This is an online expert lecture in the two-weekly Digital Humanism Lecture Series.
Speaker: James Cortada
Moderator: Susan Winter
ABSTRACT “Misinformation and Social Media as a Historical Process: Insights from the American Experience”: This presentation discusses the nature of false or misinformation in U.S. social media. Social media is today widely used by the American public as a major component of its use of the Internet as a whole. It is argued that these collections of facts are similar to those that have existed for over 200 years in this country. The problem of such information is serious, its characteristics are described, and how it is (or should be) dealt with concludes the presentation.
Short bio of James Cortada
Dr. James W. Cortada is a senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. He is an historian specializing in corporate history, and that, too, of all manner of information since the start of the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s. He is the author of a series of books on information’s history, including Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinformation in America (2019) co-authored with Professor William Aspray, Birth of Modern Facts (2023), and Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information (2025). He also spent four decades working at IBM Corporation in sales, consulting and management.
Short Bio of Susan Winter:
Dr. Susan Winter, Associate Dean for Research, College of Information Studies, the University of Maryland. Dr. Winter studies the co-evolution of technology and work practices, and the organization of work. She has recently focused on ethical issues surrounding civic technologies and smart cities, the social and organizational challenges of data reuse, and collaboration among information workers and scientists acting within highly institutionalized sociotechnical systems. Her work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. She was previously a Science Advisor in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, a Program Director, and Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation supporting distributed, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration for complex data-driven and computational science. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona, her MA from the Claremont Graduate University, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
See zoom link https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
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