The Fake News Epidemic

I've often been at odds with how new media makes its billions.  People self-identify with new media like nothing else because it is such an intimate part of their lives.  The hardware is always at hand and the software makes personal demands on our information and our time that would have felt foreign and invasive twenty years ago, but like a frog being slowly brought to a boil, we haven't noticed how it's killing us.

We suddenly feel time compressed like never before because we have become a commodity in an always on attention culture.  The tech giants feeding from this frenzy that they have created present themselves as saviours of the people, democratizing media and making the world a better place:

If you ever want a brilliant parody of the bizarre nature

of our digital revolution, you really need to watch Silicon Valley

Yet there is a change in how we are relating to the strange new mediascape we find ourselves in.  Facts are no longer facts and the tech companies enabling this, up until recently, were willfully unaware of how damaging that can be, though more than happy to make advertising revenue from it.

The hand wringing helplessness felt over this epidemic of fake news always struck me as odd, like an alcoholic wondering why everything is going to shit when the answer if obvious (it's the alcohol).  Yet the vendors of our hangover kept it paying off until the damage was done.  

This was brought into sharp focus for me after reading this article by WIRED.  It tells the story of disenfranchised teens in a former Soviet Bloc state who found a way to make silly money by aggregating fake news.  Google, Facebook and others were only too happy to make a mint from this process in advertising revenue.

By leveraging the information collection platforms (aka 'social' media) they have created to produce targeted ads, these new media advertisers found an avenue for stale marketing budgets.  Companies flooded in to Google, Facebook and the rest, desperate to tap a younger demographic unreachable through traditional media.  But social media companies offered something more than just the vaunted Millennial crowd, they also offered targeted advertising.

You don't get Gmail, or Facebook Messenger or any of these other complex, expensive services for free.  You get them because they are constantly mining your data and using that information to target ads.  Social media companies ARE advertising companies.  How powerful is this technology?  Last year Facebook made six billion dollars more than the largest advertising agency in the world.  Google made tens of billions more.

Tech companies present themselves with noble ideas like organizing the world's information or giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, but they aren't non-profits, quite the opposite actually.  While they might engineer their technology to organize and share, the way they pay for their private jets is to monetize those noble ideas while avoiding paying taxes as aggressively as they are legally able.  

Google, Facebook and social media itself is now the largest advertising system on the planet.

Take the time and read that article.
It wasn't until things were on fire that any technology company took steps to stop the inferno that they'd designed.

That some shifty Macedonian teens made a bit on the side is really an afterthought.  What should strike you as most illuminating is that the multi-nationals driving social media were more than happy to make millions from obviously false and plagiarized information that was dressed up as news.  If you think this didn't have any effect, look to the damage done to one of the oldest democracies on the planet.

Google stopped cashing in on fake news when people complained,
not before, and the people who lost money on it were the website
owners, not Google, they kept every penny.

By aggregating bonkers right wing fiction into easily consumable content (usually by stealing it outright and dressing it up as news), those kids made years of salary in a month, but what are pennies on the dollar compared to the profit social media advertisers pocketed?  Google and others were not only making a fortune off the fake news epidemic, they themselves were the cause of it, using their customer data collection systems to feed lies back to the people who most wanted to read them.

It wasn't until the flaming mess of the US election that anyone stopped to consider what the ramifications of this approach were.  These tech companies love to claim the moral high ground, but their highest ideals take a back seat to greed.  Perhaps Google needs to try a bit harder with it's motto of 'don't be evil'.

Try harder.

I've struggled with how these companies have insinuated themselves into education, branding teachers and even information itself with their logo.  Looking over nearly seven years of Dusty World I can see myself slipping from a technology evangelist into an increasingly uncomfortable relationship with these companies.  As they've become richer and more influential, their ability to make decisions based on the public's best interests seems to have steadily deteriorated.  Nowhere is this more apparent than this latest social hack: design a system that feeds lies to the people who most want to believe them, and then make a profit from it.  They're making it mighty difficult to like them, let alone admire them.  

Meanwhile Britain Brexits and the US government can best be described as a maelstrom.  At least some poor kids in Macedonia made a bit of money in a world were it's usually the super rich who make something from nothing.  Maybe social media systems are blameless in all of this. After all, they only give us what we want.  If we're too stupid to educate ourselves, perhaps it's what we deserve.  Is it still propaganda if we're doing it to ourselves?

NOTES

NPR tracks down a fake news maker in LA.  
"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."

"...Coler insists this is not about money. It's about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was "correct."

Google and Facebook take steps to stop fake news after starting the phenomenon and making millions from it

A Slippery Slope

Fortunately, the ark didn't have to worry about any of
those pesky fictional icebergs...

