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The final assignment for the course was to create an analytic treatment of the issues we had been studying in multimedia projects that were designed for the Web. Students learned the necessary skills in a weekly media lab that was designed and taught by other students. These projects were not supposed to be merely a visual display of information, but were required to present arguments using words, images, video, sound and, above all, design. Working collaboratively in groups of three or four, students created impressive explorations of advertising and fashion, artificial intelligence, digital biology and hedge funds, as well as massive multiuser online games.

All of these projects required students to work across a range of disciplines as they never before had done. They also learned how to read difficult philosophical and literary works in ways that illuminate new media, popular culture and pressing contemporary problems without compromising academic rigor. The most impressive example of this was the project on hedge funds. One of the books we read in class was Counterfeit Money by the notoriously difficult French philosopher Jacques Derrida. This work is a prolonged meditation on a one-page story with the same title by Charles Baudelaire. The students used Derrida’s book and Baudelaire’s story as the framework to create an interactive securities exchange that simulated online trading. They also drew on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug” to show how questions of representation in literature can help us to understand the new financial instruments that now fuel the global economy. I assembled all of these projects on the interactive website we created for the course. Remaining true to the theme of the course, the interface for the site was a knockoff of the National Enquirer’s home page.

Of course, not all subjects lend themselves to this approach. I could not, for example, teach my seminar on Hegel, Schelling and Kierkegaard this way. Courses that use the latest media and communications technologies should supplement and not replace traditional courses. As I have stressed, it remains absolutely essential for students to learn how to read and write in traditional ways. Indeed, I am so committed to teaching young people to write clearly and effectively that I decided this would be the inheritance I would leave my children. From the summer after they finished sixth grade through the summer before they left for college, I made them write a three-page essay every week. It could be on any subject they chose, and the only requirement was that the essay had to be discursive, that is to say, they had to formulate a thesis, develop an argument, defend it and draw a conclusion. I encouraged but did not require them to write about current events or what they were reading at the time. When the essay was finished, I corrected it and went over it with them, and they rewrote it. This effort paid dividends.

But to succeed in life, young people also need to learn different ways to express themselves in other media as well. A course like Real Fakes provided the opportunity to help students think critically about the multiple media surrounding them, while at the same time learning how to use them in creative and productive ways. These Web-based projects were particularly well suited for this course. The ability to integrate written text with images, video and sound enabled students to explore the broad range of issues we examined in class in a variety of ways. Furthermore, they were able to translate their message into new media. By developing innovative designs and engaging interactive features in their projects, the students created uncertainty for the viewer or user about where to draw the line between the real and the fake in today’s media-saturated network culture.

Judging by the feedback from students after the course and in the intervening years, Real Fakes was one of the most successful courses I have ever taught. The course broke down