Modern Media Landscapes

Roundtable discussion "On the Other Side of Post-Truth: Modern Media Landscapes" in the framework of "Politics and Culture" Seminar (58–60 Galernaya Street).

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented rise of a new category of description within the world of media and information. Fake news and fake facts, post-truth and post-politics, have started to govern the media and social life, unmistakably attracting also academic attention. At the same time they give an illusion as if true news and true facts, truth and politics, were fixed objects before the rise of populism and authoritarian regimes in East and West. This creates a narrative of a current informational insecurity, which follows an (alleged) age of informational clarity. To what extent could this narrative be simplified and how does it serve to divert attention from other, in many cases, more crucial transformations occurring in the local and global media landscapes (such as changes in the economy following the growth of information and multiplication of truth makers)? These changes, by and large, instigate the "fakeness" of the "post" era, or the "post-truth-regime," and becomethe reality we live by.

Taking the concepts "fake," "post" or "truth" as categories in current social, cultural, media, legal, political and philosophical discourse, our discussion intends to look at the construction of these entities and practices connected with their use in the current informational environment.

While the focus of our discussion will be Russian-language media, it is our intention to place Russian media in the larger context of transformations occurring in international mediaprimarily by applying comparative approaches. Our main interest are the changes that affected "truth figures" and "truth scenes" after 1989 and after the collapse of the bipolar world order, analyzed within global trends. We are particularly interested in discussing the conceptual frameworks with which the international situation can be analyzed beyond the simplifying rhetorical figures such as "true," "fake," "propaganda" etc. By engaging into discussion with actors of conventional and new media, we also want to unite, in one setting, academic and non-academic discourse concerning the creation of information.

PROGRAM

3 June

9:00am Registration

9:30am Introductory remarks: Friedrich Cain (Germany), Daria Petushkova (Moscow), Jan Surman (High School of Economics, Moscow)

10:00am Bernhard Kleeberg (University of Erfurt, Germany) "The Truth-Era: Epistemologies of Desintegration"

11:15am Coffee break

11:30am Session 1. Chair: Dietlind Huchtker

• Diego Han (Zagreb University, Croatia) "The Post-Truth Bias: A Historical Perspective"
• Andreas Langenohl (University of Giessen, Germany) "Post-Truth or Post-Normativity? Remarks on Recent Critiques of Public Political Communication"

1:00pm Lunch

2:30pm Session 2. Chair: Friedrich Cain

• Philipp Kohl (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany) "Image Stabilization: The Camera and the Post-Political (Loznitsa, Navalny)"
• Armen Aramyan (Moscow) "Anthropology of Advertising and Production of Non-truths"

4:00pm Coffee break

4:30pm Session 3. Chair: Ilia Kalinin

• Greg Yudin (High School of Economics; Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences) "Against Tyranny of Truth in Politics"
• Aleksander Bikbov (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, France) "How do French Yellow Vests and Russian White Stripes Rationalize Political Anomalies"

4 June

10:00–12:15pm Session 4. Chair: Armen Aramyan

• Olga Savinskaya (High School of Economics, Moscow) "Censorship and Self-Censorship in Social Networks: Search for Rationale Logics in Online Storytelling"
• Solovieva Olga (High School of Economics, Moscow), Zhigaylov Aleksander (High School of Economics, Moscow), Smirnov Philipp (High School of Economics, Moscow), Boyarshinova Polina (Moscow) "Non-political Manifestation of Post-Truth"
• Konstantin Gabov (Moscow Institute for Social and Cultural Programs) "Experts of the Youtube: What Type of Knowledge is Produced in the (Post-) Social Media Era?"

12:15pm Lunch

1:15pm Session 5. Chair: Jan Surman

• Zhanna Mylogorodska (University of Leipzig, Germany) "The Image of Divided Ukraine Presented on Maps"
• Sophie Schmaing (University of Giessen, Germany) "Performative Aspects of Popular Sovereignty in the Recent Russian-Ukrainian Conflict"

2:45pm Coffee break

3:00 Session 6. Chair: Daria Petushkova

• Darya Khokhlova (Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, Moscow), Nikita Khokhlov (High School of Economics, Moscow) "The Soviet Union Did not Collapse: Post-Truth Through the Russian Popular Music (2010—Present)"
• Ilia Yablokov (University of Leeds, England) "What Really Happened in 1991? The Soviet Collapse and the Culture of Conspiracy in the Post-Soviet Space"

4:30pm Coffee break

5:00pm Keynote: Stef Aupers (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgique) "Conspiracy Theories"