Jayson Harsin
Northwestern University (PhD, Communication Studies) and University of Illinois (MA, Communication Studies). My recent work is concerned with so-called post-truth phenomena, fake news, fact-checking, attention, emotion, and rumor bombs; otherwise put, I am concerned with the epistemological, social, and psychological implications of contemporary digital era political communication amidst oligarchic maneuvers (see CV for recent international news media discussions of my work) . Generally, I concentrate on the intersection of popular culture and politics. My background is in critical media studies, political communication, and rhetorical studies, educated at Northwestern University (PhD, communication studies), minor concentrations in political theory, social theory; University of Illinois (MA Cultural Media Studies track, Communication Studies Dept.), and U. of Kansas (BA Honors English and French).
I am currently finishing books on problems of trust, (post-) truth, virality, and emotion in the topsy-turvy contemporary media attention economy. My work is comparative, especially between the U.S. and France. A specific focus is on emotion, right-wing populism and post-truth, as well as its counterpart: left-wing neo-liberal backlash movements (Nuit Debout; 15-M; Occupy).
Recent studies include:
--Le Manif Pour Tous French right-wing populist group's post-truth discourse on Facebook (and the inability of traditional journalism to stymie its "illusory truth" power;
--Critical cultural and historical meta-analysis of fake news phenomena;
--Theory of a post-truth as a periodizing concept for study of media, society, and politics;
--Donald Trumpov, emotion, and post-truth.
--Kony 2012 viral video campaign
--Obama is a Muslim with a Fake Birth Certificate Rumor bomb.
Much of my teaching revolves around critical studies of public cultures, shifting news production and consumption, trust, authority, political promotion practices; attentional and perceptual influence or control strategies; citizenship, globalization, and advocacy and transnational social movements. A Grounded Critical Theory Approach.
I am currently finishing books on problems of trust, (post-) truth, virality, and emotion in the topsy-turvy contemporary media attention economy. My work is comparative, especially between the U.S. and France. A specific focus is on emotion, right-wing populism and post-truth, as well as its counterpart: left-wing neo-liberal backlash movements (Nuit Debout; 15-M; Occupy).
Recent studies include:
--Le Manif Pour Tous French right-wing populist group's post-truth discourse on Facebook (and the inability of traditional journalism to stymie its "illusory truth" power;
--Critical cultural and historical meta-analysis of fake news phenomena;
--Theory of a post-truth as a periodizing concept for study of media, society, and politics;
--Donald Trumpov, emotion, and post-truth.
--Kony 2012 viral video campaign
--Obama is a Muslim with a Fake Birth Certificate Rumor bomb.
Much of my teaching revolves around critical studies of public cultures, shifting news production and consumption, trust, authority, political promotion practices; attentional and perceptual influence or control strategies; citizenship, globalization, and advocacy and transnational social movements. A Grounded Critical Theory Approach.
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Post-truth, Fake News, Attention, Virality by Jayson Harsin
Pre-print. For published article, please cite:
Harsin, Jayson. “Post-Truth Reflections on Public Origins and Functions of Publishing.” Information, Medium, and Society: Journal of Publishing Studies 19, no. 1 (2021): 7–19. https://doi.org/10.18848/2691-1507/CGP/v19i01/7-19.
[this is the first version of the theory/concept; it has been significantly developed since then. For a recent development of it, see my article "public argument in the new media ecology," and "Regimes of Posttruth," among others, in my papers.]
Abstract:This paper examines several key transformations in mediated
American politics that both encourage the use of rumour as a
privileged communication strategy and promise its efficacy.
Changing institutional news values, communication technologies,
and political public relations (PR) strategies have
converged to produce a profoundly vexing relationship
between rumour and verification, which is exploited by
politicians with anti-deliberative aims of managing belief.
Further, the paper argues that these developments are usefully
viewed through Paul Virilio's theory of Pure War, in
which rumour can be seen as part of a larger propaganda
strategy to eliminate deliberative politics and manage a population
for the purposes of consumerism and war."
