The quest to satisfy human needs, wants, and desires has been the fuel that has enabled globalization to take off at the pace it currently is going through. In addition, the developments in technology and transportation has enabled the rapid movement of ideas and people from the remotest areas of the Earth. This is what has led to the current world being referred to as a global village. The movement created numerous networks has invariably led to the exchange of cultures and ways of lives from different corners of the world at a pace that was unthinkable a few centuries back. This paper seeks to bring the limelight the power dynamics that has resulted in the resurgence and spread of fake news in information space.
Your reader has no idea who you are referring to Mary Louise Pratt looks into the relationship that exists between a subordinate and dominant individual. It is this concept of imbalance in power that she expounds on and gives examples from the past and in the present, using the experience of her own son, to clearly bring out the concept. She manages to introduce two terms, “autoethnography” and “transculturation”, that arise from the concept of different ideas mixing resulting into the creation of a unique mix of two different cultures (Pratt,234).
Autoethnography is the most discussed term by Pratt and it refers to an approach to research and writing that seeks to analyze personal experience and use the results of this analysis to understand cultural experience (Adams,438). In addition, the experience that is looked into is a mixture of cultural views from the dominant and subordinate cultures.
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Pratt looks into the ways through which writing can help define the areas where two cultures meet, hence the term contact zone. This contact of cultures leading to exchange of cultural values is what Pratt refers to as transculturation. The scenario plays out in such a way that individuals caught in the middle of the clash of cultures are forced to evolve and gradually begin taking up the cultural practices of the dominant culture, from the way of life to the language that is spoken. In most cases, it results in the development of a hybrid cultural system including cultural practices from both ends. In more extreme cases, the subordinate culture ends up being encapsulated by the dominant one.citaiton needed here
Fake news are false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or by use of other media, usually for political mileage or for satirical purposes (Cambridge Dictionary). In addition, the false stories are misleading by design with the overall intention of manipulating the target audience cognitive ability so as to achieve a specific objective (Gelfert 186). Deliberate misinformation has been in existence for as long as civilization.
Proliferation on a massive scale on the other hand coincided with the development of printing which enabled the mass production of newspapers and periodicals which saw a rapid rise in sensationalist propaganda and outright manipulation of facts (The public domain review). The main objective of sensational reporting at this time was mainly for commercial purposes as newspapers printing houses competed to sell the highest number of newspaper copies.
Population growth and further developments in governance structures worldwide led to the proliferation of misinformation with the main objective of attaining a set political objective.
This has been the mainstay of fake news from the times of the American Civil War, to Hitler’s Nazi regime propaganda to the current situation that exists in America and other areas of the world where fake news from the times of the American civil war, to Hitler’s Nazi regime propaganda to the current situation that exists in America and other areas of the world where fake news has becoe a normal part of life. This has been aided by the developments in technology and the internet that has enabled individuals with the knowledge to utilize technology to have access to have access to a large mass of people that are easily reachable while at the same time one is able to remain anonymous.
Developments in these two fields have given life to the fake news machinery and this is a result of the ability of the perpetrators of such to be able to remain anonymous while at it in addition to the low cost that the internet has enabled circulation of such news to be done at. The 2016 presidential elections in November 2016, Wikileaks, the whistleblowing website, published emails from the campaign manager of the then Democratic Presidential Candidate, Hillary Clinton, on twitter, that marked the start of the conspiracy that became known as Pizza gate.
It alleged that the prominent members of the Democratic Party were involved in a satanic pedophilia ring and that they were using a well-known pizza joint in Washington DC to carry out their actions. The opponents of Hillary Clinton, The Republicans, who were on the side of the current President Trump, unbelievingly took this as the truth and used it as a weapon to mudsling her name in the public domain. Things took a deadly rout when a month after the story came out into the public, a lone gunman opened fire on the mentioned pizza joint with the intention of freeing the children that were supposedly being held there (Tuters, 28).
The main reason for this fake news story taking a life of its own was because of the polarizing situation that was in existence in the country at that point in time. Supporters of the Republican Candidate Trump needed any reason to malign their opponent’s name and as such they made use of the uncertainty to create hysteria that enabled the story to get into the mainstream public discourse. capitalized on the stories supposed power imbalance in which Democratic Party members who were in authority was using their power to abuse helpless children while the government was not taking any actions.
It is this narrative that they used to create an emotional connection, especially with the Republican supporters who used this as a reason to instigate violence against an establishment that was eventually found to have been an innocent victim of a political contest. An analysis of the fake news that was spread during the 2016 American general elections established that people were more likely to believe stories that favored their preferred candidate, especially if the news was from an ideologically segregated social media network. (Allcott 342).
President Trump on the other hand has been at loggerheads with mainstream media houses from the campaign period into his current term. He’s been categorical that these media houses are not objective in their reporting and as such every time they report him in bad light, he refers to their fake news. His election caught the world by surprise as the mainstream media polls all showed that his opponent had an upper hand in the elections (Happer, 213). From then on, he has capitalized on this to garner sympathy support especially in cases where his administration has been found questionable dealings. Immediately after his victory, there emerged a theory that the 2016 elections had been tampered with by an external party and hackers from Russia were the ones being floated as having been the cause.
The democratic party and their supporters have used such news in their quest to discredit the President and utilize it in their campaign against him for re-election.
This is a clear example of how the political class is able to capitalize on any situation that favors them and the measures that opponents are willing to take to mitigate against such.
It is evident from the discussion above that fake news has been part of human civilization and the technological advancements that followed it provided the fuel that enabled these non-factual and/or fabricated stories to spread amongst the population. Initially, it was done for commercial purposes mostly but in modern times, the control of the population through spreading of ideologies especially for political mileage and control has taken exploded. This explosion has created an environment where it is difficult to separate the fake news from the real ones.
It therefore calls for the need for that have well-developed internet infrastructure to put mechanisms that can better protect the end consumers from accessing fake news or empower them to be able to tell them apart. From the incident that took place at the pizza joint in Washington D.C, it is evident that the spread of fake news has the ability of radicalizing individuals within a country to an extent of deadly violence occurring.
Works Cited
- Adams, Tony E., et al. “Autoethnography.” The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, 2017, pp. 1-11.
- Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 211-36, doi:10.1257/jep.31.2.211.
- ArtsColumbia. “Arts Of The Contact Zone By Pratt Essay Example For Students – 1108 Words.” Artscolumbia, 26 May 2018, artscolumbia.org/literary-arts/prose/arts-of-the-contact-zone-by-pratt-50106/.
- Cambridge Dictionary. “FAKE NEWS | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary.” Cambridge Dictionary | English Dictionary, Translations & Thesaurus, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fake-news. Accessed 5 Nov. 2019.
- Gelfert, Axel. “Fake News: A Definition.” Informal Logic, vol. 38, no. 1, 2018, pp. 84-117.
- Happer, Catherine, et al. Trump’s Media War. Springer, 2018.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595469. - The Public Domain Review. “Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century.” The Public Domain Review, 21 Feb. 2017, publicdomainreview.org/collections/yellow-journalism-the-fake-news-of-the-19th-century/.
- Tuters, Marc, et al. “Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit.” Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 21, no. 3, 2018, journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1422.
