Backlight: Seeing Is Believing

In this broadcast Backlight looks into what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’. Are we moving towards a world without truth? Through the emergence of social media, information bubbles and the possibilities offered by Deepfakes, we no longer live in a world of shared reality.

What role does synthetic media play in how we experience ‘reality’? An exploration of the future with three prominent thinkers that highlights both the perils and the positive potential of this media. What to think of deep fake as therapy and new artistic form of expression?

We are living in an ‘infocalypse’, says British disinformation expert Nina Schick. In her book Deepfakes and the Infocalypse – What You Urgently Need to Know, she depicts a society suffering from information overload that blurs the distinction between ‘information’ and ‘disinformation’.

With the rise of social media, different groups in our society are more and more inclined to retreat into their own ‘echo chambers’ where they experience their own ‘subjective truth’. This makes it increasingly difficult to reach consensus about how to view the ‘real’ world.

The advent of synthetic media heralds a new effective and influential step in the distribution of dis- and misinformation.