Marina Warner (DBE, FBA, FRSL), Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, University of London and Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS, 2014-2017, will give a public lecture on 'Truth in Stories'.
Tickets may be booked through the UCD Humanities Institute website or EVENTBRITE: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/truth-in-stories-truth-to-be-told-lecture-2-tickets-39609655546?aff=es2
The lecture is part of the UCD Humanities Institute lecture series: Truth to be Told; Understanding Truth in the age of post-truth politics. The series responds to the emergence of what is called a ‘post-factual’ world in which trustworthy models of discursive truth have been derided as old-fashioned, elitist and authoritarian. A founding ideal for the world wide web was to allow everyone unprecedented access to share information, knowledge and truth unconstrained by established hierarchies and institutions. What followed was a social media revolution that enabled people to exchange information at little cost, producing new modes of online citizenship and participation. But recent political events cast doubt that social media networks simply enhance citizenship: “digital wildfires” of fake news are increasing and seem to be unstoppable. Such disinformation is hard to discredit because counter-measures are not spectacular, fact-checking takes expertise and resources, and public debate requires more than fleeting attention.