Seeing is not believing: reality, simulation and the epistemic authority of the image

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I'm Slim Shady, yes, I'm the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won't the real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up?
'Cause I'm Slim Shady, yes, I'm the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won't the real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up?



Eminem famously played with the distinction between the real and representation in his song (and accompanying music video) The Real Slim Shady, in which he plays with the idea of persona and authenticity. The beginning of the music video begins with an announcement, “May I have your attention, please, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?”. Everyone in the room stands, the announcement continues, “We’re gonna have a problem here.”

So, yes, we have a problem here, as the line between the real (Slim Shady) and the intimators becomes harder to locate.

 The desert of the real

Scholars have theorised for decades about the gap between representation and reality. Most famously, Baulliard proposed the concept of the simulacrum to capture what happens when representations of the ‘real’ eventually become detached from representation, insofar as presentation becomes a truth unto itself. Specifically, Baudrillard explains, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.” By this, he means the casual relationship between signs (the map) and what they signify (the territory) are irrevocably fractured, he explains that it is, “The desert of the real itself.”

This is all theoretically well-established and generally accepted by scholars as characteristic of the contemporary media environment. Despite this theorising, most people are not aware of the fracturing of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Generally speaking, the image still holds its epistemic authority. That is, we look at images and videos and generally consider them to represent reality, or the really real. Undoubtedly, the advent of photoshopped, and the widespread use of beauty filters and AI images has led to some fracturing of this relationship. We know, or at least we allow, the possibility that an image or a video is not a direct representation of reality. However, for the most part, we all behave (and, in fact, need to behave) as if it is. In a mediated world, where what we know about the world is transmitted through various forms of media, this is a necessary and vital relationship.

Enter Kate Middleton

As you might be aware, Kate Middleton has not been seen in public since Christmas Day, 2023. As someone whose job is to appear in public on behalf of the British monarchy, this is somewhat unusual. In early January, the palace announced that Middleton would be, essentially, on sick leave from her normal duties as she recovered from planned abdominal surgery. Planned? But the Princess’s diary was booked out months in advance, and the announcement set in train a series of unexpected event cancellations.

In February 2024, people began to realise that they hadn’t seen Kate in a month. No photos had been released of her convalescing at home or waving from a car. Where was Kate? At the same time, King Charles was going through his own health crisis and publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer. As rumours swirled about his health, we got the standard Royal statements and photo ops, with King Charles looking comparatively well as he waved from a car.

But Kate, Kate is a different story. In an attempt to squash some of the rumours circulating about her retreat from public life (she’d had a Brazilian butt lift, she was growing out her bangs), we were treated to a series of increasingly odd images. In the first, a grainy pap shot, she appeared to be sitting next to her mother in a car, but the photo was of such poor quality and taken from such a distance that online commentators were not convinced it was her at all. Mother’s Day in the UK rolled around, and Kensington Palace released a photo of Kate Middleton via Instagram with her children. The photo was later revealed to have been photoshopped and major news agencies took the step of issuing a ‘kill notice’ on the image, signalling that they could not verify its authenticity. A few days later, footage claiming to be of Kate and William at a local market market surfaced. Again, the footage was poor quality, and grainy. No other recordings of the outing appeared to exist, and again the internet said, “that’s not Kate.”

In a last-ditch attempt to fix the problem, Kensington Palace collaborated with the BBC to produce a video of Kate, sitting alone on a garden bench, explaining to the public that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was currently undergoing treatment following her surgery.

And yet, the rumours persist. Posters speculate that the BBC video is, itself, AI-generated.

What is ‘real’ anymore?

Why did this series of unfortunate events take hold in the way it did? My argument is that, for the first time, we are repeatedly encountering the collapse of the relationship between the sign and its signifier. We are used to thinking of these two categories in reference to each other, but as Baudrillard theorised in 1981, this direct connection has collapsed. There is “no more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept.”

We are encountering the difficulty of disentangling the real from the illusion. As such, we doubt the epistemic authority of the image or the video, asking, “Is this real?” while grappling with the fact that the real is becoming increasingly difficult to locate.  The image has lost its status as an authoritative representation of reality.

The failure of Kensington Palace to adequately address this situation also points to the difficulty in maintaining an illusion when the relationship to ‘the real’ has collapsed. So, we find ourselves in a world where Twitter (presently X) sleuths scrutinise every pixel of an image from the foliage in the background to try to locate the ‘real’. But in the age of simulation, the harder we chase the real and try to reinforce the binary between the real and the simulation, or illusion, the harder they become to locate.

Baudrillard argues, “Of the same order of impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is is no longer possible.”

Just as it is not possible to situate the ‘real’ in relation to the Kate Middleton PR crisis, it is simultaneously impossible for Kensington Palace to sustain the illusion that she was unproblematically recovering at home.

More materially, the case of the ‘missing’ Kate Middleton, marks, I think, the first time that the slipperiness between the real and the simulation, and the difficulty of orientating ourselves in this space has been broadly felt. It feels, a little like being tumbled head over feet in the surface, unable to locate which way is up. 

The image as spectacle

We can also draw on the work of Debord, who opens his book, The Society of the Spectacle, with the following compelling argument, “The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.” Arguably, this describes the intensification and proliferation of images in social media contexts, where we encounter both ‘real’ and synthetic media, including AI-generated images, in a platforms-based context in which they can only be ‘looked at’, not experienced. 

Debord also highlights the importance of the spectacle as a ‘means of unification’ and the ‘focal point of all visions and all consciousness’. The ‘faked’ images of Kate provided this very means of unification described by Debord, Twitter (currently X) was almost wholly given over to analysis of the photos, video, analysis of the PR response, and analysis of analysis. It was quite literally the focal point of all visions and consciousness, almost completely dominating international news coverage. Debord is a Marxist, and warns that the spectacle’s danger lies its ‘domain of delusion and false consciousness’. While I am less concerned with the production of false consciousness, in the landscape of media excess, I am interested in his point that the spectacle “is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by image.”

Debord’s critique here centres on how the spectacle is enrolled in the dominant mode of production, and how it supports and reinforces particular (capitalist) modes of social organisation. The spectacle is a distraction from the issues of capitalist society, which entralls and enraptures us, to the detriment of our own emancipation. In the society sketched by Debord, the image still has epistemic authority, in contrast to Baudrillard, who is pointing to the collapse of that authority and how the real and the representation fold in on themselves.

To quote the girl from the Old El Paso ad, “Why don’t we have both?”


Does this image function, now, more powerfully as a spectacle as it moves further away from the real?



Mirror, Mirror: The lure of the AI selfie

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At the end of 2022 AI avatars, generated from selfies uploaded to an AI art generator app spread like wildfire on Twitter.  There are a few AI art generator apps but LENSA AI was far and away the most popular app to experiment with. Lensa AI takes these pictures and then spits out a series of avatars in different art styles or themes including kawaii. There are other apps that offer similar products, with slightly different art styles. Dream by WOMBO had a particularly horrifying medieval option which supplied me with the below interpretation of my face.

Make it medieval

However, this outcome is not as likely as smooth, pretty, youthful renditions of my face.

Some options made me ethnically ambiguous and co-opted aspects of Indigenous culture to create a ‘theme’. For example, one of the themes in an AI art app gave me some Kakiniit (facial tattoos) that are a traditional cultural practice of the Inuit. Kakiniit are currently experiencing an important cultural revival, after missionaries attempted to stamp out the practice after their arrival in arctic communities over 100 years ago.

Confronted with the Indigenised version of my face, as a white woman living on stolen land I felt wrong-footed and horrified, that the AI generator had taken a culturally specific practice and given it to me to ‘try on’. I was newly reminded that the data that generator AI art is (almost) indiscriminately vacuumed up from the web and spat out again in response to ‘prompts’. Undoubtedly the AI saw a photo of me in a large faux-fur trimmed hood, covered in snow and used those elements to apply Inuit ‘style’ features to the avatars it generated with little thought or care about cultural specificity. 

