In 2008, US journalist Nicholas Carr dipped his toes into a well of anxiety when he posed the question “is google making us stupid?”. In his compelling argument of the nets cultural and social consequences, Carr argues that media are not just passive channels of information. Instead, they supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
The 24 hour news cycle, twitters 250 word character limit and the endless scrolling on social media is changing the way we interpret and make sense of the world around us. His article finishes with a chilling proposition, that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”(Carr 2008).
If this proposition is indeed true (as I fear it might be), what position does this put us in to identify fake news/misinformation? As technology becomes more sophisticated in the form of generative AI and deep fakes, how can we find the truth? Does truth even matter?
Our presentation tries to answer these questions? To navigate these questions we will anchor our presentation in a case study. The case study will be misinformation in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Please read Nicholas Carr’s short piece–> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/