CDCS Book Talk: Prof. Jayson Harsin

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.