Make / Believe - by John Hartley (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book illustrates that mediated popular culture and science-based knowledge systems, entangled and compromised as both have become, are still a robust crucible for system change for the future when they combine forces.

Planetary crises require responses from everyone. This means that collective action is not simply a scientific or political problem. It is a problem of culture and media. But modern politics, journalism, and science were not designed for global climate action. They've divided humans into competitive and often hostile 'we' and 'they' groups. Identity, news, and knowledge are all weaponized. Culture makes groups, groups make knowledge, and knowledge makes enemies.

What can be done to prevent global conflict and the drift to war? Make/Believeturns to popular culture and social media to argue for an alternative storyline. While the Great Powers are making new enemies, emergent 'classes' - led by children - are using planetary connectivity to make new worlds. A digital planet generates new kinds of strategic stories for pan-human action, based on difference, intersectionality, and cooperation for a sustainable Earth system.

Make/Believeshows how alternatives to the 'Great Game' of global contestation are gathering strength in unlikely places, among women, children, lifestyle, and pop culture. Popular digital media literacy is now a prerequisite for the remediation of the planet.

Review Quotes

Make / Believe is a fascinating journey into the ever-expanding world of story-telling, story-making and story-listening as mechanisms for imagination and knowledge co-production. It guides the reader in a deep learning process that goes beyond the experience of 'just' reading a book: page after page, I felt like being attracted into a multisensory gallery packed with unexpected, creative stimuli that act as prompts for collective positive change and everyday activism... through reading, thinking, story-ing.
Antonia Liguori, Professor of Participatory Storytelling and Public Policy, Teesside University, UK

Make/Believe is a singular work that illustrates how doing research well leads to making the world a better place. This simple, yet layered message, is told by Hartley as a compelling story that explains the meaning of our mediated ecosystems. The book is both an explanation of all that cultural studies has achieved and an argument for driving cultural change forward. It is a dream and reality weaved together.
Zizi Papacharissi, UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication and Political Science and Head of Communication, University of Illinois Chicago, USA

Hartley is at his most majestic in this book. It poses a grand question, crystalized from a lifetime of thinking creatively as well as from work over the last few years, and proceeds to address it from all the important angles, some continuous with the author's earlier works and some as fresh as our ever-expanding semiobiosphere. The question is what is to be done with the problem of cognitive and intellectual paralysis that we collectively experience under expanding webs of mediation and usurping AI? How should we envision and, more importantly, present human history from here onward, when such presentation is necessarily make-believe? The author combines the critical insights of Marxism, semiotics, studies of creative industries, and the philosophy of technology to project a set of paths forward for the Anthropocene generation. All the sparkling chapters in the book converge on an argument for "posthuman humanism"--a powerfully intuitive idea--as a guiding principle of cultural and political interventions in our epoch.
Wen Jin, Professor of Comparative Literature, East China Normal University

About the Author

John Hartley is Professor in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Sydney, Australia. He previously worked at Curtin University, Australia, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, as Dean of Creative Industries and ARC Federation Fellow, and Cardiff University, UK, as head of the School of Journalism and Media. He has published over 30 books and many articles on media, journalism, creative industries and digital culture.