AI ‘art’ is part of the white, colonialist techno-culture that created it. Difference is stripped of its cultural and historical context and becomes another thing for us to try on for size, like so many Orientalist gazes before.

While this specific case is troubling, I found the whole exercise jarring. AI removed my reading glasses, and made me non-smiling, serious. It showed me a pretty, younger version of myself. I had no pores, and suddenly, a perfectly symmetrical face. Looking at the AI generated images of myself I felt sad and upset and maybe a little bit like I wanted to cry. It was me, but not me. Me as AI thought I should look according to prevailing beauty standards.


My face is smaller, cuter. I can recognise myself in the images, but also, not at all.  My selfies had been run through a filter that almost added normative ideas of beauty in addition to the art style, washing out everything unique and human about me. I had become the most generic version of myself. All this before we even get to where this art is coming from and the labour that underpins its production. AI art generators are trained on images collected from the web. They are broadly speaking in the public domain, although they are not without copyright. As Clare Southerton says, it’s “a beauty filter made of stolen artists' work”. 


As art is (re)produced through AI it loses the relationality and cultural specificity that makes art, art. It has no human point of view and it shows, as everything regardless of the art style requested begins to look and feel the same. It is, after all, machine generated, and even as a machine may be prompted to create difference it still produces a standardised product.

At the same time, in a related albeit slightly different arena, a friend of mine sent me a photo of a professional sports team put through a ‘hot girl’ filter. Over text he joked about how hot some of women were, rendered in emphasised femininity. They now looked like they wouldn’t be out of place on an American version of The Bachelor. Long, wavy hair, with heavy, contoured makeup. To me this example also highlights the problem with AI art generators is the same as it is with all AI.  It reproduces cultural biases and values and in doing so locks us into repeating past patterns, behaviours and values. It feels to me as it reflects and reproduces dominant norms back to us that it narrows all the ways it is possible to be a person in the world. 

Finally, I want to think about why we are so concerned with how we are perceived by machines. Why do want to know how AI sees us? Why are we prepared to accept that (joking/not joking) the For You Page on TikTok knows us better than we do? Machines have long been our mirrors. Now fed by the data we give/they have taken, we gaze at ourselves reflected in them thinking they are capable of seeing and knowing us better than we know ourselves. In doing so, we cede some of our selfhood to technological assemblages of code, software and devices that (in the case of generative AI) run on stolen data, stolen art and stolen valour; entertained by the sleight of hand, ignoring the real human labour that makes the machines look ‘effortless’.




Data decay and the continuous present in social media research

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Social media platforms are constantly shifting beneath our feet. Sometimes these changes are visible and jarring, for example the roll out of a new feature, a change in the way a feed appears or is ordered. Sometimes they are less visible, backend changes to the way content is algorithmically structured, or shifts in moderation policies to de-platform misinformation.

I want to think about what this means for the accumulation of longitudinal data on how social media operate. At the moment, much social media research focuses on snap data from a moment in time. As social media is both generative (e.g. generating social movements, news, memes, trends) and reactive (e.g. responding to social change, politics, news and popular culture) this approach makes sense. Longer term studies pull data from a few years, a few months or a few weeks. The longer a study stretches across time, the more likely it is to suffer the effects of what I call ‘data decay’.

While data on its surface may seem commensurable, the almost continuous micro adjustments companies make to their social media platforms, means it becomes harder, for example, to compare tweets collected at point a to tweets collected at point b. The challenge of collecting social media data over time becomes a contemporary version of the Ship of Theseus problem. At describes in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, the problem is thus:

 

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

 

If the parts of a social media platform are constantly being changed, swapped out, rearranged and tweaked, are we still studying the same social media platform?

 

At present, researchers largely avoid this problem, by collecting data in one swoop, avoiding the problems of comparing datasets collected at different points in time, under different conditions. However, this means that we, as researchers, lean towards living in the ‘continuous present’, forever re-engaging with the now. Of course, we do what we can to contextualise our findings in and through other scholarly work, and trace shifts and trends over time, but empirically we are still stuck in a continuous present.

Platforms that are always changing the stake of visibility, attention and virality makes making sense of data collected over time a more complex task. This is additionally complicated by the fact that researchers operate on a platform’s good will and good grace (a problem most recently illustrated by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter).

 This also limits researcher’s ability to collaborate over time. Quantitative survey data is often provided via data commons and other mechanisms to help researchers compare results across time and context. Additionally, the data we collect from social media exists in a legal grey area and is not strictly ‘ours’, and limits our ability to pool data over time.

Over the past 7 years Meta (formerly Facebook) has slowly but surely shut down researcher access to its social media platforms; Instagram and Facebook. Almost as quickly as researchers develop and finesse work-arounds (for example, Instamancer), platforms make them redundant. Platforms like TikTok have no formal researcher or API access at all. Researchers scraping data through second-party APIs have suggested that the data produced by these approaches is often inaccurate on key metrics.

As social media research has become dominated by metricised forms of data gathering and analysis, this has serious implications for what we can know, over time about the platforms we study. Broadly, this trend reflects our preference for, and privileging of, metrics and quantitative data more generally as seemingly objective ways of measuring the heart or truth of platforms, and by extension, the social world. As Jenny Davis and Tony P. Love has carefully argue we must resist the temptation to empirically generalise from social media data to the broader social world. This is true for research of social media and with social media. Empirical social media research are slices of time. When scientists sample arctic ice, they are able to drill down 1000s of metres to analyse how the environment has changed over time. In this metaphor, social media research is examining each of these layers as they are formed, in the present.

To create social media research that moves beyond the continuous present, we need to look carefully and critical at how we can layer data over time to create satisfying and robust insights into this part of our social world (like a really good sandwich). This requires melding deeply qualitative sensibilities with computational approaches - as well as sticking with topics and communities that may fall in and out of visibility. An approach that weights temporality has the capacity to deepened and enhance our ability to theorise social media and speak more fully to what was, what is, and what is to come.


 

With thanks to Clare Southerton and Jenny Davis for additional insights and feedback

Twitter Hashtags: The Death of an Affordance?

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When I wrote my PhD between 2010-2014, I was, in part, interested in exploring how Facebook was constructed as a place. To do this, I borrowed from the theories of urban sociology and human geography. In my thesis, I wrote:

 While the architecture of Facebook has certain objective limits, it is possible to go beyond, disrupt or reinterpret these determinants that Facebook – as an object – sets on its utilisation (de Certeau 1984). De Certeau argues that the act of walking through a space (the urban environment) creates and transforms spatial signifiers into something else. The choices made by the walker mean that only a few possibilities out of a constructed order are realised; conversely the number of possibilities may be increased by taking unexpected routes and limited through prohibitions. That is, taking or not taking paths considered accessible or obligatory (de Certeau 1984). Thought of in this way, Facebook could be considered to have as many forms as it has users (de Certeau 1984).

By making these choices, places are made and unmade. The history of the internet, and social networking, is replete with such examples of previously well-trodden paths becoming neglected, and then abandoned, because the spatial choices made (of where to go) have condemned them to inertia and disappearance.

I am now interested in how this ‘inertia and disappearance’, this not choosing, or not walking is playing out with hashtags on Twitter.

In the early iterations of Twitter, hashtags functioned as a way of curating information, and emerged somewhat organically as a way of working with and around the early constraints of the platform.

The first use of Twitter hashtags was the 2007 San Diego wildfires. As Bruns and Burgess explain, this event provided a clear ‘use case’ for hashtags on Twitter. To circle back to the metaphor of walking, a ‘goat path’ or ‘desire lines’ emerged through the architecture of Twitter, opening up new patterns of use.

Hashtags became a central part of the Twitter experience. Hashtags have been used for live TV watching, elections, social issues, and natural disasters.

This was also demonstrated by the use of Twitter during the 2010-2011 Queensland floods via the #qldfloods and #bnefloods hashtags which played a central role in disaster communication and recovery coordination. Hashtagged information on Twitter then flowed into broader media coverage of the floods – expanding the reach of Tweets beyond their initial audience and platform.

