89 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. Savin-Baden (ed.), Postdigital Humans, Postdigital Science and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65592-1_6
Postdigital Truths: Educational Refections
on Fake News and Digital Identities
Kathrin Otrel-Cass and Michael Fasching
1 Introduction
Mona, an 18-year-old secondary school student from Denmark, is talking to us
about how she evaluates the information she collects from the Internet, and espe-
cially how she assesses her own competences in dealing with fake news. She says
that she has experienced a lot of fake news when surfng the Internet. At school they
learned about how to identify fake news, but it was ‘out of touch because as a
younger generation we know that fake news exists and we know to be critical of the
things we read’. This short example should depict the problem we would like to
address in this chapter, namely: what kind of digital competences young people
should acquire at school, in particular when they are or will be faced with fake news.
Fake news is not a new phenomenon, but it has become increasingly diffcult to
distinguish between correct, erroneous, and deliberately falsifed information
(Auberry 2018), and the debates about the magnitude of this problem amongst
media industry, politics, and academia have increased (Lazer et al. 2018). Around
two-thirds of students, rate news reports in social media as credible, and an increas-
ing amount of fake news is interpreted as fact (Himmelrath and Egbers 2018). It
seems therefore necessary to better understand young people’s postdigital practices.
For this reason, we asked students to show us their online performances (Goffman
1959). This approach should help us gain a better understanding of young people’s
online practices and sharpen our suggestion of what kind of competences are needed
to obtain critical digital literacies (Davies 2018).
K. Otrel-Cass (*) · M. Fasching
University of Graz, Graz, Austria
e-mail: kathrin.otrel-cass@uni-graz.at; michael.fasching@uni-graz.at