What Is This Book About?

This online textbook has two goals:

1.    To help readers find information in places, mostly online, where they usually don’t look;

2.    To help readers evaluate the credibility of the information they find.

Who Is This Book For?

Although we wrote this textbook for a required college-level journalism course, anyone who navigates information on the Internet can benefit from the concepts and skills presented here.

The primary audience for this book starts with students in Journalism 302: Infomania, a course we teach at the University of Kansas. When they take this class, these students usually are in their second or third semesters in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. They have varied career aspirations. A few of them want to be “traditional” journalists, writing for online news sites, magazines, or newspapers. Some of them want to be broadcast journalists. Many of them want to work in strategic communications, which encompasses public relations, advertising, marketing, and related fields.

Why Did We Write This Book?

[...] To teach information literacy and journalism practice, we needed a textbook that would deconstruct the process of judging the credibility or authority of sources, and that would align with the professional standards of journalism. As we searched for textbooks and other instructional materials, however, we concluded that there wasn’t anything on the market that met our students’ needs and the goals of this class.

This textbook, therefore, is the result of a collaboration between journalism and library faculty. It is an illustration of what happens when concepts developed in library science and instruction get applied to a specific field, in this case, journalism education. Our overarching intent in writing this book was to help undergraduate journalists develop the skills and a skeptical stance for accessing, evaluating, and using information, and in the process, to build their own authority as credible communication practitioners. 

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This textbook overviews the time-tested conceptual foundations of the field, while incorporating the latest research and cutting-edge applications of these basics. Each chapter will include timely, concrete, and real-life examples of communication concepts in action. For questions about this textbook please contact textbookuse@umn.edu

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This is a modular open textbook designed for entrepreneurial journalism, media innovation, and related courses.

For students enrolled in a journalism or communications course, there is—bar none—no better place to embrace and refine nearly every skill you will need to know than learning about media entrepreneurship and innovation.

In the course of envisioning, prototyping and launching, you will integrate multimedia production, social media distribution, design thinking, data collection and analysis, and audience engagement strategies.

As added benefits, you will develop business skills, begin to understand how to develop a product, how to discover customers, and how to manage all these activities so that you can deliver a new entrepreneurial startup. Or you may go the intrapreneurial route and spearhead a new venture inside your existing media organization.

Face it: You will be stepping into a world where media entrepreneurship is at an all-time high.

It’s clear that media entrepreneurs are articulating some new value propositions for their audiences. Nowadays, entirely new breeds of journalism are emerging from the imaginations of news entrepreneurs: mission-driven journalism, restorative narratives, soft-advocacy journalism, solutions journalism and activist journalism.  Moreover, new media ventures are reaching out and engaging audiences in fresh, new ways, often building robust civic communications ecosystems.

In learning about media innovation, you will be part of the creative process and a contributor to these new trends.  

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 Media, Society, Culture, and You is an approachable introductory Mass Communication text that covers major mass communication terms and concepts including "digital culture." It discusses various media platforms and how they are evolving as Information and Communication Technologies change.

The book grew out of an experiment in developing and employing open educational resources (OER) at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Professors from various disciplines were encouraged to find or develop texts to replace or supplement course materials. Because the field of mass communication changes so rapidly, the author of this text decided to “go all in” on OER materials and develop, write, and edit the first version of this electronic textbook with plans to update it at least once per year.

The book has been peer-reviewed by 6 subject experts and is now available for adoption or adaptation. If you plan to adopt or adapt this open textbook, please let us know by filling out our adoption form.

Table of contents:

1. Media, Society, Culture and You

2. Digital Culture and Social Media

3. Media Literacy and Media Studies Research

4. Film and Bricolage

5. Television through Time

6. Music Recording, "Sharing" and the Information Economy

7. Radio Broadcasting, Podcasting and "Superbug Media"

8. Digital Gaming

9. Newspapers and Digital News

10. Advertising, Public Relations and Propaganda

•  Glossary

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This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign.

Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news.

Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of “alternative facts”, this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.

Contents:

Ch. 1 -  What is New and True 1 about Fake News?

Part I -  The journey and aftermath of (false) information in networks

• Ch. 2 -  How Bad is the Fake News Problem?: The role of baseline information in public perceptions

• Ch. 3 -  Truth and the Dynamics of News Diffusion on Twitter

• Ch. 4 -  Retracted Articles – the Scientific Version of Fake News

Part II -  Cognitive processes in accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation

• Ch. 5 -  When (Fake) News Feels True: Intuitions of truth and the acceptance and correction of misinformation

• Ch. 6 -  Truthiness: How non-probative photos shape belief

• Ch. 7 -  Can that be True or is it Just Fake News?: New perspectives on the negativity bias in judgments of truth

• Ch. 8 -  False Beliefs: Byproducts of an adaptive knowledge base?

• Ch. 9 -  Psychological Inoculation Against Fake News

Part III -  Motivational processes in accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation

• Ch. 10 -  Your Fake News, Our Facts: Identity-based motivation shapes what we believe, share, and accept

• Ch. 11 -  Conspiracy Beliefs: Knowledge, ego defense, and social integration in the processing of fake news

• Ch. 12 -  Fake News Attributions as a Source of Nonspecific Structure

Reviews:

"Fake news is a serious problem for politics, for science, for journalism, for consumers, and, really, for all of us. We now live in a world where fact and fiction are intentionally blurred by people who hope to deceive us. In this tremendous collection, four scientists have gathered together some of the finest minds to help us understand the problem, and to guide our thinking about what can be done about it. The Psychology of Fake News is an important and inspirational contribution to one of society’s most vexing problems." – Elizabeth F Loftus, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine, USA

"This volume provides a great entry point into the vast and growing psychological literature on one of the defining problems of the early 21st century – fake news and its dissemination. The chapters by leading scientists first focus on how (false) information spreads online and then examine the cognitive processes involved in accepting and sharing (false) information. The volume concludes by reviewing some of the available countermeasures. Anyone new to this area will find much here to satisfy their curiosity." – Stephan Lewandowsky, Cognitive Science, University of Bristol, UK

"This is an interesting, innovative and important book on a very significant social issue. Fake news has been the focus of intense public debate in recent years, but a proper scientific analysis of this phenomenon has been sorely lacking. Contributors to this excellent volume are world-class researchers who offer a detailed analysis of the psychological processes involved in the production, dissemination, interpretation, sharing, and acceptance of fake news. This book should be essential reading to anyone interested in public affairs, and especially to students, researchers, and applied professionals in the social sciences." – Joseph P Forgas, Scientia Professor, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

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