Two things on how various intersecting discourses are coming at “fake news’… I find it interesting to see and hear how different folks are attempting to make sense of an apparent phenomenon, it’s a little like watching Foucault’s ‘discursive formation’ in action…
First, via Adrian J Ivakhiv:
Parsing the “alternative media ecosystem”
An interesting forthcoming article by University of Washington researcher Kate Starbird examines the “alternative media ecosystem” by focusing on the production of the kinds of narratives that are fairly exclusive to the “alternative,” as opposed to mainstream, “media ecosystem.” Specifically, the piece analyzes conspiratorial narratives, found on Twitter and connected web sites, that follow terrorist incidents (including the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings and the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17) and several mass shooting events.
“For each event,” Starbird writes, “rumors claimed the event had been perpetrated by someone other than the official suspects–that it was instead either a staged event performed by “crisis actors” or a “false flag” orchestrated by someone else.” (For more, see the Seattle Times and Starbird’s own summaries of the research.)
From Starbird’s scholarly article:
“After several rounds of iterative analysis to identify commonalities and distinctions across clusters of accounts, we identified three prominent political agendas: U.S. Alt Right, U.S. Alt-Left, and International Anti-Globalist.”
Second, via the ‘Team Human’ podcast, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff, Caroline Jack on ‘propaganda’:
What’s Propaganda Got To Do With It?
If “propaganda” is a useful as a media epithet because it expresses concerns about media persuasion and power, then we must allow that a variety of actors, not just states or would-be states, can influence the television networks, newspapers of record, and leading online news sources.
Our understanding of media power (and of what it means to call something propaganda) must make room for a variety of potential collective and individual influences. This includes corporations, interest groups, activist groups, and other traditional collectives; it should also include the new forms of individual and collective presence that digital communications facilitate. This includes state-sponsored online actors and ad-hoc user collectives.
