Postdigital

Postdigital “refers to a state in which the disruption brought about by digital information technology has already occurred” (Berry & Dieter, 2015, p. 7).

Digital technologies are utterly ordinary features of contemporary existence. They are essential and ubiquitous tools for getting along in society that have become, in a relatively short time, as de rigueur as cars on the highway. We no longer talk about "online banking," for example, it's just banking. (Nevermind the fact that 99% of it happens online.)

Smartphones, clouds, trolling, remix culture, mis- and disinformation, clapbacks, deepfakes, TikTok culture, the “datafication” of lived experience: these are all part of the energizing ether that animates and structures contemporary postdigital life.

And it was mostly fun and games until the shocking realization that neither our political institutions nor our media literacy skills are really built for a postdigital era. Our political norms depend on stodgy twentieth century holdovers like facts, context, consensus, shared assumptions, and evidence.

Despite our postdigital reality, most of our media literacy skills are still mired in a print-dominant, broadcast model of media and mass communication.

Examples to discuss:

• context collapse (Phillips & Milner, 2021, pp. 186-87)
• Poe's Law
• digital plenitude (Bolter, 2020)

Act I

What do we really mean when we talk about "fake news"?

The term "fake news" re-emerged in late 2016 as a convenient (if overly simplistic) moniker for a dangerous panoply of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, misleading content, and manipulated media. (In 2017, it was voted word of the year.)

"Fake news," though popular, is a blunt instrument. It misses the subtler, crucial distinctions among different types of misleading information and ignores the question of intent altogether.

Fortunately, researchers and teachers have better terms at their disposal. There are three we will get to know and use in this workshop today: problematic information (Jack, 2017), information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), and polluted information environment (Phillips & Milner, 2021).

Problematic information is a useful umbrella term that describes information that is “inaccurate, misleading, inappropriately attributed, or altogether fabricated” (Jack, 2017).

Misinformation: information that is unintentionally inaccurate or misleading.

Disinformation: information that is deliberately false or misleading.

Publicity & propaganda: “deliberate, systematic information campaigns, usually conducted through mass media forms” (Jack, 2017, p. 4).

Satire, parody, & culture jamming: information or media that intentionally spreads “fabricated, inaccurate, or exaggerated information to convey a critique or cultural commentary” (Jack, 2017, p. 11). Ex.) The Borowitz Report or The Onion

“filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2012) & algorithmic manipulation (Project Information Literacy, 2020)

manipulated images and AV: deepfakes and cheap fakes (Paris & Donovan, 2019)

Post-truth

The term “post-truth” refers to a situation in society where the way information makes us feel has become more significant than whether that information is accurate, credible, or true.

One problem the post-truth era poses is that there is now so much information (i.e., Bolter's notion of digital plenitude) that we run the risk of becoming paralyzed in our ability to tell accurate from inaccurate information—often with disastrous consequences.

There are so many perspectives and so many ways to support these perspectives that it has become exceedingly difficult for people to navigate questions of truth, lies, fact, fiction, opinion, and bias in our contemporary information ecosystems.

Post-truth epistemology, along with other factors, has led to what the Rand Corporation (2018) calls "truth decay" in their influential and comprehensive report of the same name.

A recent story on NPR's Here and Now suggests the pervasiveness of these frames are on social media and internet culture more broadly.

First, they are frames because they are "sensemaking mechanisms that allow people to tell coherent stories about the world" (Phillips & Milner, 2021, pp. 19-20).

Second, they are deep insofar as they run to the core of our beings and our cherished, largely unchallenged understandings of the world, which of course we tend to think of as non-ideological and non-political, as "just the way things are."

And third, they are memetic in the sense famously defined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: "ideas moving back and forth between collective norms and individual actions, evolving as they travel" (Phillips & Milner, 2021, p. 20).