Digital Fever
Description
Terror warnings, fake news, spectacles and scandals in real time - the networked world has wound itself up into a nervous frenzy, where everything has become visible: the banal and the terrible, the uninhibited abuse and the anonymous attack.
Translated for the first time into English, Digital Fever analyses the patterns of outrage and agitation that have come to define social media and the Internet, exposing their devastating impact on our notions of truth, debate, authority and power. In this endless cycle of outrage, Poerksen argues that the intelligent use of information must become part of the general education provided by schools: the digital society must be transformed into an editorial one. In order for democracy to survive, we must as a society achieve media maturity.
A blazing tour of the contemporary landscape of fake-news, echo chambers, disinformation, manipulation, and the turbulence that democracy is undergoing, this book not only analysesthis digital economy of outrage, but serves as a guiding light to overcome it.
Reviews / Votes
"Fake news, bots and foreign interference are just part of the new media landscape that is reshaping - almost daily - our culture and even the sense we have of ourselves. Newspapers have always been prone to scandal and "man bites dog" kind of stories, but today the digital flow is unlimited, instanteneous and disruptive. As Bernhard Poerksen shows this means a radically changed and charged world as billions of people check their cell phone each day. Authority falls away because each person is now consumer, producer and distributor of stories - chosen for excitement rather than veracity. Poerksen tells us that there is a way forward but only if schools utterly transform learning and prepare students to dissect and understand this brave new world of endless digital flow."
Jerry Brown, governor of California (1975-83; 2011-2019)
"No longer do journalists independently control the gateway to the public world, says Bernhard Pörksen in his new book, Digital Fever. "The fourth power of traditional journalism has been joined by the fifth power of the networked many," which can be organized to reject and discredit the work that journalists do. Meanwhile, The Media, in his vision, "short-circuit the private and the public awareness of things." Poerksen´s heady description of the communications world we are moving toward is unlike any I have read. It made me rebuild my understanding of what is going on. Try it against yours."
Jay Rosen, writer and professor of journalism at New York University
"Bernhard Poerksen brilliantly guides the reader through a shifting media landscape, without either simply accepting the new or nostalgically idealizing the gatekeepers of old. Never afraid to evaluate, but never content to just evaluate, this book makes an implicit case for curiosity and precision as cardinal virtues of our age of informational climate change. Timely and deeply necessary."
Adrian Daub, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
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Content
Chapter One - The Crisis of Truth: or the suspicion of manipulation.- Chapter Two - The Crisis of Discourse: or the diminishing of the gatekeepers.- Chapter Three - The Crisis of Authority: or the pains of visibility.- Chapter Four - The Crisis of Cosiness: or the collapse of contexts.- Chapter Five - The Crisis of Reputation: or the omnipresence of scandals.- Chapter Six - The Tangible Utopia of an Editorial Society.