Tyler Lecture Series [POSTPONED]
This Lecture Series has been postponed to the Fall 2020 semester due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
At the dawn of the contemporary “information age,” prophets evangelizing for technological innovations insisted that “information wants to be free” and envisioned a world in which easy, unregulated exchange of information facilitated by revolutionary media and technologies would liberate the human condition.
In recent years this optimistic vision has turned dark, as the ever-expanding global information ecosystem has proven not to exalt reason or produce stabilizing consensus, but to be troublingly susceptible to the chaos-inducing poison of disinformation.
Disinformation, while difficult to define, is the information strategy of deliberately using falsehood, decontextualization, and distortion to sew disorder, chaos, and debilitating skepticism. While it is a matter of contemporary urgency, the Tyler Speaker Series this year investigates its long history.
The schedule of events is as follows:
Margaret Meserve (Notre Dame): What if you Threw a Reformation and Nobody Came? Fictitious Councils in Fifteenth-Century Europe.
- March 20, 4pm, James Blair Hall 229
Erez Manela (Harvard University): “Fighting for the Mind of Mankind”: Global Propaganda in the Great War.
- March 27, 4pm, James Blair Hall 229
Eliot Borenstein (NYU): Plots against Russia: Conspiracy, Sincerity, and Propaganda
- April 10, 4pm, Washington Hall 201
