This Is Not Propaganda [Audio]
Speaker(s): Joanna Kavenna, Dr Martin Moore, Peter Pomerantsev | Post-truth, disinformation, bots, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump….we live in a world of media manipulation run amock. To understand the new propaganda, and what to do about it, we need to grasp both the cultural and technological dynamics in play, which is what this panel sets out to do. Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda – Adventures in the War Against Reality will be joined by Joanna Kavenna, author of new tech-dystopian novel Zed, and Dr Martin Moore of Kings College London, author of Democracy Hacked: How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics, to grapple with both the philosophical and computational dramas of the disinformation age. Joanna Kavenna is a British novelist, essayist and travel writer. She is the author of The Ice Museum, Inglorious (which won the Orange Prize for New Writing), The Birth of Love, Come to the Edge and A Field Guide to Reality. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, Spectator, London Review of Books and New York Times and she has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College Oxford and St John's College Cambridge. In 2011 she was named as one of the Telegraph's 20 Writers Under 40 and in 2013 was listed as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. To pre-order a copy of Joanna's new book, which can be collected from independent bookshop Pages of Hackney at the event, please go to Zed. Martin Moore (@martinjemoore) is Senior Lecturer in Political Communication Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Policy Institute at King’s. Before joining King’s, Martin was the founding director of the Media Standards Trust (MST), an independent charity dedicated to fostering high standards in the news media, from 2006-2015. During this time the MST won a Prospect Think Tank of the Year Award (2011) and a Knight News Challenge award (2008). He completed his doctorate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2004, where he subsequently taught undergraduates in history. Before completing his doctorate, Martin spent over a decade working in media and communications – with the BBC, Channel 4, NTL, AT&T and others. Sophia Gaston (@sophgaston) is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs, LSE. She is a social and political researcher, who conducts international projects on public opinion, specialising in both qualitative fieldwork and quantitative analysis. Sophia’s work is especially focused on social and political change, populism, the media and democracy - with a focus on threats to governance in Western nations. She is also an Academic Fellow at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, and the Managing Director of the British Foreign Policy Group. Previously, Sophia was the Director of the Centre for Social and Political Risk, and the Deputy Director and Head of International Research at Demos think tank. She has previously also held research and strategic roles in a range of UK and international NGOs, the civil service, and private sector, including working as a political speechwriter in Premier & Cabinet in Australia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.