Coronavirus Is Making Me Believe in the Power of the Internet Again
Online resources provide a much better tool for understanding COVID-19 than broadcast news
Had South by Southwest not been canceled, I would have been giving a talk there this morning about fake news. I think they wanted me to get all worked up about the danger of deepfake videos, but I was having a hard time freaking myself out.
It seemed to me that deepfakes would eventually restore the primacy of trusted news agencies and journalists. The less we can trust the veracity of videos, the more we must depend on those whose responsibility it is to determine the provenance and context of everything. If anything, the more accustomed we become to the idea that video pictures have no more claim to truth than text or speech, the less power these constructed images will have over us.
The bigger threats to public coherence aren’t the internet’s falsified videos at all, but television’s truthful ones. The preponderance of sensationalist, fearmongering images distracts us from everything that actually matters. In a glib nod to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, I had decided to call my SXSW talk “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fake News.” I meant it as more than a clever allusion. For, like the montage of documentary atomic…
