Christian Humanist Profiles 242: Peter K. Fallon

The book I expected to read would present all the ways in which human communities in the digital age are dealing with a decentralized authority structure, how any given woman or man might jump on the Internet, either through a browser or a social-media program or by some other means, and encounter half a dozen figures, all competing for status as authorities on the question at hand, disagreeing with each other not on marginal matters but on the most important, most central parts of the public policy or scientific finding or the political tension at hand.  The book I expected to read would look at all that and warn me about the dangers of a post-truth world.  Peter K. Fallon takes a look at the same stew of unstable sources and says, “How cool is that?”  His new book Propaganda 2.1 from Cascade Books draws from the rightly-renowned examinations of Jacques Ellul and then launches forward, never denyinig the dangers of citizenship in an Internet context but also looking at the genuinely good possibilities that emerge.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Fallon to the show.