth and Twitter feeds of populist leaders (Kakutani, 2018). The term ‘truth’ remains a loaded and contentious term, but the post-truth lexicon of ‘fake news’, ‘fake science’ and ‘alternative facts’ is part of the vernacular.
• The post-truth problem is nuanced and needs a critical approach. As an example of contradictions, my own work as a strategist and change agent has regularly traversed technology, new media platforms, education and public policy. The concern is that actors in these specific areas have been contributing to the worst excess of the post-truth society, as much as others in the same areas seemingly operating as forces to provided solutions for the common good. Education systems based on acquiring a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contants
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction to Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society Introduction
• Part 1 Repurposing Education for the Post-truth Society
• Part 2 Repurposing Media for the Post-truth Society
• Part 3 Future-proofing for the Post-truth Society
• Index