#5: #fakenews is logical outgrowth of web’s infrastructure
Fake things abound on the internet—as do true ones, to be sure—because its current infrastructure is based upon amoral principles that do not measure, value, or correct for candor or integrity. Rather, popularity, volume, consumption, sales, and entertainment rule the day and the form. As I argued in my 2011 on-line video-book Learning from YouTube, while there’s nothing wrong with any of these qualities per se, they are not the best forums to sustain and promote education, and they may be even less well equipped to support news, elections, democracies, or civil societies.
Read More:
- After Politics/After Television: Veep, Digimodernism, and the Running Gag of Government, by Joe Conway.
“Joe Conway makes reference to Alan Kirby and his dystopian concept of “digimodernism”, where the “apparently real” is the dominant aesthetic, “one where the knowing pastiches and parodies of postmodernism cease to register because they require a broad foundation of past cultural knowledge that has been leveled into non-meaning.” Some of his descriptions of digimodernism are helpful to think about fake news and how fake have lost its subversive potential.” Recommended by Emilia Yang, Ph.D. Student in Media Arts and Practice. - Learning from YouTube, Alexandra Juhasz, MIT Press, 2011.
- Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This is All About Income,” By Andrew Higgins, Mike McIntire and Gabriel JX Dancenov, Nov. 25, 2016.