Steve Fuller - Who’s Afraid of The Post-Truth Condition? (Video)
“Perhaps the most interesting feature of the post-truth condition is the extent to which it has taken academics and other political and economic elites by surprise. Nevertheless, it should have been expected, given higher levels of educational attainment and greater access to information, which together have empowered a democratic sensibility that increasingly refuses to defer to expert authority. I shall consider the implications of this development for how we understand reasoning, evidence and knowledge work more generally.” — https://www.essex.ac.uk/events/2020/03/19/who-is-afraid-of-the-post-truth-condition
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I wanted this video to be posted because it shows how on short notice (a week or less), a scheduled on-site talk in another country can be conducted well with Q&A. The talk and Q&A were of the normal length (45 mins apiece) and all went fine. It’s interesting not least because of how it was managed — e.g. the moderator could take written questions and then read them out themselves or open the mic to the participants. The moderator was Oren Harman, head of the STS Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, but he himself was guided from behind by scenes by his colleague, Israel Belfer, who came up with the idea of the video seminar. 50 people were online — which would have been about right if not higher than a live audience.
I say all this because this kind of format could make much of academic conferencing obsolete, saving a lot of time, money and environmental resources. You will notice that the description for this seminar comes from the one I provided to Essex University in the UK, which I was scheduled to give ten days earlier and was cancelled. That perhaps suggests something of the potential savings, if we need to radically readjust our lives after the COVID-19 crisis. I say this as someone who really enjoys travelling around the world — and normally does it a lot.