Kirjahaku

As the Internet Age endures and expands, Peter K. Fallon peers into the Pandora's Box of our age. A twenty-first century update to Jacques Ellul's masterful sociological study Propaganda, Propaganda 2.1 explores how the 'digital revolution' has transformed the boundaries between individuals, institutions, and centres of power. Coupling historical analysis with a wealth of current examples, Fallon exposes the intricate and insidious ways propaganda alters our daily realities. Propaganda 2.1 is divided into three sections: propaganda 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1. Propaganda 1.0 compares the popular conception of propaganda with persuasive techniques such as rhetoric and coercion; 2.0 reveals how the development of moveable-type printing built the foundations of modern propaganda; and, finally, 2.1 inhabits the 'post-truth' world in its totality. Whilst the media landscape continually shifts, Propaganda 2.1's analysis is an opportunity to tackle this new reality.

In "The Metaphysics of Media", award-winning media critic Peter K. Fallon tackles the complicated question of how a succession of dominant forms of media have supported - and even to some extent created - different conceptions of reality. To do so, he starts with the basics: a critical discussion of the very idea of objective reality and the various postmodern responses that have tended to dominate recent philosophical approaches to the subject. From there, he embarks on a survey of the evolution of communication through four major eras: orality, literacy, print, and electricity. Within each era, Fallon argues, the dominant form of media supported particular ways of understanding the world, from the ascendance of reason that followed the development of alphabets to the obliteration of space and time that we associate with electronic communications. Fallon concludes with a hard look at the mass ignorance that prevails today despite (or perhaps because of) the sea of information with which contemporary life is surrounded. A stirring, philosophically rich investigation, "The Metaphysics of Media" offers not only a clear picture of where our society has been but also a road map to a more engaged, informed, and fully human future.