How false information creates ‘true events’. Persistent and recombined forms of activist communication through internet fakes and hoaxes
Klaus Schönberger
How false information creates ‘true events’. Persistent and recombined forms of activist communication through internet fakes and hoaxes
Abstract
Activists use fakes and hoaxes to communicate information by speaking in the name of someone else – persons or institutions invested with power. With the spreading of internet communication, this pattern of action and communicating has acquired additional power as a means of political and social protest. Within the framework of Guerrilla Communication, with its specific understanding of politics, faking develops into an efficient form of political articulation. The recent DowEthics fake illustrates how the enabling potential of the internet can be realised in this context. Speaking in the name of the chemical corporation Dow, a would-be spokesperson publicly announced that Union Carbide had finally decided to pay compensation to the victims of the 1984 Bhopal Disaster. This fake forced the corporation to make a statement about something they had deliberately avoided mentioning. The paper discusses the ways in which the internet is enhancing this specific pattern of action and communicating. The channel reduction of technically-processed communication increases the possibilities for fakers to speak in the name of political adversaries or corporations: this form of activist practice is actually helped by the poverty of context within computer-mediated communication. Activists like “The Yes Men” have developed a form of cybertheatre which successfully uses the technological circumstances of “virtual life” as a starting point for “real life” actions. Internet fakes can be used to illustrate more general patterns in the use and appropriation of new technologies. Such patterns can be analyzed in terms of persistence and recombination of social and cultural practises in a novel technological environment.
Klaus Schönberger: Scientific Coordinator - Forschungskolleg Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung, Institut für Volkskunde der Universität Hamburg