Critical and Reflective Inquiry: Information Dystopia

Theme: Information Dystopia

Not long ago, “fake news” was a sarcastic self-reference used by purveyors of biting political satire and media criticism on a comedy channel. In 2016, “fake news” took on a new connotation: false stories disseminated to purposefully disinform the public for fun and profit, with social networks the medium, and the levers of national power the stakes. Politicians in power began to deride legitimate reporting and verifiable fact as “fake news” in order to delegitimize bad news about themselves. Political commentators claimed that we were living in a “post-fact” reality – that verifiable facts were no longer relevant to those who seek power or to the public, and that journalists, long the safeguards of the free and accurate flow of information that is the life’s blood of democracy, were powerless to demand them. In the last two years, we have been weathering civil unrest, a global pandemic, an armed assault against the nation’s capital, ongoing rage against basic public health measures – all fueled by a social-media-driven tsunami of information, misinformation, and disinformation. What in the world is going on? 

In this course, we’ll develop tools for discerning fact from opinion. We'll look the differences between legitimate persuasion, where facts and evidence are presented logically, and propaganda, in which communicators use sophisticated psychological techniques to manipulate viewers, readers, listeners, and scrollers into doing their bidding. We’ll learn to recognize, resist, defang, and debunk this type of message when we see it in any medium – and to communicate effectively, ourselves, with writing practice that uses logic and evidence to get our own ideas across honestly, and with power. Consider it Defense Against the Dark Arts.