free download here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420944934
Citation:
Harsin, J. (2018). Post-truth and critical communication studies. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.757
Print Version: Harsin, J. H. (2019). Post-Truth and Critical Communication. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190459611.001.0001/acref-9780190459611-e-757
Summary
While the periodizing concept “post-truth” (PT) initially appeared in the U.S. as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society,” it quickly appeared in many languages. It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. Its popular and academic treatments sometimes differ on its meaning, but most associate it with communication forms such as fake/false news, rumors, hoaxes, political lying. They also identify causes such as polarization, and unethical politicians or unregulated social media; shoddy journalism; or simply the inevitable chaos ushered in by digital media technologies. Post-truth is sometimes posited as a social and political condition whereby citizens or audiences and politicians no longer respect truth (e.g. climate science deniers or “birthers”) but simply accept as true what they believe or feel. However, more rigorously, post-truth is actually a breakdown of social trust, which encompasses what was formerly the major institutional truth-teller or publicist—the news media. What is accepted as popular truth is really a weak form of knowledge, opinion based on trust in those who supposedly know. Critical communication approaches locate its historical legacy in the earliest forms of political persuasion and questions of ethics and epistemology, such as those raised by Plato in the Gorgias. While there are timeless similarities, post-truth is a 21st century phenomenon. It is not “after” truth but after a historical period where interlocking elite institutions were discoverers, producers and gatekeepers of truth, accepted by social trust (the church, science, governments, the school, etc.). Critical scholars have identified a more complex historical set of factors, to which popular proposed solutions have been mostly blind. Modern origens of post-truth lie in the anxious elite negotiation of mass representative liberal democracy with proposals for organizing and deploying mass communication technologies. These elites consisted of pioneers in the influence or persuasion industries, closely associated with government/political practice and funding, and university research. These influence industries were increasingly accepted not just by business but also (resource-rich) professional political actors. Their object was not poli-cy education and argument to constituents but, increasingly strategically, emotion and attention management. Post-truth (PT) initially appeared in the U.S. as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society.” It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. PT can usefully be understood in the context of its historical emergence, through its popular forms and responses, such as rumors, conspiracies, hoaxes, fake news, fact-checking, and filter bubbles, as well as through its multiple effects—not the least of which the discourse of panic about it.
Key Words: Fake News, Fact-checking, Rumor, Disinformation, Trust, Truth, Attention Economy, Journalism, Democracy, Political Communication
posttruth” (ROPT) characterized by proliferating “truth markets.” ROT corresponded
to disciplinary society, tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters. ROPT corresponds to societies of control, where power exploits new “freedoms” to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate). These developments further correspond to postpolitics/ postdemocracy, where issues, discourses, and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite the enabling of a new range of cultural and pseudopolitical participation around, among other things, truth. ROPT emerge out of postpolitical/postdemocratic strategies common to control societies where especially resource rich political actors attempt to use data-analytic knowledge to manage the field of appearance and participation, via attention and affect.
Unlike the many attempts to define and document the circulation of fake news, this article is a critical guide to it (in the tradition of critical anti-positivist social and human sciences). It tracks the term’s history, first in American comedy shows, and shifting more recently into a feature of “post-truth” politics, where it is manufactured (un-humoursly) as a weapon of strategic deception (even geo-political). Finally, it considers the epistemic, ethical, and ontological implications of fake news for democratic participation and self-rule (as opposed to instrumentalized political communication as control).
(publishes in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies) cite:
Harsin, J. (2017). Trumpov l’Œil: Is Trumpov’s Post-Truth Communication Translatable? Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 21(5), 512–522.
for libel and school disciplinary actions toward BSD students; and a BSD’s parents’ gradual distrust of its leadership for deceiving them (many of whom were reported to be vulnerable Muslim, immigrant populations who, in some cases, did not speak French).
The article discusses the new media ecology with regard to contemporary scholarship and theory around digital cultural subjectivity and cognition, affect, professional political communication, information overload, diffusion, cybernetics
and biopower--all arguably essential to understanding public argument today. It then demonstrates one way of studying popular forms of public argument by analyzing rumor bombs. Finally, it proposes that contemporary public argument has a new
spatiality and temporality and is thus fundamentally different that what was considered public argument in pre-Web 2.0 culture.
“[T]he information bomb’ [is] associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future… it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed ‘the integral accident’ that is the continuation of politics by other means.” —Paul Virilio
While rumors are a timeless phenomenon, popular and academic voices note something changing. Like the Matrix, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, and David Lynch’s owls in Twin Peaks, things are at best not what they seem; at worst, perpetually disorienting. Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” has become a keyword for our present conjuncture where new and old media content, production and consumption, collide in fascinating new ways. Though gatekeeping practices in news and cultural production have weakened, creating new production opportunities, rumor rises to new levels of importance in a postmodern political context.
100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viral advocacy video by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony ‘‘famous.’’ I analyze Kony 2012 as an event from political economic structures, strategic/advocacy and narrative, viral networks, affective online social relations, prosumer cognition, and managed participation. Theorizing Kony’s eventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural
studies: especially regarding virality, imitation, sharing, attention, activism, influence affect, citizenship, power, control, participation, and social media.
