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One of the rallying cries of the blockchain community is that of immutability: the irreversibility of the past, the absolute truth which, once stored, remains there forever. The technology was designed with this foundational pillar in mind to ensure that changes to history are inordinately expensive and practically impossible to execute – and increasingly so, the further in the past the event which one intends to manipulate lies. This platonic view of absolute truth is in stark contrast with a world of manipulated truth, and it is not surprising that it is being revisited as a means of combating fake news. We argue that claims to the absolute nature of the blockchain are at best exaggerated, at worst misrepresented or even ‘fake news’. We discuss implicit centralised points of trust in blockchains, whether at a technological, social or governance level, and identify how these can be a threat to the ‘immutable truth’ stored within the blockchain itself. A global pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented wave of contradictory positions on anything from vaccines and face masks to ‘the new normal’. It is only natural that the pursuit of blockchain as a placebo for society's ‘truth’ problems continues.

This collection of essays has its roots in a collective desire to understand the workings of the post-truth society, and how education, media and technology may contribute to mitigating its worst excesses. This chapter introduces the origins of the book project.

The current environment of misinformation is causing expensive and negative consequences for society. Fake news is affecting democracy and its foundations, as well as newspapers and media companies that aim to combat this “pandemic.” In order to effectively provide accurate information, these companies are in need of a workforce with specific attitudes, skills, and knowledge (ASK). However, several studies show that students either do not have those ASK or have poorly developed them, indicating the need for better media literacy skills. Given that such skills are often not taught in school, nor is there a way for students to efficiently obtain them and tangibly show them to future employers, we propose a model ¹ that enhances the way students learn and how we measure such learning. Journalism students – enrolled in liberal arts, general studies, and humanities – have the potential to be upskilled and become the new critical thinking and fact-checking force needed to neutralize misinformation and foster a healthy society. Our model applies learning science and behavioral research on feedback and intrinsic motivation to foster students' ASK through a digital apprenticeship model that uses structured activities together with mentorship and feedback. Students participate in the creation of digital products for the journalism and news media industry. This prepares them for the types of tasks they will be required to perform in the job market. The digital apprenticeship matches students with the proper mentor, peer, and professional network. Students' work is compared against professional news media production to generate feedback, improve quality, and track progress. During the digital apprenticeship, students receive the ASK-SkillsCredit, a digital badge, which serves as a “nutritional” fact label that displays how students created the media content, the level of efficacy of the apprenticeship, and the standard of journalism quality of the piece. Lastly, we propose to enhance existing learning management systems to capture and promote a learner's profile data and expose aligned opportunities in news media outlets.

Social Technologies and their Unplanned Obsolescence seeks to sidestep the various contents of the post-truth debate to consider the manner in which any body of knowledge and practice gets taken up and extended at all. This bottom-up consideration of the material conditions of bodies of knowledge and practice is presented polemically, as a critical homily of sorts, and is concluded with a forward-looking call to action.

A continuum model helps us understand contemporary information politics. One end describes authority-centric approaches, including governments and digital corporations, while the other focuses on teaching individual skills and the understanding needed to grapple productively with the digital information ecosystem. The extremes represent opposed views of human agency, current information enterprises, and the nature of media. We apply this continuum to two examples, QAnon and COVID-19. Two instances attempt to connect the model's two poles. We conclude with a forecast of the continuum's viability and then project its application forward in education.

Information may well be an asset, but the sheer volume of what we have to navigate makes it challenging to determine those elements which are relevant to us. The credibility of news media outlets as our gatekeepers and first form of resistance to polluted information is increasingly questioned. Scientific research indicates that the quality of news offerings from news media outlets would benefit by triangulating news stories with a more diverse set of offerings and, in the process, build journalists' trust or otherwise in the sources of these offerings. Without the network effects of the Internet, false or incorrect information probably would not be such a successful phenomenon. Public opinion is quick to portray social or mainstream media platforms as guilty parties but tends to ignore the equally detrimental ramifications of their exploitation of social capital. A more reflective approach is required. This essay suggests that it is in our interest to reboot our societal consciousness and explore the underlying cybernetical dimensions, even if these appear to be confrontational for interested stakeholders in our current misinformation crisis.

What is truth and what are the conditions for its manifestation? We can induce from the evidence of the experience of all human subjects capable of communication and intersubjective behavior that we exist in a world that (1) we share and (2) is accessible to all of us. From this, we can infer that the experience of truth is not merely subjective, but depends upon objective referents to be meaningful. The interplay of subjectivity and objectivity in the meaning-making processes of human subjects is the condition of possibility for truth.

This essay proposes two ways of pursuing truth. One is a scientific project that requires generations of rigorous study and collective building. The other is a simple set of guidelines that can be used day to day by anyone. Both are important. Not everyone will be a professional scientist, but everyone can use simple scientific tools to bring their thinking and actions more in line with truth.

Truth matters; and the norms associated with a democratic society, such as the common good, responsibility, ethics, and civic engagement, are under attack with the emergence of the post-truth society. There are concerns worldwide that public education is failing us on pushing back on disinformation. Schools are not seen as developing skills that permit students to adequately differentiate truth from nontruths. In this context, the education system also faces some unprecedented challenges. The quality of education in most of the world is low, and only slowly improving. Also, future workers are concerned with automation's threat – or perceived threat – to jobs. In most countries, education systems are not providing workers with the skills necessary to compete in today's job markets. The growing mismatch between demand and supply of skills holds back economic growth and undermines opportunity. At the same time, the financial returns to schooling are high in most countries, and growing skill premiums are evident in much of the world. Schooling remains a good economic and social investment, and there are record numbers of children in school today. The skills that matter in the coming technological revolution are likely the same as what is needed in a media environment of disinformation. More and better education, and noncognitive skills, will not only prepare students for the future world of work; they will also prepare them to navigate the increasingly complex post-truth society. They will be able to detect fake news – or deliberate disinformation spread through news or online media. It will also allow young people to gain trust. In other words, better education is democratizing, to the extent that it promotes truth, values, and civic engagement.

This chapter explores responsibility in the posttruth era in communication disciplines while documenting the civic and political ramifications of the current news climate in the United States.