the age of fakeyness

wtf is going on?

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Media pros are also aware that fakery is introduced into stories in the name of making them more entertaining, engaging and understandable to the audience - and this is demonstrably so, since glitzier, flashier, more hyped presentations tend to be rewarded with bigger audiences, more attention and more money.

Therefore, their profession is one of those areas where the "slippery slope" argument is both operative and justified. If a little more hype gets a little more reward, then everyone is in an "arms race" toward blatant, conscienceless fakery. So, they watch this progression accelerating and are utterly fascinated by it.

Next, the ordinary audience is also aware of this unfortunate trend, however much they are easily hooked by it, so they, too, suspect that they are willing dupes of the media and distrust it. These news stories of plagiarism and fakery fascinate them, because it confirms their suspicions, while never actually stepping outside the mediated space they distrust.

All in all the story of "media courageously tells truth and exposes itself as liar" is too deliciously fraught with spectacle and irony to refuse. Until it gets old and becomes yesterday's news or such old hat one can only yawn over it.

I mean, our overall levels of fakeyness have surely dropped over the course of the last century. Look far enough back in history, and you reach a point where facts -- especially the ones that established personal identity -- just weren't fixed and available. You get fakeness of spectacle (P.T. Barnum), and flim-flam and snake-oil, and hoaxes everywhere, most of them believed, but that's just the beginning of it: think of the personal aspect! One thing that amazes me is that up until not so long ago, a person's identity couldn't be much confirmed beyond how that person acted in the moment. So history is full of people who just moved a few hundred miles over -- just so far as no one would know them -- and successfully claimed to be someone else. A European with the right manners could invent himself a title and join society. An American wanted for murder could move to the next state and establish himself as a family man.

I dunno; I think we're at a low point in fakery. We're very conscious of it now, in a way people didn't used to be; it's a cliche to say that Americans' bullshit detectors have gotten a lot better, but it's true. Right now I think we've just entered a moment where (a) the world is big and complicated enough for one person to think one little lie isn't going to make much of a splash, plus (b) the world is big and complicated enough that it'll find that splash and shine a lot of light on it.

also see ethan trifemagic's thread on O'Reilly's imaginary war against Christmas.

the point about the disruptive "sci-fi" technology all around is a good one, but don't forget how much we've been deceived by all of our leaders, our businesses, the pople who serve us meat at lunch, etc. they're all liars! I think making a big big fuss over discovering that we've been told a little white lie, like Blair or Frey or that woman who put the finger in her chili @ Wendy's, makes people a little more comofrtable, it's better than trying to cope with the totality of all the other lies we're told daily and just have to accept. It feels good to have some outrage we can use, Frey is a perfect example.

part of it is basically a fight over power, i think, who gets to tell the "real" story, who can be trusted. there are a lot of competing agendas, with people trying to discredit one source of information or another, and the easiest way to do that is to uncover fabrication or theft of one kind or another.

but then there's the flipside too, the fascination with the fakery and the fakers. speaking to (i guess) our implicit knowledge that we are ourselves all fakers to one degree or another, the way we construct identities and personas and so forth (which has obviously been aided/abetted/exacerbated by the internet).

xpost: I think we're at a low point in fakery.

that's interesting. i made kind of the same argument to a friend a while ago after one journalism scandal or another. he was suggesting that journalism was increasingly untrustworthy, and i was arguing that actually there's probably less fabrication and plagiarism going on now than ever, exactly because people are so aware of it. (to the extent of near-witchhunts in some cases; at some point, people are going to have to accept that there are only so many straightforward ways to say, "The Fed raised rates a quarter-point again on Wednesday.") i mean, if you go back and read some of the classic golden-age journalism stuff, and also the classic "new journalism" stuff (in cold blood, hello), you see narrative tricks and obvious liberties that would almost certainly set off alarm bells now. but then the question is why? why is it so important to us now, in a way it wasn't 50 years ago? is it just a function of people being more aware of how the media works, or also tied to deeper anxieties about major shifts in the world that are more felt than understood?

we might be at a low point in fakery regarding the quality thereof, or how much people believe stuff, but we're kind of a at the tiptop peak in human history of fakery by volume. That's what gave us the suspicions and the instinctive distrust, but now we're overwhelmed. Can't ANYBODY be straightforward? Do I really have to think about EVERY purchase, EVERYTHING I read? It's a lot easier when you can flip on Keith Olbermann, imagine he has no agenda because he's on MSNBC instead of Fox, and rest the critical analysis gland for a while.

i feel like everything i know about the world is now in question.

Wait, WHAT??

See also,
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So, in effect, you are saying that the news of an epidemic of of media fakery has been shamelessly overhyped?

i was too. (there's even a whole episode of the simpsons about it! if we can't trust matt groening...)

But go back in time far enough, to a point where people weren't informed, didn't have sources of information, were more often uneducated and untraveled, and lived (basically) in much smaller worlds, especially ones in which professionals were rare, and yeah, you quickly reach a point where there was an implicit trust in anyone with any sort of professional authority-type position. Presumably because there was only one thing to be skeptical about, and if you were skeptical about it then you believed in nothing! Easy to be choosy now, but if you lived in a little farm town and the only visitor all year was a snake-oil salesman with a fancy suit and some complicated-sounding books ... it's kinda believe that or be crazy.

i mean, some of what ivy league conservatives perceive and complain about post-modernism is true -- relativism really does make it hard to make firm judgments about anything. (where they're wrong of course is in thinking that relativism was somehow invented by french intellectuals, instead of just being mapped and analyzed by them.) otoh, of course, we still can make actual judgments, they just have to be more careful and provisional than before, and learning how to do it takes time. (time that will be filled by all the legions of snake-oil salesmen, who have always known opportunity when they see it.)