Over the past couple of days the concept of professionalism seems to keep popping up, usually after it's been lit on fire.  It began when someone posted a quote on Facebook based on a Twitter storm.  It was described as 'interesting' on Facebook and lots of people on there were very happy to prop it up.  I would have called it asinine.  My first instinct was to write back, 'it's important to remember that amateurs built the starship Enterprise but professionals built the space shuttle.'  But I didn't.

Beyond the amateurs-are-really-good-at-building-things-that-don't-exist thinking, I was more put off by the implicit attack on professionalism.  Ironically, it's the lack of professionalism in our news that's accelerating this anti-professional bias.  When you share media created to force an opinion rather than declare facts, you're pouring gas on the ignorance fire.  From patients spending half an hour on Google and then telling their doctors what their self-diagnosis is and demanding they medicate them for it (self assured arrogance is a wonderful byproduct of everyone's-an-expert), to shady business men taking over super powers (dido), the idea that we don't need professionals any more because we all have access to information and therefore know everything is rampant.

The problem with our information deluge is that it isn't vetted.  With no oversight or fact checking, alternative facts become facts when they are repeated often enough.  Opinions become truths when you find enough people to agree with them.  Part of this comes down to the shear volume of information around us.  We're living in a tsunami of data and we're very bad at curating it.

That quote is from 2010.  The revolution happened, but it hasn't been the touchy-feely future of knowledge that we thought it would be.  Maybe AI can sort it out because we've made a mess of it.

This flood of social media produced data has us awash in information, much of it crap.  With a waning (professional) fourth estate and everyone on the planet rapidly getting to the point where they can broadcast their opinions no matter how factually bereft, we are living in dangerous times.  There was some hope, early on, that crowd sourcing would help manage this onslaught, but it turns out a large proportion of the crowd doing the sourcing are idiots.

Our willingness to absorb lies is amplified by the idea that we customize our social media feeds based on our own beliefs.  Doing so turns our 'news' intake into an echo chamber of ideas that only support our world view; a sort of self-fulfilling propaganda.  This quickly takes on Orwellian proportions as people who once kept their racist thoughts to themselves suddenly find themselves at the virtual equivalent of a Clan meeting.  Those embarrassing prejudices are validated and suddenly become worthy of broadcasting.  This process is a powerful one, and its tail is wagging the political dog in 2017.

Alternative is right - this 'headline' photo is taken from a
2007 HBO film.  Welcome to 2017. 

It isn't just the alt-right who are happy to take this neo-propaganda and make use of it.  With no oversight everyone with a strong opinion is happy to do things like take pictures from a film and publish them as if they are news - just to convince people that what they think is right.

Way back in the naughties ('06 I think) one of my media studies students brought in a video that prompted tears and a lot of conversation.  The inevitability of what they proposed in that video caused a lot of anxiety in our class, me included.  At the time social media barely existed so this seemed like a real stretch, but in the dystopian future they describe in the film the traditional news media has fallen apart, eaten by the internet.  What's left is a shallow, sensationalist mediascape that caters to the quality of thought most people aspire to.  In the past year I've begun to think that this quality of thought isn't anywhere near where I thought it was.

The description at the end might be starting to feel all too familiar:
"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper and broader and more nuanced than anything available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational, but EPIC is what we wanted..."  It's what we have today.

We're too busy, distracted and incompetent to vet and even critically analyze the media that engulfs us, and we're too cheap to hire people to do it for us.  It turns out we weren't just paying for information from the fourth estate, we were also paying for critical analysis.  But if we can get sensationalism for free why pay for hard truths?

A philosophical underpinning to all of this is the idea that anyone can do or say anything they want simply by wanting to do it.  Effort to develop mastery, and the professionalism implicit in it, is frowned upon.  We're told by wealthy people that doctors, politicians, teachers and other professionals are shysters who are trying to take advantage of us, and we buy it!  Much of this media push is an attempt to crush unions and the middle class they represent.  We idolize the mega-rich who are so simply because of the situation of their birth rather than because of any professionally developed skill.  The lies we tell ourselves every day are part of a vicious cycle made possible by politically poisoned media delivered through a sabotaged information revolution that makes everything except learning the truth easier.

Radical Transparency

Mr Universe Knows!

I just read an email from our union lamenting the lack of control when it comes to presenting our contract information to us.  In the 36 hours OSSTF took to put together a two page comparison of our deal with the one the Catholic teachers had land on them, details leaked to the press and were already flowing around social media before that.

When we finally got 'official' information it was formatted entirely in comparison to the OECTA deal - we don't get to see actual details, we get a selection of facts designed to look better than the pile of manure OECTA provincial executive signed off on for their members (none of whom have ratified it) last summer.  I'm having trouble seeing the democracy through the political machinations.

