Book Talk: Professor Jayson Harsin

The Critique of Pure Information: Disinformation, Misinformation, and Democratic Life

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About The Critique of Pure Information

The Critique of Pure Information offers a critical rethinking of disinformation, misinformation, and “post-truth” politics by challenging the assumption that political deception is best understood as a problem of false or impure information.

This book argues that the dominant vocabulary of “information disorder” has helped install an infocentric model of communication, one that reduces deceptive public communication to faulty content, corrupted circulation, or deficient belief. Combining conceptual history, communication theory, systematic review, close rhetorical analysis, and digital trace ethnography, the book shows how deception and confusion work through rhetoric, style, genre, image-text composition, platformed circulation, affect, and public uptake. Through an extended case study of a long-circulating Trump quotation meme, it demonstrates why democratic communication cannot be repaired by fact-checking, media literacy, platform governance, or AI detection alone.

About Jayson Harsin

Jayson Harsin (Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2006) is Professor in the Media, Communication & Culture and the History and Politics departments; and Director, Center for Media, Communication & Global Change at The American University of Paris, France. A critical scholar of what has been called “post-truth politics,” Harsin’s work has for over 20 years focused on political deception from a critical cultural perspective emphasizing the influence of promotional and celebrity culture, as well as technological and political economic causes in practices of political trust-making and truth-telling. He coined the concepts “rumor bomb” (2006) and “regime of post-truth” (2015), prior to post-truth being declared word-of-the-year (2016). Harsin has taught at Northeastern University; The New School; CUNY, Baruch College; and The American University of Paris. Most recently, he is editor of Re-thinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture Affect (Routledge, 2023)