Steve Fuller’s ‘Media and the Power of Knowledge’ arrives at a time of intense public anxiety about misinformation, political polarization, and the authority of experts in democratic societies. The book is ambitious in scope, extending from ancient Greek debates about rhetoric to the algorithmic infrastructures of digital capitalism. Yet its unifying thread is the conviction that media have always been more than neutral instruments of communication. They are epistemic environments that encode and enforce assumptions about truth, authority, and democracy. Fuller’s central insight—that asymmetry rather than symmetry has historically defined communication—places him in sharp contrast with both Habermasian ideals of dialogue and contemporary visions of “information democracy” built on social media.
This piece takes readers through Fuller’s work by looking at it from three different angles. First, it reconstructs the conceptual architecture of the book, emphasizing its genealogical method and its engagement with figures like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Lippmann, and Max Weber. Second, it examines Fuller’s treatment of the “post-truth condition” and his provocative claim that it may represent democracy fully realized rather than democracy in crisis. Ultimately, it considers the implications of his arguments for contemporary debates about digital media, knowledge authority, and democratic resilience.
Fuller begins with McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message.” Still, he reframes it by insisting that the message has always been tied to asymmetrical relations of power between sender and receiver. From Plato’s metaphysics to Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical model of communication, media have rarely embodied the egalitarian dialogue that Habermas and discourse theorists imagine. Instead, they have reinforced hierarchical flows of information, from prophets to disciples, from priests to laity, and from experts to the public.
Fuller extends McLuhan’s hot/cool distinction through Weber’s categories of “prophetic” and “priestly” authority. Prophetic media energize audiences with open-ended, incomplete messages that demand interpretation and action. Priestly media, by contrast, cool communication through closure, tradition, and institutional authority. This framework enables Fuller to interpret digital media as battlegrounds between prophetic voices—hackers, programmers, disruptive influencers—and priestly authorities—platform managers, experts, and governments. The genealogy offered in the book demonstrates that today’s digital divides are not novel but extensions of longstanding struggles over epistemic control.
The sweep of Fuller’s history is striking. He links Platonic anxieties about writing to Catholic efforts at propaganda, Jesuit innovations in communication, Enlightenment projects of print dissemination, and finally the compression of digital tweets. This long view highlights the continuity of struggles over who has the right to communicate, under what conditions, and with what authority. For Fuller, asymmetry is not an aberration but the historical norm.
The second chapter situates Walter Lippmann at the heart of twentieth-century media politics. Lippmann, a journalist and public intellectual, articulated a vision of democracy where “public opinion” required careful management through elite expertise. His debates with John Dewey, who saw mass media as potential amplifiers of citizen voice, crystallize a dilemma that continues to haunt democracies: should media empower citizens directly, or should they discipline publics through curated information?
Fuller portrays Lippmann as the architect of a technocratic turn in progressivism, where democracy evolved into what he terms “cognitive authoritarianism.” Citizens were encouraged to self-limit their expression, to defer to experts, and to accept mediated knowledge rather than insist on first-hand understanding. This model resonates uncomfortably with today’s algorithmically managed publics, where platforms decide which voices are amplified and which are muted, and where expertise is both invoked and distrusted. Fuller’s reconstruction of Lippmann challenges us to see current struggles over misinformation not as unprecedented disruptions but as replays of older tensions between popular sovereignty and technocratic control.
The third chapter shifts from institutional history to the role of intellectuals in a fragmented media environment. Fuller argues that in the “post-truth” era, intellectuals must be understood as performers rather than detached truth-tellers. Their authority lies less in the possession of truth than in the demonstration of integrity through action—“walking the talk” rather than simply “talking the talk.”
Fuller’s provocation lies in reframing post-truth not as a pathology but as the logical extension of democracy. When individuals are sovereign over their beliefs and choices, competing standards of validation proliferate. The task of the intellectual, then, is not to restore a lost consensus but to dramatize suppressed alternatives and remind the public of modal possibilities. In this sense, intellectuals serve as actors who embody roads not taken, thereby expanding the horizon of democratic choice.
This view unsettles familiar dichotomies. Rather than lamenting the decline of truth, Fuller suggests that post-truth may represent democracy’s fulfillment—when the demos itself determines the rules of epistemic legitimacy. The cost is instability and pluralism; the gain is empowerment. Critics may worry that this collapses into relativism, yet Fuller insists that intellectual performance provides a counterweight by enacting integrity and exposing coercive limits on thought.
Religion occupies a central but compact role in Fuller’s narrative. He frames Socrates and Jesus as “public relations problems,” whose reputations were shaped as much by media strategies as by philosophical or theological substance. More provocatively, he argues that the Church may thrive in a post-truth environment, since its secular rivals—journalism, science, and the state—are themselves demystified. Religion, in other words, regains communicative parity in an age when all authorities are contested.
