Hoaxed

A couple of viral stories, or memes, circulating through the information ecosystem over the past month got me thinking about hoaxes and viral media. They're both stories about interactions between strangers. They have the elements of any good story: conflict, a moral element, a character with whom you can identify. They both incorporate pictures of written documents which have the effect of serving as proof of the events (they make the stories slightly more believable than if there were no pictures at all). One took place on an airplane. The other took place in a restaurant. They both turned out to be hoaxes. Many people, including major news outlets, believed them at first.

My initial thoughts on hoaxes and new media revolved around the premise that hoaxes happen when any information dissemination technology is new. They expose the fact that we have placed too much trust in the new source of information. Think of War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast (radio), the quiz show scandals of the 50's (TV), Lonelygirl15 (online video), Manti T'eo (online dating). Whether intended or not, hoaxes help audiences or users develop a proper skepticism toward information from the new technology.

But this latest rash of hoaxes seem like something else. This just seems to be par for the course in the era of decentralized, virally spreading information. It's easy to create and spread a hoax online and an audience can only be so skeptical. This kind of hoaxing and unmasking happens a lot on Reddit. People pretend to have cancer, or make up a story around a photo, e.g., "my 5-year-old daughter made this" in order to garner greater attention or sympathy. As good as digital media is at spreading lies, it seems equally equipped to unmask them. Crowd-sourced Sherlocks put pieces of evidence together to determine the truth of any of these stories.

The situation raises a couple of questions:

Can an online information consumer really spend the energy being that skeptical about all the information he/she encounters online, all of the stories like this one? The signal-to-noise ratio isn't quite so low that people will stop believing certain sources, but that could happen. But with a site like Gawker, I'm not convinced the average reader, after having read a fake story on the site, would be any less likely to believe or go to the site for information. But perhaps that is because Gawker readers seek a certain kind of information, which leads me to my next question.

Does it really matter if stories like these turn out to be untrue? Does that erase all of the meaning? It matters if a story about an attack on the White House turns out to be fake. But these morality play stories go viral in part because they spark a conversation about morals and behavior. The conversation and the thoughts shared about the topic still seem valid to me. Perhaps there is news and there is gossip. Both serve a function, and with the latter, we're more tolerant of the occasional falsehood.

----------

After listening to an excellent podcast in which Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, and Chris Connelly discussed what we know about the Kennedy assassination 50 years after it occurred, I had another question related to truth and lies in the digital age: are we, in general, developing a more complete understanding of the world around us, or are we somehow moving further away from that? We have better tools for recording, seeing, hearing, and analyzing. We should be better at answering questions about what happened. But those tools developed at the same time as the hoax-spreading machine known as the internet.

There is some theoretically knowable answer to the question of who killed Kennedy and why. But information and knowledge do not move in tandem. William Gibson once said that the future is here, but that it was just unevenly distributed. Maybe knowledge of the world around us is like this. Those with a certain orientation to the technology are moving closer to this knowledge while others move further away.

Post script: There was an interesting article on the Reuters blog about this topic. It features quotes from Jonah Perretti (BuzzFeed) and Nick Denton (Gawker) and is definitely worth reading. Here's a terrific quote from it: "the reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true." The article acknowledges the two types of information circulating - news and info that let's people feeling "fleeting instances of comfort or joy" that are more difficult to verify. But even if you're dealing in the latter, if you repeatedly pass on stories that draw some of their appeal from being real (and let's face it: these little gossipy stories make for sub-par fiction) that turn out to be untrue, you become like the friend who's always telling tall tales and loses all credibility. Not as bad as the news organization that loses credibility, but still, I think people will seek out reliably true "gossip"-type news, shunning sources that get repeatedly duped.