This book offers an intermedial approach to truthful communication. Bringing together a wide range of media types and interactions from a transmedial perspective, the volume maps out how truth claims are made in different contexts, and how different media promise to create a truthful perception of the social world. The flexible communicative possibilities of digital technology have a significant impact on our perception of truth and truthfulness of communication. Bot accounts, deep fake videos, or AI technology draw attention to how reliable communication is destabilized and questioned. In this unstable climate, binaries such as true/false, authentic/fake and fiction/facts are difficult to apply. Instead, it is crucial to investigate how media products construct truthfulness in different ways. The volume brings together various media types and contexts such as press conferences, documentaries and mockumentaries, images in magazines and on social media, horror movies, biopics, and educational games and explores how truth claims, authenticity discourses, and knowledge communication are established and how they collide, merge, or are confused. This is an open access book.

This book offers an intermedial approach to truthful communication. Bringing together a wide range of media types and interactions from a transmedial perspective, the volume maps out how truth claims are made in different contexts, and how different media promise to create a truthful perception of the social world. The flexible communicative possibilities of digital technology have a significant impact on our perception of truth and truthfulness of communication. Bot accounts, deep fake videos, or AI technology draw attention to how reliable communication is destabilized and questioned. In this unstable climate, binaries such as true/false, authentic/fake and fiction/facts are difficult to apply. Instead, it is crucial to investigate how media products construct truthfulness in different ways. The volume brings together various media types and contexts such as press conferences, documentaries and mockumentaries, images in magazines and on social media, horror movies, biopics, and educational games and explores how truth claims, authenticity discourses, and knowledge communication are established and how they collide, merge, or are confused. This is an open access book.

Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media. The detailed introduction offers a short history of the field and outlines the main theoretical approaches to the field. Part I explains the approach, examining and exemplifying the dimensions that construct every media product. The following sections offer practical examples and case studies using many examples, which will be familiar to students, from Sherlock Holmes and football, to news, vlogs and videogames. This book is the only textbook taking both a theoretical and practical approach to intermedial studies. The book will be of use to students from a variety of disciplines looking at any form of adaptation, from comparative literature to film adaptations, fan fictions and spoken performances. The book equips students with the language and understanding to confidently and competently apply their own intermedial analysis to any text.

This handbook provides an extensive overview of traditional and emerging research areas within the field of intermediality studies, understood broadly as the study of interrelations among all forms of communicative media types, including transmedial phenomena. Section I offers accounts of the development of the field of intermediality - its histories, theories and methods. Section II and III then explore intermedial facets of communication from ancient times until the 21st century, with discussion on a wide range of cultural and geographical settings, media types, and topics, by contributors from a diverse set of disciplines. It concludes in Section IV with an emphasis on urgent societal issues that an intermedial perspective might help understand.

Truth qualities of journalism are under intense scrutiny in today's world. Journalistic scandals have eroded public confidence in mainstream media while pioneering news media compete to satisfy the public's appetite for news. Still worse is the specter of "fake news" that looms over media and political systems that underpin everything from social stability to global governance. This volume aims to illuminate the contentious media landscape to help journalism students, scholars, and professionals understand contemporary conditions and arm them to deal with a spectrum of new developments ranging from technology and politics to best practices. Fake news is among the greatest of these concerns, and can encompass everything from sarcastic or ironic humor to bot-generated, made-up stories. It can also include the pernicious transmission of selected, biased facts, the use of incomplete or misleadingly selective framing of stories, and photographs that editorially convey certain characteristics. This edited volume contextualizes the current "fake news problem." Yet it also offers a larger perspective on what seems to be uniquely modern, computer-driven problems. We must remember that we have lived with the problem of people having to identify, characterize, and communicate the truth about the world around them for millennia. Rather than identify a single culprit for disseminating misinformation, this volume examines how news is perceived and identified, how news is presented to the public, and how the public responds to news. It considers social media's effect on the craft of journalism, as well as the growing role of algorithms, big data, and automatic content-production regimes. As an edited collection, this volume gathers leading scholars in the fields of journalism and communication studies, philosophy, and the social sciences to address critical questions of how we should understand journalism's changing landscape as it relates to fundamental questions about the role of truth and information in society.

This collection offers a multi-faceted exploration of transmediations, the processes of transfer and transformation that occur when communicative acts in one medium are mediated again through another. While previous research has explored these processes from a broader perspective, Salmose and Elleström argue that a better understanding is needed of the extent to which the outcomes of communicative acts are modified when transferred across multimodal media in order to foster a better understanding of communication more generally. Using this imperative as a point of departure, the book details a variety of transmediations, viewed through four different lenses. The first part of the volume looks at narrative transmediations, building on existing work done by Marie-Laure Ryan on transmedia storytelling. The second section focuses on the spatial dynamics involved in media transformation as well as the role of the human body as a perceptive agent and a medium in its own right. The third part investigates new, radical boundaries and media types in transmediality and hence shows its versatility as a method of analyzing complex and contemporary communicative discourses. The fourth and final part explores the challenges involved in transmediating scientific data into the narrative format in the context of environmental issues. Taken together, these sections highlight a range of case studies of transmediations and, in turn, the complexity and variety of the process, informed by the methodologies of the different disciplines to which they belong. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, communication, intermediality, semiotics, and adaptation studies.