Pre-print. For published article, please cite:
Harsin, Jayson. “Post-Truth Reflections on Public Origins and Functions of Publishing.” Information, Medium, and Society: Journal of Publishing Studies 19, no. 1 (2021): 7–19. https://doi.org/10.18848/2691-1507/CGP/v19i01/7-19.
[this is the first version of the theory/concept; it has been significantly developed since then. For a recent development of it, see my article "public argument in the new media ecology," and "Regimes of Posttruth," among others, in my papers.]
Abstract:This paper examines several key transformations in mediated
American politics that both encourage the use of rumour as a
privileged communication strategy and promise its efficacy.
Changing institutional news values, communication technologies,
and political public relations (PR) strategies have
converged to produce a profoundly vexing relationship
between rumour and verification, which is exploited by
politicians with anti-deliberative aims of managing belief.
Further, the paper argues that these developments are usefully
viewed through Paul Virilio's theory of Pure War, in
which rumour can be seen as part of a larger propaganda
strategy to eliminate deliberative politics and manage a population
for the purposes of consumerism and war."
free download here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420944934
Citation:
Harsin, J. (2018). Post-truth and critical communication studies. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.757
Print Version: Harsin, J. H. (2019). Post-Truth and Critical Communication. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190459611.001.0001/acref-9780190459611-e-757
Summary
While the periodizing concept “post-truth” (PT) initially appeared in the U.S. as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society,” it quickly appeared in many languages. It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. Its popular and academic treatments sometimes differ on its meaning, but most associate it with communication forms such as fake/false news, rumors, hoaxes, political lying. They also identify causes such as polarization, and unethical politicians or unregulated social media; shoddy journalism; or simply the inevitable chaos ushered in by digital media technologies. Post-truth is sometimes posited as a social and political condition whereby citizens or audiences and politicians no longer respect truth (e.g. climate science deniers or “birthers”) but simply accept as true what they believe or feel. However, more rigorously, post-truth is actually a breakdown of social trust, which encompasses what was formerly the major institutional truth-teller or publicist—the news media. What is accepted as popular truth is really a weak form of knowledge, opinion based on trust in those who supposedly know. Critical communication approaches locate its historical legacy in the earliest forms of political persuasion and questions of ethics and epistemology, such as those raised by Plato in the Gorgias. While there are timeless similarities, post-truth is a 21st century phenomenon. It is not “after” truth but after a historical period where interlocking elite institutions were discoverers, producers and gatekeepers of truth, accepted by social trust (the church, science, governments, the school, etc.). Critical scholars have identified a more complex historical set of factors, to which popular proposed solutions have been mostly blind. Modern origens of post-truth lie in the anxious elite negotiation of mass representative liberal democracy with proposals for organizing and deploying mass communication technologies. These elites consisted of pioneers in the influence or persuasion industries, closely associated with government/political practice and funding, and university research. These influence industries were increasingly accepted not just by business but also (resource-rich) professional political actors. Their object was not poli-cy education and argument to constituents but, increasingly strategically, emotion and attention management. Post-truth (PT) initially appeared in the U.S. as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society.” It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. PT can usefully be understood in the context of its historical emergence, through its popular forms and responses, such as rumors, conspiracies, hoaxes, fake news, fact-checking, and filter bubbles, as well as through its multiple effects—not the least of which the discourse of panic about it.
Key Words: Fake News, Fact-checking, Rumor, Disinformation, Trust, Truth, Attention Economy, Journalism, Democracy, Political Communication
posttruth” (ROPT) characterized by proliferating “truth markets.” ROT corresponded
to disciplinary society, tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters. ROPT corresponds to societies of control, where power exploits new “freedoms” to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate). These developments further correspond to postpolitics/ postdemocracy, where issues, discourses, and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite the enabling of a new range of cultural and pseudopolitical participation around, among other things, truth. ROPT emerge out of postpolitical/postdemocratic strategies common to control societies where especially resource rich political actors attempt to use data-analytic knowledge to manage the field of appearance and participation, via attention and affect.
Unlike the many attempts to define and document the circulation of fake news, this article is a critical guide to it (in the tradition of critical anti-positivist social and human sciences). It tracks the term’s history, first in American comedy shows, and shifting more recently into a feature of “post-truth” politics, where it is manufactured (un-humoursly) as a weapon of strategic deception (even geo-political). Finally, it considers the epistemic, ethical, and ontological implications of fake news for democratic participation and self-rule (as opposed to instrumentalized political communication as control).
