Media, Markets, and Psychology under Conditions of Post-factual Democracy

The Danish expert on political opinion formation, media environment, and affective polarization, Mads Vestergaard, will give a lecture on May 15 at Freie Universität Berlin on the mechanisms of attention under the conditions of post-factual democracy. Entitled "Media, Markets, and Psychology: Structural Conditions of Post-Factual Democracy," the lecture will be given in English. It is public, and admission is free. No registration needed. The media landscape has evolved into an attention economy under the growing influence of digitization, in which fake news, conspiracy theories, and populist thought patterns of a "we against you" successfully compete for attention and set the pace. Both - disinformation and the demarcation against dissenters - threaten the achievements of the community and in the end democracy itself. In his lecture, Mads Vestergaard critically examines and questions these developments, drawing on central arguments that he and the Danish philosopher Vincent F. Hendricks developed in the recently published book Post-Factual: The New Reality in Times of Bullshit, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories (published so far in Danish and German, "Postfaktisch.