Propaganda 2.1: Understanding Propaganda in the Digital Age

Since the US presidential election of 2016 the words propaganda and fake news have been prominent in American political and cultural discourse. Yet very few people can provide a coherent explanation of what they mean, precisely, when using them. On the two sides of the political spectrum (“red” and “blue”), each points out messages from the other side that they think are untrue—or that they simply don’t like.

Unlike our dangerously biased political system, however, reality has more than only two sides. For decades, Americans sat by while their mediated world was carved into a single “red reality” focused in necessary opposition to a single “blue reality.” We’ve been given “red media outlets” and “blue media outlets” to stoke our collective rage, each against the other’s lies.

But the first two decades of the twenty-first century have presented us with a new information environment, one of unregulated and seemingly uncontrollable information. Like the young boy in a popular folktale, we can now see—if only we can resist the pressures of social conformity—that both emperors, red and blue, strut proudly before us, naked.

Propaganda 2.1 is a handbook for seeing reality clearly—and coping with it.

Peter K Fallon is the author of two award-winning books, Why the Irish Speak English (Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book, 2007) and The Metaphysics of Media (Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship, 2010), and a third book, Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance (2013). He was active in the Occupy movement between 2011 and 2012, supports the Catholic social justice movement (Pax Christi), and is an associate of the Sinsinawa Dominicans.

Fallon spent twenty-three years in television, seventeen of those years at the NBC News TODAY program in New York before leaving the news business in 1999 to teach full-time. Working in what he called "the news racket," Fallon learned firsthand about both the power and reach of propaganda 2.0.

His work has been profoundly influenced by three people: his teacher in New York University's Media Ecology program, Neil Postman; Jacques Ellul, theologian and author of Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes; and his father, James P. Fallon Sr., who emigrated from Ireland to the United States at the age of eleven.