This week, we are going to explore the concepts of the law of one price and the theory of purchasing power parity. In brief, these tell us that in the absence of trade barriers, the same pr

1

1 INTRODUCTION

R ead the following headlines and determine if the statements are true or false.

True or False? Ariana Grande Left Bloodied and Dazed after Manchester Bombing

True or False? Native American Names Deleted off Facebook

True or False? London Mayor Sadiq Khan Says Citizens Have No Reason to Be Alarmed Following Terror Attack

True or False? J. K. Rowling Mocks President Trump for Tweeting in the Third Person

True or False? Ireland Just Elected Their First Gay Prime Minister

True or False? Man Mowed Lawn during Tornado

True or False? Maxine Waters Blames the London Attack on Climate and Health Care “Inaction”

True or False? Fish Swim in the Streets of Miami at High Tide

▪ Why do these headlines ring true or false?

▪ If you saw these headlines on social media, would you share them with your networks? Why or why not?

▪ How would you present and explain these examples to others? What strategies and resources would you suggest?

See the “Revisiting the Headlines” section of this book’s “Conclusion” for an explanation and discussion about these headlines.

FAKE NEWS IS OLD NEWS

A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

—Quote often attributed to author Terry Pratchett, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, James Watt, and various others

It’s no secret that the Internet is saturated with information of all kinds, and much of the information is of low or no quality. Yet, before we can blink, this information makes the rounds without being confirmed. It is all too easy to believe the latest gossip

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 8 . A L A E d i t i o n s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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2 C H A P T E R 1

or innuendo or get lost in YouTube videos featuring pets and pranks. Unfortunately, there is another, darker dimension of information found online—there is an excessive amount of web-based information that is both sensational and malicious, to the point of being harmful and even dangerous. Even if such information is corrected or disproved, the audience’s attention has long shifted, the damage has already been done, and the original misinformation continues to float around online for future discovery.

It is now said that we live in a post-truth era—an era in which audiences are increasingly likely to believe information that appeals to their emotions and their personal beliefs, as opposed to seeking and accepting information that is regarded as factual and objective. People’s information consumption is being increasingly guided by the affective, or emotional, dimension of their psyche, as opposed to the cognitive dimension. This post-truth reality is one of the reasons why fake news has become so inescapable, and consequently, why it’s so hard to combat and interrupt the production and dissemination of deliberately false information.

The phenomenon of fake news is not new, nor is the concept of post-truth. The Colbert Report introduced us to the concept of “truthiness” over a decade ago, warning us, albeit comically, of the danger of accepting information and stories because they appeal to our emotions and not because they are supported by any real evidence or facts (Colbert 2005). Now, in 2018, journalists and the media remain on high alert and are warning their constituents about the “production of confusion” that surrounds the current presidential administration and encourages the industry that is fake news. Alternative facts are disseminated daily, and fact-based information or reporting that is negative or objected to is quickly and erroneously labeled as fake news, further obfuscating and suppressing information that citizens should be aware of and prioritizing.

THE NEED TO BE MULTI-LITERATE In an age in which tweets and Facebook statuses are being reported as news, Internet users need to be competent and intelligent users of information; information consumers should be able and prepared to critique the “news” being broadcast, and they should be able to seek and find the information that is not being broadcast or otherwise prioritized. Additionally, they should be able to describe and understand the difference between the various providers and provocateurs of information. An approach to reaching this level of critical media consumption is to impart literacy skills to Internet users, many of whom patronize our libraries. Specifically, critical information literacy (Elmborg 2006; Eisenberg et al. 2004), digital literacy (Bawden 2008; Bawden and Robinson 2002), media literacy (Buckingham 2013; Hobbs 2011; De Abreu 2010), and ultimately metaliteracy (Jacobson and Mackey 2016, 2013; Mackey and Jacobson 2014, 2011; Witek and Grettano 2014) would facilitate the average user’s ability to seek, find, and use appropriate and quality information, which in turn would facilitate more meaningful learning and understanding. Literacy skills would facilitate a shift from the routine crowd-sourcing

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3 I N T R O d U C T I O N

of information on the Internet to the substantive evaluation and usage of information. Further discussion about metaliteracy and the importance of critical information skills appears in chapter 4 of this report.

Information creation and consumption will always be a significant part of our lives and our society, influencing how we understand and interact with the world. But the more information we have access to, the harder it becomes to pick out the good bits, use them, and relevantly apply them to our lives and individual needs. Formulating ways to educate users of all ages, inside and outside of formal educational and library settings, is an important topic that is not limited to any one area or group of people, or any one discipline of study. The procurement and implementation of literacy skills is a long-term and integral part of addressing the challenges involved in information consumption.

UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT STATE OF THE MEDIA Of particular note to this conversation is the role of journalism in the sphere of fake news. Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor of journalism at New York University (2017), warns against low-quality journalism and describes the “production of confusion” wrought in part by fake news and alternative facts by stating:

The production of confusion is a method that the Trump White House is using as control, and the fact that when we’re done listening to Kellyanne Conway, we know less as viewers doesn’t seem to bother the journalists who interview her, and they’re sort of slow in accommodating this fact.

The production of confusion is facilitated by the current administration’s knowledge of the media’s “deep grammar” and their subsequent manipulation of news outlets— they know that the media needs to have access to them, to interview them, to be privy to information and documents they are producing. Rosen suggests that this “deep grammar” of the media (the underlying and implicit business model of how the news outlets function) causes them to lower, or ignore, their standards and ethics, and not challenge fake news and alternative facts in the way they know that they could or should, because in doing so, they could inadvertently cut off their sources of information, rendering them noncompetitive (for example, when the New York Times is banned from White House press briefings, they are at a disadvantage when trying to analyze and report the news). Rosen further describes the “deep grammar” of the press by saying:

The deep grammar is like the logic beneath the practice. So, for example, the fact that you need your interviewees to come back is part of the deep grammar of journalism, right? It affects a lot of what you do but it’s not on the surface, it’s not explained to viewers. It’s not something that journalists would talk about very often. But certainly, Kellyanne Conway knows that and it gives her an advantage because she knows she has to be welcomed back.

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4 C H A P T E R 1

But again, none of this is new. Journalism and media outlets are no strangers to controversy and manipulative tactics, nor are government or corporate entities unfamiliar with devices used to curry favor with, or penalize, journalists and the media. Consider the legacies of yellow journalism and propaganda and their particular relationships to political information and world events. Yellow journalism, synonymous with “the penny press,” “jazz journalism,” “tabloid TV,” and “Internet gossip,” is characterized by sensational or dramatic language and headlines, and exaggerated and potentially scandalous content that is poorly researched and often without merit (Cohen 2000, 8). Such stories are generated solely for attention and revenue (i.e., click-bait). Modern-day tabloids still engage in these practices, and social media is ripe with fantastic headlines and descriptions whose sole purpose is to get users to click and share. The goal is to employ “circulation-building gimmicks” that emphasize “drama over accuracy” (Cohen 2000, 18).

Propaganda is information of a prejudiced or disingenuous nature that is used to encourage a political cause or point of view (Stanley 2015). Propaganda utilizes the psychological devices of influencing and altering the attitude of a group toward a specific cause, position, or political agenda in an effort to form a consensus and to ensure a homogeneous viewpoint or belief. Propaganda is information that is subjective and is used primarily to influence the target audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (perhaps lying by omission), or by using coded or suggestive messages or language to elicit an emotional response, as opposed to a rational response. Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups and corporate entities can also engage in propaganda. Despite its long historical context, propaganda is alive and well, and it has been at the heart of the criticism levied against Facebook after the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Shane and Goel 2017). Facebook at first denied any involvement in the dissemination of purchased advertisements designed to sway social media users, but it later admitted that fake Russian accounts purchased approximately $100,000 in targeted political ads prior to the election. The full effect of these ads is not yet known, but it has been established that these ads reached many people and may indeed have influenced their thinking and opinions, particularly if people did not realize that the information presented in the ads was fake. Propaganda is hiding in plain sight and influencing great multitudes of information consumers every day.

A cursory understanding of political economy and the underlying business structures of the news media is an important context for appreciating why fake news is so widespread and difficult to contest. More discussion about political economy, and the media’s impact on information evaluation and consumption, is featured in chapter 3.

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CHAPTER 1

Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity

1.1. INTRODUCTION

Meet the Alvin family. Pete is a 45-year-old biology teacher whose hobby is paragliding. He has a Facebook page, although lately he has been negligent in maintaining his network of “friends.” Through LinkedIn, Pete keeps up his professional profile and occasionally hooks up with other members from the national teachers union. An early adopter of social media, he became an enthusiastic contributor to Wikipedia in 2004, and still adds infrequent entries about his specialty, lizards, to the online encyclopedia. Pete also used to be a member of a paragliding group on YouTube, which, back in 2006, actively communicated via short videos of spectacular glides; the group later dissipated, and he only sporadically checks the site for interesting glides. Pete’s wife Sandra is a former journalist who now makes money as a freelance publicist specializing in food. She has over 8,000 fol- lowers on Twitter and keeps an elaborate blog that also serves as her per- sonal public relations site. An active family of “netizens,” the Alvins order books via Amazon and download music via iTunes; Sandra uses Skype to have video chats with her brother in Hong Kong; their 16-year-old daugh- ter Zara is a fanatic Facebook user—456 friends right now—and she also uses Pinterest for “pinning” and sharing photos; and their 12-year-old son Nick is a devoted gamer, who has recently discovered CityVille, a social network game developed by Zynga.

