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Beyond “Fake News”: Misinformation Studies for a Postdigital Era

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Education in the Age of Misinformation

Abstract

Our complex postdigital reality—marred by mis- and disinformation, information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), and network pollution (Phillips & Milner, 2021)—demands that our approaches to media and digital literacy move beyond the current obsession with “fake news.” This chapter highlights the limitations of our current approaches to combatting mis- and disinformation through digital literacy and then shifts to a call to action: a problem as vast and epistemologically complex as information disorder must be met with a meta-disciplinary approach, which the author dubs “misinformation studies.” Misinformation studies, as it is laid out in this chapter, would draw insights from across the academic disciplines, would be methodologically and conceptually diverse, and would harness the power of the academic disciplines to tackle one of the most intractable problems of our time.

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Correspondence to Paul Cook .

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Cook, P. (2023). Beyond “Fake News”: Misinformation Studies for a Postdigital Era. In: Parker, L. (eds) Education in the Age of Misinformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25871-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25871-8_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-25870-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-25871-8

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