"The true merit of the book lies in that it addresses the problems of fake news, conspiracy thinking, and other disturbing phenomena in the postdigital ... . The contributors to The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era: Dupery by Design ... address a multitude of approaches in detecting, understanding, and combating dupery online which make an excellent starting point for necessary future work." (Mats Hyvönen, Postdigital Science and Education, Vol. 4 (3), 2022)
Introduction: The Genesis of Dupery by Design.- Part 1: Epistemology of Deceit.- Chapter 1 Bad Faith, Bad Politics, Bad Consequences: The Epistemic Harms of Online Deceit.- Chapter 2 An Epistemology of False Beliefs: The Role of Truth, Trust, And Technology In Postdigital Deception.- Chapter 3 Towards A Response to Epistemic Nihilism.- Chapter 4 Duperation: Deliberate Lying in Postdigital, Postmodern Political Rhetoric.- Chapter 5 The Right to Freedom of Expression versus Legal Actions against Fake News: A Case Study of Singapore.- Chapter 6 US Digital Nationalism: A Habermasean Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump’s ‘Fake News’ Approach to The First Amendment.- Chapter 7 A Project of Mourning: Attuning to the Impact ‘Anthropocentric-Noise Disorder’ on Non-Human Kin.- Chapter 8 Someone is Wrong on the Internet: Is There an Obligation to Correct False and Oppressive Speech on Social Media?.- Chapter 9 Writing Against the ‘Epistemology of Deceit’ on Wikipedia: A Feminist New Materialist Perspective Toward Critical Media Literacy and Wikipedia-based Education.- Chapter 10 The Neoliberal Colonization of Discourses: Gentrification, Discursive Markets and Zombemes.- Chapter 11 Social Memes and Depictions of Refugees in The EU – Challenging Irrationality and Misinformation with A Media Literacy Intervention.- Chapter 12 Scallywag Pedagogy.- Chapter 13 Learning from the Dupers: Showing the Workings.- Chapter 14 Ghosting Inside the Machine: Student Cheating, Online Education and the Omertà of Institutional Liars.- Chapter 15 'Choice is Yours': Anatomy of a Lesson Plan from University V.- Conclusion.
Alison MacKenzie’s academic background is in Philosophy of Education. She is the Director of the Masters programme for Special Educational Needs and Inclusion at Queen's University, Belfast. She is interested in how injustice and inequality are reproduced and sustained by forms of ignorance, testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, lack of access to important capitals such as linguistic capital, and by the ways in which ordinary vices are often overlooked as important sources of injustice, such as cruelty, misogyny, or hypocrisy.
Jennifer Rose’s academic background is in Philosophy of Education. She is primarily interested in epistemology, epistemic practices, related psychologies, how they foster or hinder social justice initiatives, and how education can respond. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast with her thesis focused on knowledge and its role in creating and sustaining injustices. Her professional background is entrepreneurial focused on course development and delivery in a corporate lifelong learning context.
Ibrar Bhatt is a Lecturer in Education at Queen’s University Belfast. He specialises in research and teaching related to writing and literacy as a social practice, digital literacies, and contemporary digital epistemologies. He has also published on the fields of digital literacy, epistemologies of trust online, and research methods. He is also a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a convener of its Digital University Network. He is an Executive Editor for the journal Teaching in Higher Education.
This edited book collection offers strong theoretical and philosophical insight into how digital platforms and their constituent algorithms interact with belief systems to achieve deception, and how related vices such as lies, bullshit, misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance contribute to deception. This inter-disciplinary collection explores how we can better understand and respond to these problematic practices.
The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era: Dupery by Design will be of interest to anyone concerned with deception in a ‘postdigital’ era including fake news, and propaganda online. The election of populist governments across the world has raised concerns that fake news in online platforms is undermining the legitimacy of the press, the democratic process, and the authority of sources such as science, the social sciences and qualified experts. The global reach of Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms has shown that they can be used to create and spread fake and misleading news quickly and without control. These platforms operate and thrive in an increasingly balkanised media eco-system where networks of users will predominantly access and consume information that conforms to their existing worldviews. Conflicting positions, even if relevant and authoritative, are suppressed, or overlooked in everyday digital information consumption. Digital platforms have contributed to the prolific spread of false information, enabled ignorance in online news consumers, and fostered confusion over determining fact from fiction.
The collection explores:
Deception, what it is, and how its proliferation is achieved in online platforms.
Truth and the appearance of truth, and the role digital technologies play in pretending to represent truth.
How we can counter these vices to protect ourselves and our institutions from their potentially baneful effects.
Chapter 15 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.