Make / Believe

We and They on a Digital Planet

John Hartley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9798765128060
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Computer Science

This book illustrates that mediated popular culture and science-based knowledge systems, entangled and compromised as both have become, are still a robust crucible for system change for the future when they combine forces. Planetary crises require responses from everyone. This means that collective action is not simply a scientific or political problem. It is a problem of culture and media. But modern politics, journalism, and science were not designed for global climate action. They've divided humans into competitive and often hostile 'we' and 'they' groups. Identity, news, and knowledge are all weaponized. Culture makes groups, groups make knowledge, and knowledge makes enemies. What can be done to prevent global conflict and the drift to war? Make/Believe turns to popular culture and social media to argue for an alternative storyline. While the Great Powers are making new enemies, emergent 'classes' – led by children – are using planetary connectivity to make new worlds. A digital planet generates new kinds of strategic stories for pan-human action, based on difference, intersectionality, and cooperation for a sustainable Earth system. Make/Believe shows how alternatives to the 'Great Game' of global contestation are gathering strength in unlikely places, among women, children, lifestyle, and pop culture. Popular digital media literacy is now a prerequisite for the remediation of the planet.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Digital media literacy for planetary popular activism
• 2 Children of media: Worldmakers: Class theory for dummies
• 3 Zombie semiotics: The economics of the apocalypse
• 4 ‘Pathetic earthlings! Who can save you now?’: Science fiction, planetary crisis, and cultural globalization
• 5 ‘Present at its own making’: How do we make a pan-demic class?
• 6 Policy is theft: Global internet policy in an age of revolutions
• 7 Strategic stories: Weaponized narratives, aircraft carriers, and pre-war manoeuvres
• 8 Submarines at the end of the world: Great Game or make‑believe?
• 9 Gareth Jones’s mother and the future of journalism: Truth warrior or ‘Welsh Message’?
• 10 Grim-visaged war or lascivious lutes? Lifestyle journalism and the Barbenheimer principle
• 11 We and they on a digital planet: A ‘make / believe’ account of how to turn ‘they’ into ‘we’
• Postscript Cultural science: The universe is already awake
• Acknowledgements and positionality
• References
• Index
• Copyright