Exploring possible future worlds with the practice of design fiction
Speculation as a means of critical distancing from the media

Une conférence de Géraldine Wuyckens (UC Louvain)

7 décembre 2022

Unveiling the false, screenwriting the true. Transparency battle in the Early modern polemics (the example of the French Catholic League, 1585-1594)

During the Wars of Religion (16th and 17th centuries), various political or religious groups produced polemical texts. This post focus on the production of the zealous Catholics, whose texts use a large variety of argumentative strategies. Two of them are structured along the axis of transparency: a rhetoric of unveiling and a staging of the information.

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“Knowing the audience” on digital platforms

A platform, in its very nature, promises to make the entire communication chain transparent (and hence controllable). For content producers, this makes platforms an appealing environment to distribute their creations, since they offer the possibility to know their audiences. Most platforms therefore offer contributors insight into the reach of their creations, in the form of dashboards that contain audience metrics. This knowledge about the audience given to content creators is “interested”, in the sense that the knowledge is not random nor complete, and in its biases it is possible to detect a certain managerial logic.

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