{"title":"How Can Wikipedia Save Us all?: Assuming Good Faith from all Points of View in the Age of Fake News and Post-truth","authors":"T. Sant","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211010","url":null,"abstract":"The world's most popular noncommercial website is built on five pillars, which include an assumption of good faith and ensuring all points of view are included in every encyclopedia article. How does this pan out in the day-to-day reality of fake news and the ever-growing climate of post-truth? How apt are mechanisms established by Wikipedia over a decade ago in the face of unreliable news sources and beliefs based on gut feelings and emotions rather than verifiable evidence? Active editors of Wikipedia firmly believe that this open online encyclopedia and other wikis operating under the same value system are lifeboats for truth seekers in a post-truth society. The mechanisms established over many years for sharing open knowledge through this online platform are even more useful now than they may have been in previous times, even though this too is understandably debatable.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128707732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Technologies and Their Unplanned Obsolescence","authors":"D. Hughes","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211020","url":null,"abstract":"Social Technologies and their Unplanned Obsolescence seeks to sidestep the various contents of the post-truth debate to consider the manner in which any body of knowledge and practice gets taken up and extended at all. This bottom-up consideration of the material conditions of bodies of knowledge and practice is presented polemically, as a critical homily of sorts, and is concluded with a forward-looking call to action.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122985845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It Is Time for Journalists to Save Journalism","authors":"L. Zuluaga, P. D. Long","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211015","url":null,"abstract":"The current environment of misinformation is causing expensive and negative consequences for society. Fake news is affecting democracy and its foundations, as well as newspapers and media companies that aim to combat this “pandemic.” In order to effectively provide accurate information, these companies are in need of a workforce with specific attitudes, skills, and knowledge (ASK). However, several studies show that students either do not have those ASK or have poorly developed them, indicating the need for better media literacy skills. Given that such skills are often not taught in school, nor is there a way for students to efficiently obtain them and tangibly show them to future employers, we propose a model\u00001\u0000 that enhances the way students learn and how we measure such learning. Journalism students – enrolled in liberal arts, general studies, and humanities – have the potential to be upskilled and become the new critical thinking and fact-checking force needed to neutralize misinformation and foster a healthy society. Our model applies learning science and behavioral research on feedback and intrinsic motivation to foster students' ASK through a digital apprenticeship model that uses structured activities together with mentorship and feedback. Students participate in the creation of digital products for the journalism and news media industry. This prepares them for the types of tasks they will be required to perform in the job market. The digital apprenticeship matches students with the proper mentor, peer, and professional network. Students' work is compared against professional news media production to generate feedback, improve quality, and track progress. During the digital apprenticeship, students receive the ASK-SkillsCredit, a digital badge, which serves as a “nutritional” fact label that displays how students created the media content, the level of efficacy of the apprenticeship, and the standard of journalism quality of the piece. Lastly, we propose to enhance existing learning management systems to capture and promote a learner's profile data and expose aligned opportunities in news media outlets.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132065937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pretruth Era in MENA, News Ecology, and Critical News Literacy","authors":"Abeer Al‐Najjar","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211005","url":null,"abstract":"The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region is in a critical moment in its information and news ecology, exhibiting signs of pretruth and posttruth syndromes. Between the “pretruth” and “posttruth” there is a gap that circumvented “truth.” The state of information in the MENA region brings back the dystopian Orwellian notion of the “Ministry of Truth.” A poetic term in anticipation of this moment of the crisis of truth. Sharing the latter with the rest of the world, the pretruth moment is engraved in the region's history of precarious political and religious authoritarian control and manipulation of information and news and low press freedom. In the region, truth is told, hidden, distorted, and manufactured by a blend of humans and bots, where both artificial intelligence and social humans are involved in this process of multipolarized disinformation operations with multifarious sponsors, actors, and beneficiaries that have distinct and often clashing agendas and interests. To understand the ecology of truth, facts, news, and information in the Middle East, studies ought to be situated within the ecosystem of information and media technologies in the globalized national and transnational societies of the region and consider both the role of the regionally oriented neoauthoritarian regimes and that of interested rising and established global powers. Central to this ecosystem is the dynamic interaction among three actors: communication technologies (the focus here is on the Internet); media, public, and activists' use of these technologies to mobilize, inform, and present alternative narratives, and to resist or confirm state narratives; and the authoritarian political regimes and their containment strategies for legacy media (particularly television) and the Internet.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":" 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113949366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Do We Know What Is True?","authors":"Natalie Smolenski","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211019","url":null,"abstract":"This essay proposes two ways of pursuing truth. One is a scientific project that requires generations of rigorous study and collective building. The other is a simple set of guidelines that can be used day to day by anyone. Both are important. Not everyone will be a professional scientist, but everyone can use simple scientific tools to bring their thinking and actions more in line with truth.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120960387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society Introduction","authors":"Alex Grech","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211001","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122627677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on the Visual Truth and War Photography: A Historian's Perspective","authors":"Anna Topolska","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211014","url":null,"abstract":"In order to discuss visual truth both from the epistemological and ethical perspective, this essay focuses on the nature of photographic image and its complex relationship with human perception and ethics in Western culture. It argues that this relationship is similarly complex to that of history and reality it represents and points out that the ethical approach to truth is most constructive for society. By looking at the most politically, ethically, and ideologically engaged category: war photography, the author analyzes how images are constructed and used in various contexts. The text provides a background of history of war iconography but focuses on the examples from the twentieth and twenty-first century: the Vietnam War, the Balkan conflict, the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in Iraq, and the war in Syria.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114765042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Learning Challenge in the Twenty-first Century\u0000*","authors":"H. Patrinos","doi":"10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-906-120211004","url":null,"abstract":"Truth matters; and the norms associated with a democratic society, such as the common good, responsibility, ethics, and civic engagement, are under attack with the emergence of the post-truth society. There are concerns worldwide that public education is failing us on pushing back on disinformation. Schools are not seen as developing skills that permit students to adequately differentiate truth from nontruths. In this context, the education system also faces some unprecedented challenges. The quality of education in most of the world is low, and only slowly improving. Also, future workers are concerned with automation's threat – or perceived threat – to jobs. In most countries, education systems are not providing workers with the skills necessary to compete in today's job markets. The growing mismatch between demand and supply of skills holds back economic growth and undermines opportunity. At the same time, the financial returns to schooling are high in most countries, and growing skill premiums are evident in much of the world. Schooling remains a good economic and social investment, and there are record numbers of children in school today. The skills that matter in the coming technological revolution are likely the same as what is needed in a media environment of disinformation. More and better education, and noncognitive skills, will not only prepare students for the future world of work; they will also prepare them to navigate the increasingly complex post-truth society. They will be able to detect fake news – or deliberate disinformation spread through news or online media. It will also allow young people to gain trust. In other words, better education is democratizing, to the extent that it promotes truth, values, and civic engagement.","PeriodicalId":444998,"journal":{"name":"Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130432672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}