Fake News in Digital Cultures presents a new approach to understanding disinformation and misinformation in contemporary digital communication, arguing that fake news is not an alien phenomenon undertaken by bad actors, but a logical outcome of contemporary digital and popular culture, conceptual changes meaning and truth, and shifts in the social practice of trust, attitude and creativity. Looking not to the problems of the present era but towards the continuing development of a future digital media ecology, the authors explore the emergence of practices of deliberate disinformation. This includes the circulation of misleading content or misinformation, the development of new technological applications such as the deepfake, and how they intersect with conspiracy theories, populism, global crises, popular disenfranchisement, and new practices of regulating misleading content and promoting new media and digital literacies.

Modern Conspiracy attempts to sketch a new conception of conspiracy theory. Where many commentators have sought to characterize conspiracy theory in terms of the collapse of objectivity and Enlightenment reason, Fleming and Jane trace the important role of conspiracy in the formation of the modern world: the scientific revolution, social contract theory, political sovereignty, religious paranoia and mass communication media. Rather than see in conspiratorial thinking the imminent death of Enlightenment reason, and a regression to a new Dark Age, Modern Conspiracy contends that many characteristic features of conspiracies tap very deeply into the history of the Enlightenment itself: among other things, its vociferous critique of established authorities, and a conception of political sovereignty fuelled by fear of counter-plots. Drawing out the roots of modern conspiratorial thinking leads us to truths less salacious and scandalous than the claims of conspiracy theorists themselves yet ultimately far more salutary: about mass communication; about individual and crowd psychology; and about our conception of and relation to knowledge.Perhaps, ultimately, what conspiracy theory affords us is a renewed opportunity to reflect on our very relationship to the truth itself.

A Mayan Priest Reveals What the 2012 Prophecy Really Means for Your Life

Written at the request of the Mayan Elders, by a member of the Guatemalan Elders Council and Mayan priest Carlos Barrios, The Book of Destiny is a tool to help people understand their life purpose and to use this profound knowledge to make the best of their time on earth.

According to the Mayan Elders, at the moment of birth every human being is given a destiny. Our life challenge is to develop ourselves and our skills in order to fulfill this destiny, thus fueling our individual contribution to the planet. At the heart of The Book of Destiny is the sacred Mayan Calendar, an extraordinary tool that allows readers to discover this destiny, along with their special Mayan symbol, origin, and protection spirits that accompany them through life.

By the age of nine, I will have lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities. I'll know how a document is forged, how to withstand an interrogation, and most important, how to disappear . . . To the young Cheryl Diamond, life felt like one big adventure, whether she was hurtling down the Himalayas in a rickety car or mingling with underworld fixers. Her family appeared to be an unbreakable gang of five. One day they were in Australia, the next in South Africa, the pattern repeating as they crossed continents, changed identities, and erased their pasts. What Diamond didn't yet know was that she was born into a family of outlaws fleeing from the highest international law enforcement agencies, a family with secrets that would eventually catch up to all of them. By the time she was in her teens, Diamond had lived dozens of lives and lies, but as she grew older, love and trust turned to fear and violence, and her family--the only people she had in the world--began to unravel. She started to realize that her life itself might be a big con, and the people she loved, the most dangerous of all. With no way out and her identity burned so often that she had no proof she even existed, all that was left was a girl from nowhere. Surviving would require her to escape, and to do so Diamond would have to unlearn all the rules she grew up with. Wild, heartbreaking, and often unexpectedly funny, Nowhere Girl is an impossible-to-believe true story of self-discovery and triumph.

