ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the best way to help students address problems of mis- and disinformation online is not to focus on evaluating the ‘truth’ of what they read or see online but rather to reflect on their own practices of truth-making as a socially situated practice. The chapter develops a framework that positions truth-making as an emergent phenomenon arising at the intersection of the five dimensions previously explored in this volume: action, attention, affect, affinity, and visibility. The chapter describes how digital truth-making practices depend on the material-discursive architectures of media environments, the attention structures and affective economies that scaffold our responses to information, the affinity spaces within which social or ‘tribal’ epistemologies develop, and the visibility regimes that determine whose knowledge claims become legible. The chapter goes on to discuss how evaluative judgments about information are inseparable from the ‘deep stories’ that are part of the collective consciousness of different social groups. The chapter concludes by framing epistemic literacies as a matter of teaching students to be ‘committed testers’ who don’t just have a commitment to ‘truth’ as an abstract ideal, but also have a commitment to the ethical and material consequences of their truth-making practices and a willingness to examine the values and ‘deep stories’ that animate their own and others’ epistemic frameworks.
