Join us in person in room CAS 233 or via Zoom (register here). Dr. Sandra Braman, Scholar and Professor of Media & Information.
John Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding (1690) introduced his concept of the fact and became the most important book of the 17th and 18th centuries after the Bible. As Tom Wolfe put it, the effects of the turn to reason in text were as powerful as “the introduction of electricity into machine technology.” Facticity is the social formation that resulted across Western societies — the social orientation around the fact, whether towards or away. This presentation will briefly review the history of facticity, introduce current trends in the state of the fact, examine ways in which technological innovations have affected every facet of fact production with profound epistemological consequences, and map the manifestations of these epistemological developments in contemporary media and information research. The talk will conclude with an overview of current work on facts and their processing in US law.
Sandra Braman is Scholar and Professor of Media & Information and Senior Scholar, Quello Center for Media & Information Policy, Michigan State University. Her book Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (The MIT Press, 2006) won the 2022 International Communication Association Fellows Book Award for a book of enduring value.