GSU on Keren Wang

Fake News: Concepts, Rhetorical Disruptions, and Policy Implications

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:26:53 +0000

Media, Society, and Culture Lesson Module

Seeing Isn’t Believing

 RepresentUs, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons: A synthetic Kim Jong Un warns Americans—evidence that our eyes/ears are no longer reliable gatekeepers.

This video clip is a "deepfake" of Kim Jong Un created in 2020 by RepresentUs, a non-partisan non-profit organization that produced it to raise public awareness about fake news in the emerging age of generative AI. The footage itself is fully synthetic, yet it’s an amalgamation from genuine video footage and voice samples of the North Korean leader drawn from publicly available news archives. It was intentionally designed to look real enough to unsettle us, but still recognizable as “fake” for educational purposes. Since 2020, of course, deepfake technology has advanced by orders of magnitude, in terms of realism, accessibility, and speed of production.

The Internet - from "Nuclear Hardened" Networks to Algorithmic Governmentality

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:15:36 +0000

References

Beck, Estee. "Who Is Tracking You?: A Rhetorical Framework for Evaluating Surveillance and Privacy Practices." In Cyber Law, Privacy, and Security: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, pp. 121-138. IGI Global, 2019.

Belk, Russell. “Extended self and the digital world.” Current Opinion in Psychology 10 (2016): 50-54.

Chen, Ning, and Yu Chen. “Smart city surveillance at the network edge in the era of iot: opportunities and challenges.” Smart cities: development and governance frameworks (2018): 153-176.

Understanding Advertising through Consumer Psychology and Computational Rhetoric

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:44:29 +0000

What Do You See?

Historical "Thickness" of Advertising

Demonstrative and Associative Ads

Advertising & Consumer Psychology

Bandwagon & Anti-Bandwagon Effects

Social Marketing & Exploitation

Computational Rhetoric of Hyper-Personalization

What Do You See?

Let’s begin today’s lesson with a quick glance at these sets of images. What do they remind you of?