Does seeing entail believing? Visualising information during societal crises

Despite the shared belief that information visualisations are immune to manipulation, as visual stimuli, they “are no different from words in this regard, for any means of communication can be used to deceive” (Tufte, 1983). This paper discusses the power of information visualisation in engendering “a narrative experience” (Segel et Al., 2010) that cannot be considered politically neutral (Boehnert, 2016). In this sense, it can be compared to the concept of “tropes” (Haraway, 1988) which are narrative tools transmitting political and social agendas. The paper explores the existing literature addressing the circulation of information disorders (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2019) on social media platforms when supported by information visualisations. The starting point is that the complexity of the topic, its interdisciplinarity, and the dense availability of reflections call for a crisis, a “fracture line” (Foucault, 1969), that can lead to the unveiling of omitted dimensions. The exploration enabled the identification of a space for reconsidering critical approaches to information visualisation circulating on social media by defining literacy resources that combine terminologies, views, methodologies and approaches from diverse disciplines and fields.