Recent legal action, satire and analysis of technology blogging has highlighted the hyperreality that characterises new media. That this appears in the technology media is interesting because, based one might think that have at least some link to science, the technology media provide a site where differentiation between reality and fiction is better demarcated and this hyperreal state might be held at bay.
Lawsuits and rumour sites
A good example of the issue is found in the reporting and satirising of the tension between technology firms and bloggers. The tension arrises because bloggers appear less willing to entertain established journalistic principles, such as tending to verifiable fact rather than rumour, respecting confidential information and so on. This tension is revealed in litigation between Apple and some bloggers who may have induced others to breach their non-disclosure agreements and publishing this proprietary information (business secrets).
This issue recently came to a head when one of the rumour sites, Thinksecret (http://thinksecret.com) settled with Apple and agreed to close. A more recent site called the Fake Steve Jobs (http://fakesteve.blogspot.com) has satirised this, claiming to have an offer from Apple to also close. Roughly Drafted (http://roughlydrafted.com), one of the most analytical commentaries on Apple, and especially the reporting of Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux news has also weighed in on the issue, highlighting in particular the way that bloggers are induced financially and through privileged access to cover (or even create) stories in a particular way.
The key posts in this issue are:
- http://www.thinksecret.com/news/settlement.html
- http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/im-weighing-offer-from-apple.html
- http://roughlydrafted.com/2007/12/23/daniel-lyons-cries-wolf-the-real-bill-gates-behind-the-fake-steve-jobs
I am interested in three things that are relevant to this issue, related to funding of commercial media, the analytical ability of an audience and the role of news in society. I’ll look at each in turn.
Media and money
We understand that commercial media is a business. Media here means more than just television, radio and newspapers. It also includes websites and trade publications. The logic can also be extended to anywhere there is an audience that can be sold to advertisers (such as, annoyingly, on the Heathrow Express and on airlines, where we must listen to sales pitches for duty free and frequent flyer programmes).
Traditionally, the commercial media earned its keep through a combination of advertising and/or subscription. Consumers are generally much less willing to pay for content than businesses, so consumer media rely much more on advertising than business to business media.
However, consumers are become more sophisticated users of advertising, able to filter, co-opt, subvert, parody as they please. This, of course, makes traditional advertising less effective. The industry gets around this in two ways.
- First, companies such as Google, try to add more intelligence to the placement of advertisements to increase the relevance of the advert to the reader / viewer, making the reader / view less likely to block it out. This works in electronic but not traditional media, and has arrived first on the internet, and will moving to digital cable television in due course.
- Second, the advertising industry and media outlets have been experimenting with public relations (PR) activities and product placement (the logical extension of PR). The two activities work by circumventing the queues that consumers normal use to activate their advertisement filters. PR activities try to make commercial products and services into stories while product placements typically site brands inside television shows and movies.
I don’t have any particular problems with the former, and consumers appear generally willing to trade off some of their valuable personal information for more relevant advertising (and maybe less of it). If consumers are informed about this, then it appears to be a conscious and win-win situation. Consumers give information about their preferences (i.e., by having Google monitor their surfing through cookie tracking) and see fewer but more relevant adverts as the price for free content. Advertisers don’t waste money showing their adverts to uninterested consumers and get their adverts into less cluttered media (i.e., with less competition with other advertisers). The proviso here is the extent that consumers are aware of the data collection and how it is used and distributed.
I have a larger issue with PR and product placement because they a new set of skills to discern the difference between advert and fact (in fiction this wouldn’t seem to matter so much). The more sophisticated this process of PR and product placement, the harder it is to discern the difference between news and advert.
The audience as informed analyst
There the media is being used by a particularly informed audience, this might not be a problem. So, one would hope that professional users of the technology media, for example, might have sets of criteria for selection of products and be able to evaluate those products accordingly.
However, less informed users rely on analysis published in the commercial media to make decisions about products that are important to them but about which they cannot develop suitable expertise (for reasons of cost, time, education) to evaluate. This is where the commentary in Roughly Drafted prompt considerable cause for concern.
One of the ways that consumers deal with this problem is by using networks of their own. Traditionally, consumers have done this by asking relatively expert friends for advice. Now they can also use online forums in order to quiz peers and educate themselves. Of course, business knows this an also seeks to infiltrate the forums, potentially undermining their usefulness.
News as entertainment
Where does all of this leave commercial news outlets. In one sense, we might say that they have tended toward becoming just another source of entertainment. This is the hyperreal environment in suggested in the introduction: emotions in the movies are more emotional than in real life, fiction and entertainment look like news programmes and the news unravels as soap opera.
The Fake Steve Jobs plays exactly into this postmodern environment and plays a part in dismantling traditional boundaries between fact and fiction; between real, unreal and hyperreal. It does this by creating a soap opera about a real person that is more interesting than the reality. The satire about the lawsuit is a particularly accute example of this. While writing as the “Fake Steve Jobs” the site is clearly satire. However, when writing as the author (rather than implied author) the boundary is less clear. This would be fine if, as I note above, if we can be sure all readers understand the difference and the intent. If this is not the case, then it undermines, at least more some of the audience, the usefulness and value of news and satire. That a company like Forbes, who makes their money and attaches their brand to the masthead of a serious newspaper is amusing for some, troublesome for others.
Entertainment, however, is not without its ideological affect. What I ignore above, and what Daniel Eran Dilger tackles in the Roughly Drafted article I reference above, is the way that humour has its ideological side and, deliberately or otherwise, reveals and challenges particular worldviews. Tradionally, journalism as careful(ish) to note its ideological stance, potential conflicts of interest and so on to empower the reader to deal with them. Humour and journalism that plays on the blurred line between real, unreal and hyperreal doesn’t do this. Whether it doesn’t do this deliberately or through lack of reflexivity is another issue.