Gathering data from hashtags also became central to researchers’ work to understand and map Twitter dynamics. Why does this story of floods and hashtags matter?

It matters because I think the hashtag is dead, as a meaningful Twitter affordance.  Here I draw from Jenny Davis’ mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances, which I think is very useful for the argument I am advancing here:

[using a] mechanisms and conditions framework shifts affordances’ orienting question from what technologies afford, to how technologies afford, for whom and under what circumstances? The ‘how’ of affordances, or its mechanisms, indicate that technologies request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow social action, conditioned on individual and contextual variables, grouped into perception—what a subject  perceives of an object, dexterity—one’s capacity to operate the object, and cultural and institutional legitimacy—the social support, or lack thereof, for technological engagement.

 Importantly, Davis’ work highlights how affordances are co-constituted through both technical capacity and social patterns of use.

Don’t get me wrong, hashtags still exist, and commonly coalesce around significant social events, like elections, sporting events and transformative social issues like #BLM. However, they have fallen out of use and style as an everyday communicative practise on Twitter.

To illustrate, we return to Brisbane, which experienced widespread flooding in March 2022 due to intense and prolonged rainfall. While the floods were not as significant as those in 2011, there was still widespread major flooding along the Brisbane River and in other creek and river catchments throughout Brisbane and South East Queensland.

As the disaster unfolded, I turned to Twitter and immediately began searching the #qldfloods and #bnefloods hashtags. At best, they returned a little over 100 results each. Highly centralised broadcast media in Australia was not particularly responsive to the unfolding disaster. The ABC had a good live blog, and their local radio stations did their usual excellent emergency work, but commercial stations were largely silent as were the Twitter hashtags.

Concerned about the impending flooding, I texted a friend who I knew lived in a flood-prone area. She responded with surprise; all the news she’d seen was about the war in Ukraine. I told her what I knew and directed her to the ABC live blog.

On Twitter, Professor Jean Burgess also noted the failures in the local media ecology.

 Any information I found about the Queensland floods on Twitter became a function of the algorithm and socially-proximate networks of retweeting. If you sat outside those retweeting networks, or the algorithm did not surface those tweets for you, information was thin on the ground and difficult for a casual user to find.

 Significantly, reporters, who in the past would have used hashtags to circulate flood updates did not use them. Twitter users, filming their slowly flooding streets and backyards also rarely used hashtags to mark their content as flood-related. The combination of a diminished local media system, and the haphazard curation and sharing of flood content on Twitter, meant it was very hard to get a sense of what was actually happening in anything approaching real-time – once Twitter’s greatest strength as a social media platform.

The reasons for the functional death of hashtags as a means of curating information on Twitter are twofold and bring us back to Davis’ work on affordances. Twitter, as a platform has significantly reshaped its user interface over the past few years. Timelines are no longer straightforwardly linear. Tweets are presented based on an algorithmic mixture that shows you likes and retweets from people you follow, as well as suggesting tweets associated with seemingly random topics. The image below was suggested to me as a topic to follow last week.

 Even trending topics have had a considerable overhaul. The trending column of hashtags is now hidden on the Twitter web interface, replaced with a series of trending topics (including promoted ones) called “What’s Happening”.

Twitter Trending Topics

Notable here is the emphasis on live events (war, The Grammys), which are similar to the initial affordances of hashtags, but with a notable difference. Results within the trending topics are now algorithmically curated. Most recent tweets no longer appear at the top, but rather tweets with the most attention. The remaining showcased tweets rarely use hashtags, but rather are grouped based on their keyword use. Generally, this works well enough but topics can quickly become junked up, or filled with irrelevant content, as the algorithm cannot discern the context surrounding the key phrases.

 It's hard to know what came first in these contexts, the Twitter redesign that centres topics over hashtags, or the declining use of hashtags spurring a more topic-focused redesign. Either way, the mutually shaping effects of both on platform architecture means that hashtags, once a commonplace communicative practice on Twitter are becoming much less widely used outside of what we might call ‘exceptional’ cases. For example, large scale live events, or social movements. The lack of volume on hashtags has other flow-on effects. Research suggests that it is increasingly easy to make hashtags ‘trend’ even with a relatively small number of Tweets. This is an artefact of their disuse. As day-to-day use of hashtags has decreased, they have become easier to ‘weaponise’. Dr Tim Graham details how trending hashtags are subject to coordinated activity and manipulation (also called brigading) to make issues trend. Hashtags then can no longer be trusted to accurately reflect user engagement and interest.

 The (almost) death of the hashtag as an everyday communicative affordance on Twitter has implications for researchers. 100s of papers have been written that approach Twitter hashtags very straightforwardly, as proxies for interest in and discussion of any given topic on Twitter. Given their lack, of use and marginalisation within Twitter’s own platform design, it may be time for a change in strategy.

In a recent paper on Twitter memes, which I wrote with Simon Copland, we adapted our data collection strategy to reflect the move away from hashtag use. The memes we studied in this paper were based on key phrases, for example, “a girl who struggled”, not hashtags. In fact, if we’d run hashtag-based queries looking for data, they would have returned nothing of relevance at all. I think this approach reflects a necessary change to Twitter research moving forward. As both user behaviour and platform architecture twist and change, so too must our research strategies. While collecting, cleaning and computing Twitter data based on keywords as opposed to hashtags is a more laborious process, I think it is a necessary part of accurately representing the shifting sands of Twitter discourse.

 Sometimes, it takes a crisis to drive home the fact that something no longer functions as assumed. The recent Brisbane floods have highlighted the significant drift away from hashtags as a communicative affordance on Twitter, including by reporters feeding information back to the public. Traditional broadcast media is also reliant on Twitter to generate much of its content, functioning as a type of digital ‘vox pops’. Twitter is a way of providing a sense of what’s happening ‘on the ground’, which is then fed back into the Twitter ecosystem through news stories that cite Twitter.

 This much is clear, Twitter and the way information is curated on it is changed, and has changed over the past few years. Increasingly, the way information flows on Twitter relies heavily on social proximity. What you get depends very much on what the people you follow are liking, retweeting and commenting on. Tapping into information through hashtags is no longer the dominant or even common mode of engagement. These changes happened slowly, gradually and incrementally through the push/pull of platform and users, but it has happened. There are new paths of use through the Twitter landscape, and the old highway of the hashtag is becoming quiet and overgrown. Now our research strategies need to change too, we need to go where the people are.

With thanks to Jenny Davis, for careful and critical eyes.

Sontag's Notes on Camp As Applied to January 6

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I’ve been sitting on this blog post for a while. I started drafting in February and ran it past an American friend. She said, “You’re not wrong, but too soon”. I put it away, but the idea sighed impatiently in the back of my mind. Why was the insurrection a little bit funny?

Before I get into the substance of the thing, I want to first acknowledge that the insurrection was a real, violent and terrifying event with violent dreams and violent ends. Protestors brought bombs and nooses and it was clear that their intention was to do harm. I do not want to minimise this. The footage aired at Trump’s unsuccessful impeachment trial was undoubtedly terrifying and provided a glimpse into the event that was otherwise sparsely documented by news media.

However, what I am interested in, is why, in the immediate aftermath, it was also a little bit funny. The first joke I saved was the one below. Ostensibly, the rioter is protesting the ‘stolen’ election in Georgia the state, not Georgia the country. The tweet says, without saying, these people are so detached from reality, so uneducated and mindless that they can’t tell the difference. I laughed. I saved the image, I moved on. But why was it funny, what was giving rising to the humour? Where was it located, culturally? Why was a violent and misguided attempted insurrection funny?

Georgia's national flag flies under a Trump campaign flag on January 6

Jokes highlighting the ridiculous and surreal aspects of the insurrection followed quickly, if not immediately in its footsteps.  Part of the reason for this may be that its documentation was unusually one dimensional; by this I mean that very little media captured the insurrection from the perspective of those inside the Capitol, congressional members and staffers who blockaded doors and fled. Broadly, photos showed costumed rioters aimlessly wandering around the House chamber, or engaging in ceremonial and ultimately pointless conduct, like sitting in the speaker’s chair.

