Make / Believe

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, with such presentation 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, East China Normal University *