The book concludes with an analysis of Twitter as a revival of aphorism. For Fuller, the tweet embodies media’s “eternal recurrence,” where periods of communicative expansion collapse back into compressed forms. Aphorisms, from Augustine to Bacon, have always condensed insight into portable fragments. In Fuller’s reading, social media’s brevity is not the death of knowledge but its reconfiguration into new forms of provocation and engagement.
Several strengths stand out in Fuller’s argument. First, his genealogical method reveals continuity where many see rupture. The post-truth condition is not an unprecedented crisis, but rather part of a long-standing struggle over media asymmetry. By embedding digital debates within ancient and early modern histories, Fuller deflates claims of novelty while enriching our understanding of continuity.
Second, his use of the prophetic/priestly distinction illuminates the dynamics of media authority. This binary avoids simplistic optimism or pessimism about new technologies. Instead, it frames media as contested sites where open-ended communication and institutional closure vie for dominance. In this respect, Fuller offers a conceptual vocabulary that is portable across various domains, from science communication to political propaganda.
Third, Fuller’s revaluation of post-truth is intellectually daring. At a time when most commentary laments misinformation and epistemic fragmentation, Fuller suggests that democracy may necessarily involve pluralism, contestation, and performance. This reframing challenges technocratic impulses to restore consensus through fact-checking or algorithmic correction.
Yet the book is not without problems. Fuller’s prose is dense, and his leaps across centuries—from Plotinus to Shannon, from Augustine to Zuckerberg—sometimes risk obscurity. Readers may struggle to track the normative stakes of his genealogical juxtapositions. The style itself mirrors his claim that the present is always an unstable resolution of past and future, but it can frustrate those seeking linear argumentation.
More substantively, Fuller’s embrace of post-truth democracy may strike some as reckless. If every claim to knowledge is equally sovereign, what safeguards remain against manipulation, propaganda, or outright falsehoods that undermine collective action? Fuller hints that integrity and intellectual performance can serve as anchors, but the mechanisms remain underdeveloped. His account risks romanticizing pluralism without sufficiently grappling with the corrosive effects of disinformation campaigns or the concentration of power in digital platforms.
A further limitation lies in the treatment of material infrastructures. While Fuller richly explores metaphors and conceptual frameworks, he gives less sustained attention to the political economy of media—ownership structures, profit motives, and surveillance systems—that concretely shape communicative asymmetries. His genealogical approach risks underplaying the material and institutional dimensions of media power.
Despite these limitations, Fuller’s work offers essential resources for analyzing contemporary crises of knowledge and democracy. By reframing post-truth as a democratic condition rather than a pathology, he encourages us to think critically about what kind of democracy we want. Should we aspire to a world where experts and platforms curate truth on behalf of citizens, or should we accept the risks of pluralism and empower the public to navigate contested epistemic terrains?
His invocation of the prophetic/priestly binary also provides a lens for evaluating digital platforms. Social media companies increasingly act as priestly authorities, setting terms of discourse through moderation and algorithmic filtering. Yet prophetic voices—hackers, activists, and viral influencers—continue to destabilize their jurisdiction. Recognizing this dynamic helps move beyond binary judgments of social media as either liberatory or dangerous.
Finally, Fuller’s attention to aphorism highlights the changing forms of knowledge in compressed communication environments. Rather than dismissing tweets as trivial, he invites us to see them as heirs to longstanding traditions of condensed wisdom. This perspective reframes digital brevity not as an obstacle to knowledge but as a challenge to cultivate forms of expression suited to new media environments.
‘Media and the Power of Knowledge’ is not an easy book, but it is a rewarding one. Fuller’s sweeping genealogy, his provocative reframing of post-truth, and his insistence on the performative role of intellectuals all contribute to a bold rethinking of media theory. While the book leaves many questions unresolved, this is by design: Fuller aims to provoke, not to settle.
The analytical lesson of the book is clear: media are not neutral tools. They are battlegrounds where authority, truth, and democracy are constantly negotiated. To understand our present crises, we must situate them within centuries of struggle over who gets to speak, who gets to listen, and who decides what counts as knowledge. Fuller’s book does precisely that, reminding us that the challenges of post-truth and digital media are less unprecedented disruptions than recurring struggles in new form.
In an era of rising populism, fragmented information ecosystems, and contested expertise, Fuller’s insights demand attention. Whether one agrees with his embrace of post-truth democracy or not, his book forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions about authority and knowledge. Ultimately, ‘Media and the Power of Knowledge’ serves as both a diagnosis and a provocation: a reminder that the future of democracy depends not only on who controls media but also on how societies negotiate the unstable interplay between prophets and priests, performance and truth, brevity and depth.
*Author: Dr Matiur Rahman is a Research Consultant at the Human Development Research Centre (HDRC). He can be reached at [email protected]. Views expressed in this article are the author's own.*