QAnon Shaman sits in the speaker's chair during the January 6 insurrection

At times the live coverage seemed to poke fun at this, with the New York Times’ live blog drily remarking, “The Capitol seems to be under the control of a man in a viking hat”.

Early reporting from inside the riot also seemed to reinforce the tone of dry amusement. For Slate, Aymann Ismail wrote,

“The mood was giddy, but it was chaos. Everyone was excited. People were chanting, “This is our America,” and “Whose house? Our house!” They were having fun, entertaining themselves. The priority seemed to be to have their friends take selfies with them inside the Capitol.”

In this vein, other photos showed a rioter cheerfully waving at the camera while he makes off with a speaker’s podium. He was quickly identified, arrested and charged. When his lawyer was asked about the photo of him participating in looting during the riot, he replied, "I don't know how else to explain that, but yeah, that would be a problem, I'm not a magician..."

Another protestor was later tracked and arrested through his work ID badge which he was photographed wearing in the Capitol building.

Other protestors documented themselves on social media, by live-streaming the entry into the building and posting photos and videos of themselves inside. In response, this behaviour was widely met with mockery and derision. As Vox explains,

“In short, those who stormed the Capitol didn’t leave social media breadcrumbs for law enforcement to follow to their front doors — they left entire loaves of bread.”

Other participants in the January 6 insurrection were also caught bragging about their participation on Bumble, a dating app similar to Tinder.  As per NPR reporting,

Court filings say that exactly one week after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Robert Chapman, 50, told another Bumble user, "I did storm the capitol," adding, "I made it all the way into Statuary Hall." The unnamed individual was evidently not impressed.

"We are not a match," the person wrote, to which he replied, "I suppose not.”

This was not the only such incident. ABC America reported that dating app users were purposely using the services to catfish for Capitol rioters. This typically involved changing the political preferences in their dating profile to ‘conservative’ to “to catch users who boasted about participating in the riot and report them.” Successful catfish then passed this information on to the FBI. How stupid these rioters were, how silly.


The icing on the cake of these various missteps was the subsequent blacklisting of rioters on the No-Fly list. A viral video shows a white man crying in the airport, after being denied boarding due to his non-compliance with face-mask policies. However, the content of the videos suggests that he was also part of the January 6 riots, and as he appears to link the airline’s refusal to let him fly to his participation in the January 6 events. Other similar incidents were also documented and widely shared on social media.

So why the round-up? I think these incidents highlight where the humour was during and after the January 6 riots. But why is it funny? I suggest that we can understand the initial humour in response to January 6 through Susan Sontag’s notes on camp. Now, we may understand the term ‘camp’ a little differently now, but Sontag argued that camp exists in the camp between the intention of the work of art, versus how it is actually realised. Camp, then, is the enjoyable dissonance between these two states – intention and realisation. The bigger the gap between the lofty ideal, and the actual housing of these ideals, the funnier it becomes. Not only is it funny, but it’s also quite pleasurable to observe. To be clear, I don’t think camp is the gap between trying and failing, but rather we can see in camp someone attempting something (for example an insurrection) and it not turning out so well. When the attempt goes wrong, we are able to observe the intention, the intention to be great (in and of itself), rather than an interest in the thing that should be, or is claimed to be driving the action (for example, justice).

Initially, the humour of the Capitol riots came in the gap between the intention of the event and the housing of it. The January 6 rioters wanted to take over the government but seemed incredibly confused about what to do when they got inside. They took selfies, and videos, and smoked weed and played music. They seemed incapable of doing what they came to do, they weren’t even smart enough to keep their work IDs at home.

While Sontag’s concept of camp can help us explain why an insurrection is funny – it also highlights how camp can be a cover for more serious ends.

Yes, many of the rioters were inept and aimless, in the mob for the excitement, the adventure, the day out and the sense of being a part of something – what that something was shifted and changed depending on the person. Behind this campy mismatch, more serious figures searched for politicians, wearing tactical gear and carrying zip ties. A noose hung in the public space outside of the capitol. At first, these figures in tactical gear were also figures of mirth, they were making it too seriously, just another extension of the cos-play like atmosphere that pervaded the day - strange people, wearing strange things.

However, in the weeks that followed it became clear how close to the heart of US politics had come to disaster.

It is easy to make fun of QAnon folks and their conspiracy-minded compatriots who came to the Capitol that day. It was distracting, it was soothing and diverted us for a few moments from how this wasn’t funny at all, not one little bit.

Healing, Faith and Fear: Church opening in the United States during COVID-19 restrictions

Presenting my 2020 pandemic project! During the pandemic Anne Marie and myself noticed that a number of churches (in the US) were opening despite public health stay-at-home orders.

As sociologists, we wanted to know what kinds of churches and why, so we got to work.

This paper are the results of that inquiry. We spent hours watching live broadcast YouTube sermons, and examining churches’ social media outputs as they pivoted to video. Even though the churches continued to meet during the pandemic, they also broaden their reach in the digital sphere. We also dug through legal filings, how they were funded, in addition to lot of reporting on the churches in this sample.

This article is forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. It was accepted in July and isn’t quite through production yet, but we feel the substance is interesting and timely and have made the pre-print available here.

Untreated Strangeness: On Edward Said, Imaginative Geographies and Conspiracy

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I work in a small university. As such, I routinely teach areas of sociology that are outside my scope of research expertise. Mostly, this is a lot of extra reading, but sometimes it turns up unexpected gems.

 A few weeks ago, I was reading, possibly for the fourth or fifth time, a chapter of Edward Said’s Orientalism. In this chapter, Said explores how the “Orient” exists, both as an academic field, and more broadly as an orientation towards the other. The Orientalist in Said’s account is less interested in studying what actually exists, than applying pre-formed truths with varying degrees of success.

 What struck me most about this section of the chapter is Said’s discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘science of the concrete’. Lévi-Strauss argues that the mind requires order. He argues that taking note of everything, and placing it in a “secure, findable place, therefore giving things some role to play in the economy of objects and identities that make up an environment” (1995: 53), is a universal human impulse. This is despite the fact that meanings assigned to any given object are arbitrary, given that they vary across cultures. Said goes on to argue that geographical distinctions between ours and theirs are also similarly arbitrary. The ‘not foreign’ exists in contrast to what is imagined to be ‘out there’. The underlying thread in this part of Said’s work is that what we imagine to be so, is just as powerful as what actually exists.

 

Said elaborates later in the chapter,

 

“One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that the conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these cultures not as they are, but as for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.” (1995: 67)

 

In building his argument about Orientalist engagement with the world, Said proposes that imaginative geographies override other forms of knowledge. My interest in Said’s work here is in how the processes of categorisation he attributes to Lévi-Strauss, intermingle with encounters with foreignness.

Society is, in many ways, abstract and complex. As I have written before, it requires us to encounter events that are often beyond our capacity to understand, emerging, as they do, from overlapping complexities in systems, technologies, institutions, histories and mobilities. Still, as Said points out, we have the desire to catalogue and categorise the ‘untreated strangeness’ of life. This process is particularly apparent in social responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that we can understand our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the same process that Said identifies in Orientalist thought, that is, as a response to ‘foreignness’. After all, what is more foreign than a multi-year global pandemic?

 We can instead understand the swirl of misinformation, as an attempt to categorise objects in a world made foreign to us. As Said highlights, what we imagine to be true about the foreign, and our imaginative geographies of ‘the strange’ are more important than other forms of knowledge. How we feel is what matters. These feelings shape our substantive engagement with the world, and what we understand it to be. Just as the Orientalist is not concerned with the Orient as it actually exists, the COVID-19 denier, anti-masking, anti-vaccine, ivermectin taking subject is not concerned with COVID-19 as it actually exists, rather they are responding based on their imaginative geography of the now-foreign pandemic world. As per Said’s theory, these geographies exaggerating aspects of the foreign, for example, disproven COVID-19 treatments, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and ignoring others – that vaccines are safe and reduce death and disease transmission.

