News and Fake News: From Print to Photography

Undergraduate

How do people decide what is true? Why do some stories endure even after they have been challenged or disproven? This course explores these questions by tracing the emergence of information media from the printing press to the age of photography. Before the internet, before radio, before television, people were already grappling with false information. As successive technologies opened new possibilities for producing and circulating news, they also created new opportunities for deception. Between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, the circulation of information accelerated, and its audiences expanded, altering how people encountered a world beyond the limits of direct experience. Reports increasingly arrived from afar, carried by media that promised unprecedented access to distant realities while provoking new anxieties about authenticity and forgery. The same media that conveyed political events and everyday occurrences also shaped the production of scientific knowledge, allowing readers to witness experiments they had not seen, inspect phenomena they had not observed, and trust in images and instruments that extended the reach of human perception. Moving across five centuries, the course examines how new media created public opinion and transformed practices of knowing. By exploring the changing relationship between communication technologies and the realities they claimed to represent, students discover that debates over truth and evidence long predate the digital age. HU TTh 1:30pm-2:20pm