Watching the government, the forth estate and our union trying to manipulate the flood of information in an increasingly flat mediascape is rather tragic to watch.  These lumbering dinosaurs try to breach holes or spin facts, only be swamped by crowd-sourced social media.  They want to harness the crowd for their own ends only to find their carefully laid plans designed to manipulate results thrown into the weeds.

We might have evolved into Web2.0, but it is also causing a more democratic means of understanding the world and ushering in a Democracy2.0 wherein people have access to more information sources and are no longer held captive by traditional organizations and the big media that served them.  The Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous and many other social movements are happening because governments and corporations don't own the signal any more.  Anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world, find information and create community with like minded people.

How is a political organization to survive in a time where they can't control their own message?  Perhaps by putting out a message that doesn't need controlling in order to be accepted.  This would mean un-spinning and de-lawyerizing your organization and simply being direct and consistent with what you stand for.  Being accessible and open about communicating wouldn't hurt either - if you're working behind closed doors, you're not getting the point..

Your political party shouldn't be trying to win elections, it should have a clear vision of what it stands for and then never waiver from that goal in word and deed.  If you're consistent, radical transparency and the flattening mediascape doesn't frighten you, it empowers you.  If you're a shifty, manipulative organization that is used to getting its own way by having direct access to big media, your days are numbered.

Radical transparency means you don't have to stand up and read a script, you don't have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy, and you never have to come back to an interview and say, wow, we really screwed that up.  You don't have spin doctors telling you what to think about issues, you know your beliefs and you act on them.

As insane as I think Tim Hudak's tea party Conservatives are, at least they are consistent in their insanity.  The NDP are also consistent in their left winged-ness.  The Liberal party (whom I used to vote for and was considering membership in after I became a Canadian citizen) are something unique to Canada, but in trying to be centrist they have ended up being worse than the right wing bullies; a manipulative party that only stands for being in power, consistency be damned.

I'm having trouble being unionist at a time when my union seems to be playing the same kind of Liberal game, of speaking out of both sides of their faces.  One moment the offered contract is a disaster and we're ordered to go on work action; the union is overjoyed at the crowd sourced support they are seeing online and myself and others are more than happy to vocally convey the unfairness of the situation.  In the next we are suddenly accepting a similar contract.  Communication has stopped and online voices have turned from supportive to hurt and confused.

I'm a creature of this flattened mediascape.  I cannot understand or condone the backroom politics or spin.  I don't want to be manipulated, I don't want to be treated like an idiot who can't know details, I want the facts, and if I'm not given them, they are easily enough found online.

Media Arts Lab 2.0

Redesigning media arts to create, not consume

http://prezi.com/9ow8h2urx1va/dream-media-arts-lab/

The Macs in our media arts lab are getting old and plastic.  They can't push the high-def video coming out of our latest cameras, so it's time for a hardware upgrade, but it's not just about the hardware.

One of the biggest problems we face in our static, desktop centred lab with ordered rows of imacs are the bad habits students fall back into.  Because our lab is like every other lab in the school (factory like rows of desktops in Pink Floyd The Wallesque rows of conformity),  students do what they usually do in a computer lab; they zone out and become passive media consumers.  Passive TV viewing has evolved into passive computer use.

In a media arts class where they are supposed to be in a creative, active mind-space, this is an ongoing class management headache.  Battling the Facebook zombies and youtube droolers becomes an ongoing headache in the typical computer lab, especially with the weakest students who tend to be the most non-experimental and habitual in their technology use.

I've looked at this from a typical school IT/lab point of view, advocating for a mini-lab concept that emphasizes diversified, mobile technology, but this is the media-arts angle.

Many of the ideas are similar, but the idea of mobile, adaptable media tools also spurred the realization that students in front of an online desktop act much the way that students in front of a television do; they become passive, unquestioning media consumers.  In a media arts lab this is an ongoing crisis.

There is the culture of entertainment that most digital natives subscribe to.  Computers with internet access are toys to be used for entertainment.  Their habitual use of computers at home and throughout their school careers have only enforced these bad habits.  Unfortunately, those habits extend to most educators too.  From PD days where the presenter assumes that if you're on a computer you're not paying attention, to teachers booking labs to have a period off, computers aren't considered anything other than an entertaining distraction by just about everyone.

We then get them into media arts where they are creating large amounts of digital media, and most of them are trapped in their bad habits and social expectations of technology.  The fact that school related computer lab time is often unsupervised only adds to the problem.

Trying to break them out of that rut in a room with rows of desktops isn't working.  Time to free up the tech, and break the passivity.