Conspiracy theories more broadly, are also examples of imaginative geographies, attempting to respond to what often feels like ‘untreated strangeness’. They are broadly speaking (sub)cultural systems of categorisation that given meaning at shape to the world, as theories that explain foreignness in ways that emphasise the superiority of one culture over the supposed decadence and excess of others. We can see these themes playing out in the QAnon conspiracy cultures, where the righteous Q crusades against the decadence and sin of “Washington Elites” who engage in grotesque and immoral behaviour.

 Applying insights from Said’s work on Orientalism frames the misinformation problem in cultural terms and sensibilities, making the problem one that social scientists are well-versed in tackling. To grapple with the range of seemingly contradictory, concerning and dangerous responses to COVID-19, we have to understand that they are part of a (sub)culture and system of knowledge creation, that generates imaginative geographies that uphold and reproduce particular culture values as it seeks to catalogue, categorise and theorisation the strangeness of the pandemic world.

 

Further reading

 

Said, E. (1995) Orientalism. London: Penguin.

The Authenticating Body and Deep Fakes

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Remember when the internet used to be just text and maybe a couple of very slowly loading pictures? This is the internet at the centre of Sherry Turkle’s early works, The Second Self and Life on Screen, are full of chatrooms and MUDs which she argues provide a disembodied freedom to explore aspects of our selves beyond our bodies. The oft-grabbed quote of Life of Screen is, “You are who you pretend to be.” The internet was a largely anonymous space.

The internet as a disembodied place of digital exploration seems quaint now. The advent of social media, further facilitated by high-speed internet and smartphones has ushered in what I call ‘the embodied turn’. Bodies are now everywhere (and nowhere) online.

As such, the body links online self-presentation to a locatable offline person. The ability to link self-presentation to a body, a person and an offline existence means that the self online can be falsified against offline patterns of behaviour.

Arguably, this assumption was ushered in by Facebook. Unlike many other online environments including early social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook began with an emphasis on real names linked, and in effect verified by offline institutions. For the first few years of operation, Facebook users had to have a verifiable email at a university. This approach is radically different to the seemingly fluid and commitment-free modes of self-presentation that had previously dominated the internet.

Now we were all meant to be real names, linked to real bodies and the seemingly fluid online space began to solidify, becoming more tightly linked to ‘real’ life. As offline social networks were replicated online, the distinction between the two domains became meaningless.

The mainstreaming of online dating through apps like Tinder and Bumble which required access to your Facebook account to join in the first instance further cemented this link. With their emphasis on photos over text description, dating apps further centred representations of the (mediated) body as a central part of mundane digital practices.

The ordinariness of this has made the exceptions remarkable. Such exceptions (or deceptions) are the focus of continued cultural anxiety about authenticity online. This anxiety is spurred in part by the 2010 documentary Catfish and the resultant tv-series Catfish: The TV Show, now in its 8th season. The premise of Catfish hooks us because we have been habituated into expecting people to be who they said they were online, able to easily prove it with a selfie or a video call. Even Reddit one of the last bastions of anonymity online also enacts image-based verification practices. Celebrities engaging in AMA (ask me anything) sessions on its forums post photos of themselves holding a homemade sign with the date. Communication may be mediated, but it is authenticated by the absent presence of the body.

While the body is the authenticator of online communication we have come to accept, as with other aspects of day-to-day life that these representations are framed, crafted and curated. In a 2010 interview with the creators of Catfish, Gilbey explains, “Even those of us who have never ventured online can't claim to be innocent of false advertising; we have all exaggerated our plus-points, concealed our flaws, mis-sold ourselves in some way.”

We also understand that all media and our self-representations are framed, cropped and filtered in service of a larger narrative. Simulacra and simulation are mundane parts of daily life, while some argue that the manipulation of media is inherently untruthful, Baudrillard argues instead that “..The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

We have long passed the stage where representation is linked to the original, but the enmeshment of the body with digital technologies has lulled us into the sensation that online video and images are signifiers of something real. 

How does this relate to deep fakes? Deep fakes unsettle the idea that there is a real object (a body) to which to connected the video.

The deep fake is a ‘never was’ uncoupling of the object and its representation. There is only representation.

Take this latest video from the Tom Cruise Deepfake TikTok account (I sentence I can’t believe I just typed).

 

The complete detachment of the object and image that deepfakes representation means that they are ripe for panic. Observers worry they could increase the spread of misinformation, and make propaganda harder to detect, they are representative of the slide of information online away from ‘the real’

The idea that sophisticated deepfakes exist also plays into the hands of conspiracy thinking. If deepfakes are as powerful and readily available and some panic they are, then no image or video is reliable, but other further serve as evidence of conspiracy. In some ways, this is an extension of the ‘body double’ rumours that have plagued both Hilary Clinton and Melania Trump.  As we rely on bodies as authenticators in a culture saturated by mediation, we are trained to read these images for inconsistencies and incongruencies. Deviation from the expected creates a vortex of uncertainty. The creeping tide of panic around deepfakes will only make this more pronounced. Our techno-dystopian fears have been fuelled and stoked by the political and social turmoil of the last 7 years and these fears nudge up into a defensive, deterministic stance, “look at what social media has done!”. We fear bots, and coordinated campaigns, perhaps forgetting at times that there are bodies involved in these processes too, in initiating, reading, receiving and sharing. Bodies that are humans with fears, hopes and desires that we read information with and through. At the times technology seems to run on ahead of us, and deepfakes tap into that worry. In a swirling sea of misinformation maybe bodies also are imperceptibly slippery and changeable and fake. Our imaginations are already running away from us.

However, our techno-dystopian nightmares about deepfakes are worse than the technology itself. In an interview with The Verge, Chris Ume, the creator of the Tom Cruise deepfakes emphasises that “You can’t do it by just pressing a button.” Indeed, Ume is a VFX specialist, who has hired a Tom Cruise impersonator to mimic Cruise’s voice and mannerisms. Each clip takes “weeks of work” and requires the use of specialist software including a DeepFaceLab algorithm, traditional CGI and VFX. Each clip is further processed by Ume by hand, frame by frame, with the intention of removing glitches. Inserting even a vaguely credible deepfake into the political process would require weeks of specialist work and knowledge.

The idea of deepfakes is socially powerful, it plays on our fear of being gullible of our senses betraying us and a weightless born of the unmooring of representation and reality. While the unaltered body has never existed online, the development of the internet, particularly social media means that it has become a short-hand for authenticity.


(This post exists thanks to chats with Clare Southerton about weird things we found online that week)

(Authored by Naomi Smith)

Covid-19 and Vaccine Hesitancy

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Below the the text of my keynote presented at the (Con)spirituality, Science and COVID-19 Colloquium 25-26 March 2021, hosted by Deakin University and Western Sydney University.

On 16th of March, 2021 there were a total 120M cases of covid-19 globally and 2.65M deaths. In the United States alone over half a million people have died. As we know, the virus has caused significant global disruption.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was some speculation that it would spell the death of anti-vaccination sentiment. After all, what clearer example of vaccines' utility and efficacy could there be than a global pandemic?

In fact, the opposite seemed to happen. Not only were we now faced with a renewed wave of anti-vaccination sentiment, there were also denials that the virus itself exists, and if it did exist, it was nothing to be worried about, just the common cold.

For what follows, I want to explore the effect that anti-vaccination conspiracy thinking and the information environment of the internet has on vaccine hesitancy. I want to ask, why think conspiratorially? I also want to explore conspiratorial thinking as a continuum or an atmosphere, rather than a dichotomy; that is, one is either a conspiracy theory believer or not.

