Rumor and Media: Technologies, Circulati

At various historical junctures, the emergence of new media has coincided with concerns about accelerated circulations of rumor and the credence gained by unreliable or patently false information. This class will explore rumor, hearsay, disinformation, propaganda, and their interrelations to specific media formats and technologies. Often considered a purely oral medium, the spread of rumor is rendered possible not only by a mixture of fact and fabulation but also by an interaction between speech and various media formats that range from writing and print to social media. In Homer’s Odyssey, “hearsay” is the only source of information about Odysseus’s fate for his son, but it also stands in for the oral tradition from which the written epic emerges. Later on, rumor is frequently connected to new media technologies and formats. During the French Revolution, pamphlets, flyers, and posters play a crucial role for the wide dissemination of scandalous and incorrect news that plays on real anxieties and grievances. Around the same time, Herder dismissively compares the printing press to the Roman goddess of “fama.” Before ending with social media and the proliferation of disinformation and propaganda today, the seminar will also explore the newspaper, propaganda, and the radio as powerful conduits of rumor.