Recently a friend was telling me about a particularly successful Wikipedia hoax he had been reading about, and this coupled with class discussions regarding fun with Myspace identity trickery got me thinking about online misinformation generally.
The Wikipedia post in question provided information about a certain Henryk Batuta, a Polish communist who participated in the Russian Civil War and was commemorated with a street name in Warsaw. The entry lasted 15 months before the hoax was exposed, and as Eric Arthur Blair points out in his blog:
“In his short but meritorious 15 month career, Batuta was cross referenced by editors of 17 other articles.
Now this hero of the people is now being slandered by the so called “Army of Batuta,” a group of Poles (wouldn’t you know it) who claim to have invented him to promote the reactionary notion that mere repetition of something does not guarantee the reality of it. They want you to believe, comrades, that Batuta never existed, and that the people cannot make their own world.”
Despite the best efforts of the army of Batuta, it appears that people can, and are, making their own world. Tom Parfitt from the Guardian reported on the Batuta hoax, and also claimed that Batuta was reported to have been a friend of Ernest Hemingway’s. I can’t find any reference to substantiate Parfitt’s claim in the original Wikipedia entry (perhaps he made it up?) but nevertheless, a Google search for ‘Henryk Batuta’ returns both Parfitt’s and Blair’s pages within the first ten results, supporting the Hemingway association.
The mediatised nature of our society creates a situation where the population is extremely vulnerable to misinformation. Most people gain their knowledge through the consumption of reprocessed information, reported from the source through a chain of interpreters. It is the ultimate breeding ground for conspiracy theorists: we often have very little way of knowing whether ‘the news’ is fiction or fact. How does your average New Zealander know, for example, that Zimbabwe really exists? Most of us haven’t been there; we simply have to trust that our information providers have no reason to go to the trouble of lying.
I found a hilarious chronicle of April Fool’s style dupes online at the Museum of Hoaxes, some, like the Flemish Secession Hoax, perpetuated by news institutions you would have expected to put far more stock in maintaining the integrity of their reputation.
The relative anonymity afforded to users of the internet when compared with other media, and its massive potential audience, allows unprecedented abuse of people’s faith in the accuracy of media reportage. Another prank immortalised in the Museum of Hoaxes was one perpetuated by compulsive attention seeker Dan Baca of California, who became a minor celebrity after his photo was posted online with the tag ‘gorgeous guy’ by someone who had seen him at a bus stop and wanted to meet him:
“This initial posting initiated a flood of follow-up messages. The Gorgeous Guy at the bus stop became the talk of San Francisco’s online community. People theorized about who he was, whether he was single, straight, gay, etc. Then people began going to the bus stop to see him in person.”
After the national media had picked up on this ‘phenomenon’, reporter David Cassel discovered that Baca himself had posted most of the online commentary under various pseudonyms.
In her essay ‘Photographic Evangels’ Susan Sontag discusses the problems faced by photographers in the first half of the twentieth century in attempting to have their work treated with the same seriousness as the older ‘fine art’ disciplines. Sontag refers to the “distrust of mere likeness which has inspired painting for more than a century” (120) and argues that, like modernist painting, art photography derives its importance as an artistic medium from its refusal to be satisfied with mere mimesis. Although photography by its nature has a more direct relationship to perceived reality than painting, Sontag presents Henry Peach Robinson’s claim that “photography is an art because it can lie” (127-8).
Like the Batuta hoax which sought to draw attention to a problematic social truth (the glorification of Soviet officials of questionable moral standing in contemporary Poland) through the medium of fiction, artists often creatively reinterpret facts in order to communicate other sorts of truth. The institutions of knowledge set up to discriminate between ‘creative’ truth and empirical truth (museums, art galleries, universities etc) are having a hard time adapting to the more fluid play between fact and fiction on the internet. Even Wikipedia, that bastion of the new era of democracy in knowledge, is perhaps struggling to reconcile its utopian aims with the requirements of the online community.
“As more and more Wikipedia articles are brought under "semi"-protection, Wikipedia is abandoning its early utopianism. It's becoming less the encyclopedia that everyone edits, and more the encyclopedia that a narrow team of volunteers protects from wiseguys ... Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.”
Sontag, Susan, 'Photographic Evangels', in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 115-152.
Photograph: The perpetrators of the Batuta hoax uploaded this doctored photograph to Wikipedia of the street name "ulica Henryka Batuty" (Henryk Batuta Street) to add credibility to their claims.