Part of this problem is due to the overwhelming speed and volume at which we encounter information which often makes it hard to distinguish between what is real and what is fake, what is factual and what is false, what is true and what is a lie. We can trace the origins of this problem back to the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, which appeared with the arrival of cable tv relying on an endless loop of continuous and incremental reporting.  In this sense, the sensation of being overwhelmed by news is no longer new. However, I argue that social media, in particular, has made this problem more pronounced and the effects of the fast-moving avalanche of information that passes us every day are apparent in times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, where consensus and collective action are particularly important.

Technologies like social media also represent an extension and intensification of the logic of speed. The intensification of speed is identified by Virilio as part of the process (and progression of) late modernity, but as speed brings things closer and (re)shapes social space, it also destabilises the social structures that previously demarcated it, including structures of knowledge. Thus, knowledge transmitted through social media begins to flatten and liquify, losing its relationship to formerly established hierarchies. Previously, the way information was stored and communicated was dominated by a clear hierarchy of trusted sources and trusted experts. Information was typically centralised, vetted and fact-checked, and distributed via regularly timed news bulletins and daily newspapers. The internet has fundamentally disrupted this process. One of the most powerful affordances of the internet is that it turns anyone into a publisher. Anyone can set up a webpage or post on social media. There is no requirement for what we publish or post to be real or true.

As a result, the internet has proved to be fertile ground for the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. At first glance, the rise of conspiracy theories may seem like a quaint artefact of internet subculture, but they are symptomatic of how fast information online circulates and how easy it is to publish. They highlight the destabilising effects of these features on knowledge hierarchies that used to provide a steady frame through which we could interpret the world.

The change in the way we interpret the world is apparent in the way anti-vaccination sentiments spreads. Anti-vaccination communities rely heavily on personal testimony as a way of communicating the assumed dangers of vaccination. Anti-vaccination Facebook groups and pages regularly highlight apparent cases of vaccine injury including everything from newly emerging allergies, to disability and death. Videos and images appeal to one of the dominant verification practices in the flat online information environment ‘pics or it didn’t happen’. Videos and images are then demonstrations of truth, and guarantors of personal narratives.

This type of epistemological orientation emphasises personal experience and self-belief as the most important forms of knowledge building. In this way of understanding the world, my experiences are the most important way of gathering knowledge about the world; if I am unable to gather this knowledge myself, the next best thing is a first-hand account from someone who has. After Facebook’s recent clean up of anti-vaccination pages and groups, anti-vaccination news sites like NaturalNews.com claimed that big tech is suppressing information about how dangerous covid-19 vaccinations are. They claim that people are dying from vaccinations and experiencing a range of severe side effects, including, quote, “horrific convulsions, partial paralysis and other bizarre side effects”. The evidence presented relies either on first hand testimony such as personal videos or recollections, or those of grieving families. The videos show people having difficulty walking due to partial paralysis, or consistent spasms. Most often, the subject of the video outlines the history of their symptoms (always beginning after the vaccine dose) while demonstrating their physical effects.

However, the problems with conspiracism regarding covid-19 began well in advance of the vaccine rollout.  Unsurprisingly, various conspiracy theories have emerged as a socially potent force in time of turmoil and confusion. In the United States, conspiracy theories attempted to undercut the seriousness of the covid-19 crisis.

An example is a viral video of a quiet Brooklyn Hospital purporting to show that public health authorities have exaggerated the pandemic. This resulted in the #FilmYourHospital hashtag, where Twitter users were encouraged to go and film their local hospitals in an attempt to dismiss the idea that COVID-19 is a public health emergency. There were thousands of replies to the original tweets, including video and photos that appear to show empty hospitals. Prominent conservative pundits and have helped propel these videos to their followers. A video from the same Brooklyn hospital shows bodies being loaded onto an eighteen-wheeler truck for transport one day later.

Other conspiracy theories reflect anxiety about changing technologies. There are claims that radiation from 5G devices can spread the coronavirus. Alternatively, some fear that the vaccine for COVID-19 will be used to inject citizens with devices that allow them to be tracked by the new 5G network. None of these claims are true.

Modern life is complex and abstract in many ways, and requires us to trust in systems we don’t fully understand or control. At the same time, as per Beck, the risks associated with the complex systems have grown and produced new levels of human-made risks as a result of these processes. These risks cross national borders, such as the risk posed by climate change, or by a global pandemic and extend far beyond the individual’s capacity to act.

Finally, we have conspiracy theories that tread the lines between fact and fiction, most notably about the origins of the virus. You might read or hear claims that the virus is a biological weapon, that it was ‘set free’ from a lab in China. While the virus undoubtedly originated in China, it is most likely one of those human-made risks that occur when humans and animals live side by side. In spaces where humans and animals have close and repeated contact, it becomes very easy for viruses to jump the species barrier, an example of the human-made risks that can accelerate beyond our ability to control them. 

But the answer ‘it was an accident’ is not as satisfying as the answers presented by many conspiracy theories that give us a clear outsider to blame. We know from Kai Erikson’s sociology classic Wayward Puritans that outsider groups are an important source for social cohesion. Providing a point of contrast, or a place to lay blame that is external to the community is a way of maintaining coherent social order.

Speed is not just about the tempo at which things happen but also about their scale and spread. As a consequence, issues like the moderation of content on social platforms become increasingly complex. This is true not just for clearly objective violations of policy, but for the grey areas of misinformation and what type of information is allowed to circulate. As anti-vaccination content has moved into mothering groups, wellness spaces and general influencer territory, it becomes harder to police and address. The volume of content is vast and continues to grow (quickly) on a daily basis. Speed is an important part of how information flows and circulates online, and part of what makes it almost impossible to govern.

So, we have an environment where a lot of information comes at us very fast, and we have no real way of sorting that information except on the basis of our own experience. In this environment, we retreat almost instinctively to highly personalised ways of understanding the world; we trust what we can see or what we know others have seen, we trust our own experience of the world, we trust how we feel, or how something makes us feel.

The contemporary digital neoliberal subject makes sense of the world through their own experience and affectivity.  We retreat to our own logics of knowing when the world around us seems too fast, too loud and too slippery to grasp. It makes us hesitant. We trust the personal more than the abstract. Additionally, individual ways of knowing about the world are presented as just as valid as expert ways of knowing, or in some instances more valid; as accessing the ‘truth’ behind the coverup. The neoliberal state wants its citizens to take responsibility for their own health, but not too much, not like that. The topic of vaccination is one of many sites where ‘unruly’ neoliberal subjectivities break free from state-mandated behaviours.

 Even if you don’t believe in conspiracy theories, they still muddle the water (or pollute the air) they delay vaccine take up, and induce panic about side effects. Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination conspiracy thinking have made the immense project of quick global immunisation even more difficult than usual. The air is saturated with conspiracy and doubt, no longer lurking on the edges; 2020 was the year conspiracism pushed into the mainstream. 

On the15th of March, Channel Nine in Australia aired an episode of their ‘Uncovered” program, which strongly suggested that Covid-19 was lab created, and subsequently covered up. Every time Pete Evans’ anti-vaccination views are reported as news, the water gets murkier. Vaccine hesitancy is an emergent property of several factors, the logic of speed embedded in social media, the amplification of conspiracy theorists by mainstream publications and an increasingly complex and globalised world in which risks often outpace our individual ability to understand and act.

The erosion of trust in expert knowledge, amplified by the many missteps in managing the pandemic response globally, further compounds this problem, fluid and fast information rushes past, changing day by day. Who do we trust? What do we trust? So we rely on our instincts, our affective responses and the power of a good story. Conspiracy theories also make things clear. They have a satisfying narrative arc that sits so much better than ‘we’re not sure yet’. In this framing, vaccine hesitancy can be understood as a rational response to unknown risks.