The second edition of this popular text, updated throughout and now including Covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election and aftermath, introduces students to the research into conspiracy theories and the people who propagate and believe them. In doing so, Uscinski and Enders address the psychological, sociological, and political sources of conspiracy theorizing. They rigorously analyze the most current arguments and evidence while providing numerous real-world examples so students can contextualize the current debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

The Secrets of Life series is written for everyone who, frankly, needs a spot of cheering up, and will provide conversation starters for years after reading! O'Connor's easy-going, conversational style brings an outsider's questioning eye to the great forces behind life. The third in the four-part series explains how game theory developed, and why it came to show us not only how humans arrive at their decisions, but why so much of the apparently bizarre behaviour of the natural world has the same mathematical logic to it. Instead of the confusion and chaos one might expect in life, O'Connor shows that there are profound reasons behind the choices organisms make when they interact, and how we humans refined this process through the addition of our intelligence and language skills. Starting with the mind-blowing new ways of thinking that Adam Smith opened the world's eyes to, the book progresses to the 20th century-and shows how there's a coherent rationale behind our thought processes-and how this was gradually revealed by scientists at a time when the very future of the world was at stake. As O'Connor unfolds the story in Why Do We All Behave In The Way We Do?, it becomes ever clearer how cooperation has evolved to be the critical force at every level of life. It was what built our world, and it would settle so deeply into the hardwiring of living things that it would eventually become instinctive and innate in us. Perhaps most pleasingly, game theory explains how the benefits of collaboration are bound to ratchet upwards-and how this will inevitably lead to ever-increasing levels of moral behaviour in our societies. It is so often an accepted fact that bad people will win. And yet, as Book Three so clearly explains, collaborative societies are bound to grow, that it's rational to forgive to overcome vendettas and feuds, and that nice folks will always win in life by coming second. Example questions posed (and answered) in Book Three - Why Do All We Behave In The Way We Do? What's Game Theory - and why is it so critical to understanding how to make the right decisions? Why, if humans are so convinced that most of us are bad, are we concerned about being fair in our lives? Why do we value trust so highly? What are the reasons for our surprising wish to care for each other? Why do we share things, even though we might not have to? How did a failed robbery explain human nature? Why can it be rational to be irrational? And why is life like a poker game?

The second edition of this popular text, updated throughout and now including Covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election and aftermath, introduces students to the research into conspiracy theories and the people who propagate and believe them. In doing so, Uscinski and Enders address the psychological, sociological, and political sources of conspiracy theorizing. They rigorously analyze the most current arguments and evidence while providing numerous real-world examples so students can contextualize the current debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

New Lands was the second nonfiction book of the author Charles Fort, written in 1925. It deals primarily with astronomical anomalies. Fort expands in this book on his theory about the Super-Sargasso Sea - a place where earthly things supposedly materialize in order to rain down on Earth - as well as developing an idea that there are continents above the skies of Earth. As evidence, he cites a number of anomalous phenomena, including strange "mirages" of land masses, groups of people, and animals in the skies. He also continues his attacks on scientific dogma, citing a number of mysterious stars and planets that scientists failed to account for.

Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

The Secrets of Life series is written for everyone who, frankly, needs a spot of cheering up, and will provide conversation starters for years after reading! O'Connor's easy- going, conversational style brings an outsider's questioning eye to the great forces behind life. The first book in the four-part series contends that if we set received wisdom to one side and really dig into the facts, there are actually very few 'secrets' in life. Instead, suggesting it's possible to see that from the split second of Big Bang, right up to our present attempts to make the world a better place, everything that's alive has been trying to find strategies to survive the iron Laws of Thermodynamics, to work together to make more from less, and to overcome the constant threat of destructive, entropic forces. How Did Life End Up With Us? delves into explanations as to the reasons behind why cooperation is the strongest force in life, and why altruism is the proof for the 'gene-based theory of evolution'. O'Connor reveals that from the point that life first sparked off some 3.8 billion years ago, every living thing has descended from the original cell by taking blind mutational and genetic 'decisions'. Through The Secrets of Life series, aimed at general readers like himself, O'Connor recognises that life may appear as an endless and violent conflict, yet under the obvious requirement to take one another's energy, there's always been a deeper current that's driving living things to higher and higher levels of cooperation. In other words, the future isn't quite as bleak as you may believe! Example questions posed (and answered) in Book One - How Did Life End Up With Us? Why are mutations like a gambling scam? And why, if DNA is just a bunch of chemical elements, does it behave like a sophisticated hedge fund manager? If DNA is so brilliant at replicating things, then why does the reproduction process make so many mistakes? Why does everything have to die? How were the Beatles witnesses to one of the great scientific breakthroughs? Is natural selection enough to explain evolution?