Trust and Narrative in a Post-Digital Age

Dates: 5, 12, 19 & 26 November; 3 December 2024
Time: 14.30-17.00
Location: Tilburg University (MindLabs building)
Instructors: Inge van de Ven, Niels Niessen
Credits: 6 ECTS
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To trust is to invest a firm belief in something or someone, whether a G/god, the A/author of a text or documentary film, or seemingly all-knowing Internet platforms like Google Search or ChatGPT (which appear increasingly God-like). This course explores how notions of trust, narrative, and authorship change in our so-called postdigital age: an age in which the lines between the analog and digital worlds have become blurry to the extent they have become seemingly imperceptible. Over the course of our five sessions, we will explore and theorize questions like: How do we distinguish between a reliable and unreliable narrator? How do Big Tech companies like Google seek to gain our trust? How is prompting ChatGPT different from, say, consulting a newspaper archive? And how can the humanities and media literacy education facilitate people (young and older) to develop a healthy suspicion in an era in which the owls of wisdom are no longer what they seem. We will do so in dialogue with authors including Michel Foucault (“What Is an Author?”), Hugo Mercier (Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and what we Believe), Lauren Berlant (Cruel Optimism), Rita Felski (The Limits of Critique), Eve Sedgwick (Touching Feeling), Paul Ricoeur (The Conflict of Interpretations), and Jean-Luc Godard (Here and Elsewhere about people here watching images of Palestine there).

The preliminary session titles are as follows:

1. Trust and the Post-Digital

2. Big Tech Ideology

3. Unreliable Narrators

4. AI and Media Literacy

5. Hermeneutics of Faith and Suspicion

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