 

 

The Pleasures of Conspiracy

Conspiracy thinking is about more than misinformation…

Often, we talk about QAnon and other associated conspiracies as ‘misinformation problems’. That is, if we just kept social media clean of ‘bad’ information, the misinformation problem would solve itself, and we could go back to believing in the efficacy of vaccines and the integrity of our democratic institutions without issue. That is, to a certain extent, true. After Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump and fellow travellers from Twitter in the week following the January 8th insurrection, research found that misinformation about election fraud dropped 73%. (The idea that the election was ‘stolen’ is part of the QAnon universe). These results demonstrate the networked nature of misinformation; how the misinformation circulated and becomes accepted as fact. Even when trying to debunk misinformation, we still end up highlighting the very misinformation we’re trying to stamp out.

That caveat aside, there is still the unanswered question of what, exactly made QAnon and other conspiracies find such fertile soil? There are a number of competing explanations, including explanations that point to political and economic disenfranchisement, but what I want to explore in this blog post, are the affective dimensions of conspiracy thinking, particularly QAnon.

Conspiracy communities are powerful drivers of connection; it’s easy to think of conspiracy thinking and conspiracy communities as a problem of ‘information’. It is tempting to believe that Flat Earthers could be persuaded by more effective science communication, but this is, in fact, unlikely.  In concluding scenes of Netflix’s (2018) documentary Behind the Curve, we see flat earthers conducting a scientific experiment to disapprove the fact that the earth is a globe. I have copied the explanation of the experiment helpfully described by Newsweek to set the scene below,

“….at the very end of Behind the Curve, Campanella comes up with a similar experiment, this time involving a light instead of a laser. With two holes cut into styrofoam sheets at the same height, Campanella hopes to demonstrate that a light shone through the first hole will appear on a camera behind the second hole, indicating that a light, set at the same height as the holes, travelled straight across the surface of the Flat Earth. But if the light needs to be raised to a different height than the holes, it would indicate a curvature, invalidating the Flat Earth.”

As one might expect, the experiment doesn’t work as hoped, because the earth is round. One might expect this to be a transformative moment of understanding for those involved, but it is not. Empirical evidence alone is not sufficient to make people turn away from their conspiracy beliefs.

While the conspiracy itself may prove initially enticing, it is the community that makes people stay. The David and Goliath struggle against the powers-that-be with likeminded others becomes a potent identity marker, reinforced by alienation from previous relationships.

The slow slide away from old friendships is sharply demonstrated in a recent NYT article that profiles an Upper East Side, QAnon “meme queen” or as she prefers ‘digital soldier’.  Despite the recent setbacks to QAnon (the failure, for example, for Trump to declare martial law and refuse to leave office), Valerie Gilbert remains a true believer. The NYT article depicts a woman caught in a compelling affective loop. Her QAnon posts on Facebook, while alienating her from long-standing friends, are greeted with likes and “heart emojis” (NYT 2021) by her QAnon friendship.

Hanging on to the conspiracy theory, and by extension, the conspiracy theory community is as much as about avoiding negative emotion as it is about the serotonin hit that QAnon provides.

Recanting QAnon conspiracy theories poses fundamental challenges to identity and one’s personal epistemology, that is, how we know about the world and understand our place in it. To reckon with the fact that you were ‘conned’ into what amounts to an online RPG, means encountering emotions we often work so hard to avoid, like shame and embarrassment.

It also means abandoning the most potent lure of conspiracy thinking, the feeling of being right, and righteous. Conspiracy theories are a potent one-two punch. Not only do they provide a compelling narrative frame to understand a world that is so often beyond our grasp and comprehension, but they also offer a means of doing so. Conspiracy theories centre individuals as experts.  It is their problem-solving ability and their reading of the data that can uncover the truth.

For example, we can understand flat earth theories as persuasive because they appear to confirm what our senses tell us. For example, going to the top of the highest mountain in my local area will not show me the earth's curvature. Instead, it will seem from my vantage point that it spreads out horizontally towards the horizon. This epistemological orientation emphasises personal experience and self-belief as the most important form of world and knowledge building. This a heady cocktail that waives aside established knowledge with the promise that the truth is out there and you can discover it.

The individual is recentred in history's narrative arc as being in a unique position to understand the truth.

This is further reinforced through community bonds where others, operating on the same logic reaffirm, support and praise this approach. The internet is always on, providing a never-ending well of serotonin to access as true believers work to decipher clues, make connections, and in the case of QAnon be part of a history-changing event. Engaging in QAnon and other conspiracy style thinking feels good.  

The truth is much less exciting. Although real conspiracies do exist, are most often banal, they involve institution failure and yes, sometimes prolonged cover-up of that self-same failure. However, they owe more to disorganisation, neglect and self-interest, than they do to organised cabals bent towards maleficence (Jane and Fleming 2014).

In 2020 misinformation and conspiracy theories took centre stage in the cultural conversation. The panic-inducing pandemic, and the rise of QAnon, meant that more people were taking the challenges of misinformation seriously.

It is no surprise that QAnon really mainstreamed the year we spent a lot of time indoors. The usual social connections and interactions that might dissuade more than a casual flirtation with conspiracy vanished. Yes, we saw our friends, families and coworkers less, we were deprived of the incidental interactions that might act as a check on any serious drift from reality.

In the past, it was easy to dismiss conspiracy theory communities as harmless fantasists; after all, there was little demonstrable harm in believing that the moon landing was fake. Now, the stakes are much higher. Conspiracy theories have prompted waves of anti-vaccination sentiment which threatens the public health fight-back against covid-19. Most strikingly conspiracy theories prompted the insurrection in the Capitol on January 8th, egged on by sympathetic persons in positions of power. To understand why people were (and are) prepared to take such radical action, we must unravel the sticky emotional potencies of conspiracy and conspiracy communities.  

Further reading:

 Jane, E. and Fleming A. (2014) Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid, London: Bloomsbury.





The way you're making me feel: the personal and the pandemic

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I was going to write a post on what anti-vaxxers are doing during COVID-19, but mostly they are just posting affiliate links to super-strong Vitamin C on Amazon, and/or linking to their own webstore that sells, you guessed it, super-strong Vitamin C. Extra Vitamin C is a total scam by the way. They also view the latest measures to curb the growth of COVID-19 as a way to introduce mandatory vaccination. They’re advocating the use of Plaquenil and zinc as a way to treat the virus, as is the President. Some people have died as a result. As to be expected there’s also a lot of general denial about the seriousness of COVID-19.

So that was my starting point, and I found that in their denial anti-vaccination groups are sitting alongside conspiracy theories that attempt to undercut the seriousness of this crisis

Most recently a viral video of a quiet Brooklyn Hospital purported to show that the pandemic has been exaggerated by public health authorities. This resulted in the #FilmYourHospital hashtag where Twitter users were encouraged to go and film their local hospitals in an attempt to debunk the idea that COVID-19 is a public health emergency. There are thousands of replies to the original tweets including some with video and photos that appear to show empty hospitals. Prominent conservative pundits and have helped propel the videos to their followers. 

One day later a video from the same Brooklyn hospital shows bodies being loaded onto an eighteen-wheeler truck for transport. Reporters for NBC news have confirmed that this video is genuine.

Although we’re not yet filming our hospitals in Australia, we are spreading panic about busloads of city folk raiding regional supermarkets for supplies. I’ve heard it from friends, I’ve seen it on the accounts of prominent Australian journalists, each retweeted hundreds of times.

Although we’re not yet filming our hospitals in Australia, we are spreading panic about busloads of city folk raiding regional supermarkets for supplies. I’ve heard it from friends, I’ve seen it on the accounts of prominent Australian journalists, each retweeted hundreds of times.

 

It makes its way through Facebook groups, taking on racist tones, suddenly the busloads of phantom shopper are Chinese. 

In the age of ubiquitous smartphones, there is not one photo or video of these busloads raiding supermarkets. 

This urban (or regional) legend has been thoroughly debunked. The Guardian and Osman Faruqui did the hard yards, calling regional supermarkets and coach companies to check the veracity of the story.

  

I live in regional Victoria, earlier in March when Australia was in the grip of panic buying I liked, or perhaps I retweeted on of these claims.

It felt true, my town is small and the shelves were bare, it felt improbable that everyone around me had brought out the supermarkets.

