With political violence and affective polarization on the rise, American democracy is in peril, a situation made worse by the population’s cratering trust in government and journalistic institutions. What role do the media and technology industries play in this? Should they merely be blamed for the democratic decline in the United States, or is there a way they can be part of turning things around?

In this talk, Morten Bay unpacks the overall findings, themes, and arguments from his new book, Mediating Plureality: Technology, Perception, and Ethics in a Divided Democracy.

He busts the myth that social media creates affective polarization. Instead, he shows how a confluence of economic, political, and technological failures across the entire media industry has led to the current quagmire, beginning with the talk radio boom of the early 1990s and continuing to this day.

Bay argues that this confluence, along with popular sociotechnical imaginaries related to data and AI, has led to a culture of epistemic overconfidence that American society must now reverse to save its democracy.

It is a moral imperative, he argues, that epistemic arrogance is replaced with epistemic humility toward the reality perceptions of others, which recent developments in neuroscience also call for. It begins with a new form of media ethics focused on the conduct of both users and leaders and rooted epistemically in a pluralist approach to reality – a plureality.

Morten Bay teaches courses on media, technology, and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He holds a PhD from UCLA and has covered the media and technology industries as a journalist for two decades. Previously, he worked as a digital media consultant for Fortune 50 companies as well as small startups and has advised US and EU lawmakers on media and tech regulatory policy. Mediating Plureality is his fourth book on how media technologies influence human life and the first written solely for an academic audience.