Course organiser:Yvonne Evans
Presenter:David Hodgson and Elizabeth Stewart
The first 4 sessions of this course will focus on how Western Civilisation has changed in the last millennium. The world of our European ancestors in the year 1000 is almost unrecognisable to us today. Life was short and sharp and remained so for most of the millennium. What were the key inventions that changed people’s lives? What took Britain from relative obscurity to global superpower? We will discover how Europe’s Great Divergence has shaped the modern world.
Our recent entry into the information age grants us easy access to a practically
infinite amount of content – but not all content is created equal. The information
space is flooded with propaganda, fraudulent advertisements, AI-generated content,
and disinformation. Against this background, knowing who to trust with our attention
is vitally important for our personal and communal well-being. Unfortunately,
identifying trustworthy voices is challenging. While there is no silver bullet solution to
the so-called “fake news” problem, I hope in this talk to provide some tools for
identifying different kinds of problematic content and some of the effects of trust-
gone-wrong. I will distinguish three different kinds of problematic content:
misinformation, disinformation, and misleading content. Then I will discuss why
exposure to accurate information is not always sufficient for leading people to the
truth – hint: it has to do with trust!