We operate in information-saturated environments every day, and right now this is particularly pronounced. A day on Twitter can feel like a week.

Events move quickly on Twitter, exploding out of nowhere and subsiding just as quickly as the next event moves in. Days later, checking on Facebook, screenshots are shared there too. It feels like old news, it feels like last month, last year, but it has only been 24 hours.

Speed is not just about the tempo at which things happens but also the scale and spread of them. As a consequence, issues like the moderation of content on social platforms become increasingly complex. This is true not just for clearly objections violations of policy, but for the grey areas of misinformation as well and what type of information is allowed to circulate.

The volume of content is vast and continues to grow (quickly) on a daily basis. Speed is an important part of how information flows and circulates online.

So, we have an environment where a lot of information comes at us very fast, and we have no real way of sorting that information except on the basis of our own experience. In this environment we retreat almost instinctively to highly personalised ways of understanding the world, we trust what we can see or what we know others have seen, we trust our own experience of the world, we trust how we feel, or how something makes us feel.

We trust the personal more than the abstract. This alters the social context as individual ways of knowing about the world are presented as just as valid as expert ways of knowing, or in some instances more valid, as accessing the ‘truth’ behind the coverup.

We’ve been taught, through the project of neoliberal governance to rely only on ourselves, so it is perhaps no surprise that we retreat to our own logics of knowing when the world around us seems too fast, too loud and too slippery to grasp.

But defaulting to our experience makes us unruly (collectively, ironically). We buy more when we are told to stop, we go out when we should stay home, we tell our friends that hordes of people are raiding regional supermarkets, and sometimes we deny the virus exists at all. 

All this speed, all these feelings create rich and rapidly changing affective environments, particularly online, that rise and fall like waves. Our individual reckonings about what to share, about what feels true, begin to move beyond us. They become overwhelming and contagious but can also vanish in an instant.

How can we be in such a context? I could tell you to log off, to consume less? But as we self-isolate the same technologies that overwhelm us are also the ones that bring us comfort and connection.

And here we remain, suspended between the personal and the collective, how it feels and how it is.

On consent, friendship and conversation

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You know, you used to be pretty sure when a conversation was over. You would leave or hang up the phone, or disconnect from the internet and it would be done. Conversations were social accomplishments, discrete events that were bounded and open to analysis. Somewhere along the way conversations became more fluid, there was always the possibility of more, another text, another email.

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The Headphone

In June, my colleague Anne-Marie and I were contacted to expand on our previous ASMR work and contribute a chapter called “The Headphone” to the forthcoming The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, edited by Holger Schulze which will be out in 2020. This was a super fun project, and has a creative layout, that I think separates it from a typical handbook. We’ve uploaded a pre-print copy here for people to check out. (Usual disclaimers apply: not professionally copy-edited, some small errors may remain). This project really pushed us to write in a more poetic and creative ways than usual.

If you have any interest in the intersection of sound and the social world, this handbook has a really novel approach.

It’s divided into six sections: Living with Sonic Artifacts, Sounding Flesh, The Habitat in Sound, Sonic Desires, The Listening Machines, Sensologies.

I mean how could we say no after just an intriguing list of section headers? I mean!

ASMR and emotional labour

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For those of you that don’t know ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a ‘tingling’ physiological response and a relaxed state of euphoria, induced by sound. ASMR is often triggering by sound and otherwise mundane noises, including whispering, soft talking, typing, tapping, crinkling and scratching noises. My friend Anne Marie and I wrote a paper about it, if you’re interested in reading more.

The most important thing about ASMR is about connecting through sound, and reconnecting to the gentle and pleasurable spaces of life through sound, and I think this video from WhispersRed demonstrates this well.

Central to the possibility of connection, intimacy and pleasurable that ASMR affords is consent. This is particularly apparent in ‘personal attention’ videos. Personal attention videos are often styled around customer service interactions. Consent is present at every step of the video, videos often begin with a summary of what will take place, and at various key points, the next step is explained again, and consent sought for the interaction to proceed. This, I think, provides the viewer with a sense of security, safety and control, which only heightens the affective atmosphere of this particular type of ASMR video.

These customer service interactions are heightened versions of the IRL equivalent, focusing on sound. The interaction is highly personalised, relaxed and pleasant, they are interested in learning about you, your tastes and preferences. Whatever you want or need can be accommodated, no interpersonal effort is required on your behalf to sustain the interaction, it cannot be derailed or spoilt.

In these videos, ASRMtists are recreating and heightening the emotional labour (as per Hochschild) for their audience.

In many ways, the concept of emotional labour can be extended to the work of an ASMR YouTuber as a whole.

The purpose of ASMR is to make you feel good. It is the work of the ASMRtist to create an environment where the audience can experience ASMR, through sound, lighting, movement and appropriate affect.

The emotional labour is the job, is the point. Most jobs are (central core task) + (emotional labour); the genre of ASMR makes successfully performing and simulating successful emotional labour the central core task.

Through YouTube monetisation and sponsorship deals, the ability to perform emotional labour is commodified, and sold as a product unanchored from a ‘job’ (e.g. teaching, nursing, flight attendants).

When work becomes purely affective, how does this impact our relationships with our self? What happens with the production of affect becomes a job and what does it mean to become disenchanted and alienated from this type of labour?

A brief history of (some) internet slang: hot takes

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I always feel a little bit behind when it comes to internet slang. Terms seem to pop up and become ubiquitous overnight, sometimes disappearing just as quickly. In a series of posts, I will unpack internet slang and reflect a bit on how and why understanding the circulation and prevalence of internet vernacular is important.

Understanding the vernacular language of internet culture provides insight into what drives it: attention.

Attention is important not just because it affords notoriety, but also because the economic structure of the internet means it can be meaningfully translated into money. We live in a capitalist society; money is the thing.

Creating profit means exploiting both labour (e.g. freelancers) and attention.

Hot takes are an important part of both generating and exploiting attention.

Click driven online publishing models encourage inflammatory or misleading headlines designed to drive clicks, shares and engagement (clickbait).

This has created a cottage industry of hot takes, quickly generated opinion pieces tapping into a hot button issue. While opinion pieces have been around for decades, the hot take is a specific subset of the genre, and a relatively recent addition to internet slang.

According to Merriam-Webster (2018), a hot take is “a published reaction or analysis of a recent news event that doesn't offer much in the way of deep reflection.”

Hot takes are also driven by the need to be first. What makes them hot is their immediacy. Hot takes are often produced in the ‘moment of’ before the event or issue is fully played out, or context acknowledged. What makes hot makes immediate is what also makes them flimsy.

Think about a choc chip biscuit fresh out of the oven, it looks great it smells delicious, but the second you try to pick it up off the tray it will disintegrate, and possibly burn your tongue. To be truly enjoyable, it needs time to cool and solidify.

Hot takes are the same, they may look and smell enticing, but they are ultimately unsatisfying. Much could be improved by waiting, just a little bit. If this is true for eating biscuits, it is certainly true for comment on divisive and complicated issues.

A typology

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Three types of scholars in internet studies/digital sociology:

  • Locals: There all year around, grew up in town, possibly never left. Knows the secret histories and secret spots. Brings: Detailed, careful knowledge, expertise, long-term perspective. Cons: complacency, ‘but we’ve always…”

  • Holidaymaker: seasonal participant in the local communities, may stay for an entire summer or just a weekend. Some repeat visitors. Brings: money, fresh ideas, outside perspective, vibrancy. Cons: Hard to find a park, favourite café too busy, confuses seasonal knowledge with local understanding.

  • Drive By(ers): – Heading elsewhere, but they’ll get out of the car, stretch their legs, buy and sandwich and declare there’s nothing in this town anyway. Cons: Tweet on an almost weekly basis that isn’t it a shame that there’s no scholarship on the social implications of technology, what we really need a new field that examines that don’t you think? If only someone would!

Nothing wrong with some disciplinary holidaymaking, but there’s no substitute for local knowledge.