This edited volume brings together authors across the world to share their ideas, views, contemplations, assessments and theories about disinformation and post-truth in literature and media from a multidisciplinary perspective. The book gives an idea as to how the emerging trend of truth crisis, fake news and manipulated information leads to ideological antagonism, ethical conflicts and geopolitical power struggles in society. It has got revealing chapters that discuss the propensity to inquire into the data that satisfies the overtones of the personal emotions and beliefs that undermines facts and truths. Being an observant set of structured ideas having twenty-seven chapters, the book discusses diverse domains such as conspiracy ideologies, alt-facts of the contemporary era, signs and science of truth, post-truth politics of gender, political advertisements, realism and hyperreality, fifth estate and the third space, posthuman pataphysics, performativity and fiction, media renunciation, identity dynamics, and cultural obliteration.

Drawing on a range of authors that includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith, Tom McCarthy, Jennifer Egan and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book provides an innovative and original analysis of the interdependencies between digital technology and metamodernism through a detailed study of the contemporary novel. We are currently living through a period of profound rupture, in which the way the world is perceived is undergoing significant change. Just as the interplay between capitalism and technology hastened the evolution of modernism and postmodernism, then so too are those same forces now taking us into uncharted waters. In an increasingly fragile world, in which the very existence of humankind is threatened, it is vital that we begin to understand this new landscape.

Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media provides an extensive understanding of the climate crisis as it is represented in a number of medial forms, including scientific reports, popular science, graphic novels, documentaries, websites, feature films, and advertising. Theoretically, this is the first book that combines two important theories from the humanities: ecocriticism and intermedial studies. The book carefully develops Intermedial Ecocriticism as a method of investigating how climate crisis is represented and communicated through diverse media types. The chapters each include a comparative analysis of two or three specific media products and how they mediate the climate crisis.

A provocative critique of how manipulation of media gives rise to disinformation, intolerance, and divisiveness, and what can be done to change direction. "Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon emphasize what we can do today to restore the power of facts, truth, and fair, inclusive journalism as tools for people to keep political and corporate power subordinate to the engaged citizenry and the common good."—Ralph Nader The role of news media in a free society is to investigate, inform, and provide a crucial check on political power. But does it? It's no secret that the goal of corporate-owned media is to increase the profits of the few, not to empower the many. As a result, people are increasingly immersed in an information system structured to reinforce their social biases and market to their buying preferences. Journalism’s essential role has been drastically compromised, and Donald Trump’s repeated claims of "fake news" and framing of the media as “an enemy of the people” have made a bad scenario worse. Written in the spirit of resistance and hope, United States of Distraction offers a clear, concise appraisal of our current situation, and presents readers with action items for how to improve it. Praise for United States of Distraction: "A war of distraction is underway, media is the weapon, and our minds are the battlefield. Higdon and Huff have written a brilliant book of how we’ve gotten to this point, and how to educate ourselves to fight back and win."—Henry A. Giroux, author of American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism "A timely and urgent demand re-asserting the central importance of civic pursuits—not commercialism—in U.S. media and society."—Ralph Nader "Higdon and Huff have produced the best short introduction to the nature of Trump-era journalism and how the 'Post-Truth' media world is inimical to a democratic society that I have seen. The book is provocative and an entertaining read. Best of all, the analysis in United States of Distraction leads to concrete and do-able recommendations for how we can rectify this deplorable situation."—Robert W. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times "The U.S. wouldn't be able to hide its empire in plain sight were it not for the subservient 'free' press. United States of Distraction shows, in chilling detail, America's major media dysfunction—how the gutting of the fourth estate paved the road for fascism and what tools are critical to salvage our democracy."—Abby Martin, The Empire Files "Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff provides us with a fearless and dangerous text that refuses the post-truth proliferation of fake news, disinformation, and media that serve the interests of the few. This is a vital wake-up call for how the public can protect itself against manipulation and authoritarianism through education and public interest media.”—George Yancy, author of Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America and Professor of Philosophy at Emory University "United States of Distraction challenges our hegemon-media’s ideological mind control and the occupation of human thought. … Huff and Higdon correctly call for mass critical resistance through truth telling by free minds. Power to the people!"—Peter Phillips, author of Giants: The Global Power Elite