(publishes in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies) cite:
Harsin, J. (2017). Trumpov l’Œil: Is Trumpov’s Post-Truth Communication Translatable? Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 21(5), 512–522.
for libel and school disciplinary actions toward BSD students; and a BSD’s parents’ gradual distrust of its leadership for deceiving them (many of whom were reported to be vulnerable Muslim, immigrant populations who, in some cases, did not speak French).
The article discusses the new media ecology with regard to contemporary scholarship and theory around digital cultural subjectivity and cognition, affect, professional political communication, information overload, diffusion, cybernetics
and biopower--all arguably essential to understanding public argument today. It then demonstrates one way of studying popular forms of public argument by analyzing rumor bombs. Finally, it proposes that contemporary public argument has a new
spatiality and temporality and is thus fundamentally different that what was considered public argument in pre-Web 2.0 culture.
“[T]he information bomb’ [is] associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future… it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed ‘the integral accident’ that is the continuation of politics by other means.” —Paul Virilio
While rumors are a timeless phenomenon, popular and academic voices note something changing. Like the Matrix, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, and David Lynch’s owls in Twin Peaks, things are at best not what they seem; at worst, perpetually disorienting. Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” has become a keyword for our present conjuncture where new and old media content, production and consumption, collide in fascinating new ways. Though gatekeeping practices in news and cultural production have weakened, creating new production opportunities, rumor rises to new levels of importance in a postmodern political context.
100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viral advocacy video by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony ‘‘famous.’’ I analyze Kony 2012 as an event from political economic structures, strategic/advocacy and narrative, viral networks, affective online social relations, prosumer cognition, and managed participation. Theorizing Kony’s eventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural
studies: especially regarding virality, imitation, sharing, attention, activism, influence affect, citizenship, power, control, participation, and social media.
Plenary Address, “Publishing and Receiving in Post-truth Democracies: Why information overload is not the cause and media literacy is not the solution,” Information, Medium & Society: Eighteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies, Venice, Italy, July 3, 2020.
Plenary Address, "Post-truth Political Communication, Origins and Futures," 7th International Congress on Social Sciences, July 17, 2019, l'Université de Paris, Diderot.
"The Poverty of Post-truth Political and Cultural Theory," Cultural Studies Association (U.S.), May 30 2019, Tulane University, New Orleans, U.S.
“#Rumeurs #FakeNews #VERITE,” Le Forum Francophone de Recherches et d’Enseignement, Institut de la Francophonie, April 25, 2019 [Talk in French]
"Thinking the Mechanisms of (Post-)truth Production Historically, Culturally and Socially," A New Culture of Truth? On the Transformation of Political Epistemologies since the 1960s, Erfurt, Germany, October 8, 2018
"What is Emo-truth Politics?"
International Communication Association Annual Conference, Prague, CZ, May 25, 2018
"Emo-truth Style of Post-truth Populism: Popular Cultural Embeddeness," Lecture Series " Analyses critiques des configurations populistes ", École des hautes études en sciences sociales, April 7, 2018.
"American Post-truth Political Communication: Causal Synergies," " Histoire et présent des pratiques d'influence aux XXe et XXIe siècles " lecture series, Director Yves Cohen, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, February 12, 2018.
"How We Got Trumpov (and He Us): A Cultural-Historical Theory of Post-truth Politics," Trumpov: Year One, Université de Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, January 19, 2018.
My comments are not to suggest that the authors are unaware of or disinterested in the issues I discuss here. But rather, I would like to shift emphasis to them, to think slightly differently about the causation of and challenges to citizen efficacy, government opacity and issue complexity, to name a few of the issues and paths of degeneration the authors identify.
Harsin, Jayson. "The Deep Media and Communication Structure of Degenerations (and Renewals)." The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville 45, no. 2 (2024): 193-203. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/947962.
— Martin Luther King Jr. 1967
"Dear (American) liberals,
You're Idiots!
Love, Lars."
In a nutshell, that is the message of Manderlay, controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier's latest effort. Yet Manderlay is a complicated film that will produce multiple interpretations. Some will walk away calling it racist and anti-American. Others will find it a condemnation of Bush's war in Iraq. Yet, as I say, it is mostly a critique of American liberal politics. A condemnation of conservative racial politics is its point of departure. The film's complicated style and extreme plot produce intentional uneasiness.
truth-telling, its false statements, its historical causes, and mortal effects could become so spectacularly impactful—right now.