We are now only seeing the beginning of fake news and the potential dangers of faked audio and video.
There was a time, not long ago, when news used to be mostly textual, and I think that whenever my father read the newspaper over morning coffee, he wouldn’t think for one second that what he was reading could be all made up - fake news. Roughly 500 years ago, when Columbus made his epic journeys to what he believed to be the far side of India, photo- or videocameras were not at hand, so Columbus, in order to prove that he had discovered new lands, had to bring back several items from the newly found continent, items that had never been seen before by the people in old Europe. In the world before Columbus, there was no technology that would allow the capturing of images from the discovered continent; no airplane or satellite could take the bird's eye view to chart the new territory. Columbus would eventually return with unknown plants such as potatoes or tobacco, he would bring back exotic animals or samples of the indigenous population of the new continent. After a while, it must have become clear that the new world had indeed many new things to offer. Had Columbus decided to bring just a drawing or a painting of the new continent, or had he just brought a written document - I think it is fair to assume that nobody back home would have believed him. Why? Because paintings and prose is something that we generate in our mind and elaborate with our hands. The relation of this elaboration with reality is never of the same kind as a physical proof, or better, many of those items. For the majority of people on the old continent at the time, it was impossible to travel to the unknown territories in Africa and America; therefore they had to be content with botanical and zoological gardens, where plants and animals from overseas could be exposed to a wider audience that could not take the rigors of such journeys, out of fear, lack of money or other impediments. So, the public exhibits of exotic material in zoos and botanical gardens were the discovery channels of ancient times. In some cases, it was also necessary to artificially reproduce the climatic conditions in the overseas colonies; that was achieved with greenhouses, made out of glass or in aquariums and these new ways of displaying exotic content were the early forerunners of today's screen devices. My father would look at his morning newspaper in exactly the same way people would look at the exotic content in the zoo. From a safe, convenient place, over coffee, he could look at terrible, dangerous animals, deserts and mountain ranges, violent wars and uproar. Somebody witnesses something for him, so he could look at it with the eyes of this „mediator“. He was living in a pre-digital age, where analogue technology was all that was available. So whenever he saw a photograph or a TV Newscast, he was rightly convinced that these images had some resemblance with reality, they had captured, documented reality, and this analogue representation of some form of reality could also be expressed in writing. Then there was fiction. But even fiction was based on the same premise. The images captured some kind of real events - in this case, staged events - that really happened in front of a camera lens. The digital age has changed these premises profoundly. Why? Because the images we see now are no longer representations of reality, like an analogue photograph was. Digital images are being generated by computers, they are encoded data, they cannot exist without code and a computer. That means, they are not, by default, showing us some captured slice of reality. They are showing us a „generated“ image, not a „captured“ image. The fake news era we are now entering has this distinction at its core. When we go back to the analogy of the exotic plant or animal that we would look at from behind a glass screen, then digitally altered video and audio would be comparable to some sort of scientific glove boxes, where you could handle „hazardous“ material from a safe distance. You would be able to alter (to „doctor“) whatever reality it is that is inside the box. And that could even further erode and undermine public trust in journalism and harm democracies with the intent of deceiving an audience - until the point where the distinction fake/real will become obsolete as well.
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AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
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