The Alvins represent a middle-class family in an average American town in the year 2012. Over the past decade, their professional and personal lives have gradually become inundated with social media platforms. Platforms

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 3 . O x f o r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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[ 4 ] The Culture of Connectivity

like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and many others enable people like the Alvins to make connections by sharing expressive and communicative con- tent, building professional careers, and enjoying online social lives. In fact, the widespread presence of platforms drives people to move many of their social, cultural, and professional activities to these online environments. Teenagers like Zara Alvin cannot imagine a life without Facebook, and San- dra has become primarily dependent on Twitter for maintaining customer relations. Pete, however, has become less active on—and more critical of— the sites he used to frequent several years ago.

Now multiply the Alvins. Every single day, millions of individuals inter- act through social media. In December 2011, 1.2 billion users worldwide— 82 percent of the world’s Internet population over age 15—logged on to a social media site, up from 6 percent in 2007.1 Within less than a decade, a new infrastructure for online sociality and creativity has emerged, pene- trating every fiber of culture today. Social media, roughly defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and tech- nological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010: 60), form a new online layer through which people organize their lives. Today, this layer of platforms influences human interaction on an individual and community level, as well as on a larger societal level, while the worlds of online and offline are increasingly interpenetrating. Originally, the need for connected- ness is what drove many users to these sites. When Web 2.0 first marshaled the development of so-called social media, in the early years of the new millennium, participatory culture was the buzzword that connoted the Web’s potential to nurture connections, build communities, and advance democracy. Many platforms embraced this rekindled spirit when they started to make the Web “more social.”

With the rapid growth of social media platforms came the incorporation of sites by existing and new information companies. Companies often appeared less interested in communities of users than in their data—a by- product of making connections and staying connected online. Connectivity quickly evolved into a valuable resource as engineers found ways to code information into algorithms that helped brand a particular form of online sociality and make it profitable in online markets—serving a global market of social networking and user-generated content. Large and influential plat- forms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn exploded in terms of users and monetizing potential, alongside countless smaller profit and nonprofit sites. As a result of the interconnection of platforms, a new infra- structure emerged: an ecosystem of connective media with a few large and many small players. The transformation from networked communication to

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E NGINE E R ING S O C I A L I T Y IN A CULTUR E OF CONNE CT I VI T Y [ 5 ]

“platformed” sociality, and from a participatory culture to a culture of connectivity, took place in a relatively short time span of ten years.

This chapter’s argument focuses not on a descriptive account of how social media affected one family, but on the need for a critical history of the rise of social media. Such a history is needed to comprehend current ten- sions in the ecosystem in which platforms and ever-larger groups of users operate. By exploring technical, social, economic, and cultural perspectives on social media, we can elucidate how recent changes in our global media landscape have profoundly affected—if not driven—our experience of sociality.

1.2. FROM NETWORKED COMMUNICATION

TO PLATFORMED SOCIALITY

The invention of the World Wide Web in 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee man- aged to connect hypertext technology to the Internet, formed the basis of a new type of networked communication. Weblogs, list-servers, and e-mail services helped form online communities or support offline groups. Until the turn of the millennium, networked media were mostly generic services that you could join or actively utilize to build groups, but the service itself would not automatically connect you to others. With the advent of Web 2.0, shortly after the turn of the millennium, online services shifted from offering channels for networked communication to becoming interactive, two-way vehicles for networked sociality (Castells 2007; Manovich 2009). These new services, which opened up a myriad of possibilities for online connections, were initially perceived as a new global infrastructure, like water pipes or electricity cables, analogues to the Web itself.

It is a truism to say that media have historically coevolved with the pub- lic that uses them, as well as with the larger economy of inscription. The world’s complex constellations of media, in the view of Lisa Gitelman, should be conceived as the “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated pro- tocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized colloca- tion of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation” (2008: 7). Over the past two centu- ries, media technologies matured as part of everyday social practices. Generic technologies like the telephone and the telegraph developed in con- junction with communicative routines or cultural practices, such as chat- ting on the phone or sending short messages over the wire. As a medium coevolves with its quotidian users’ tactics, it contributes to shaping people’s

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[ 6 ] The Culture of Connectivity

everyday life, while at the same time this mediated sociality becomes part of society’s institutional fabric. Media histories and archaeologies provide ample evidence of this complex coevolution, relating technologies to users and organizations to infrastructures (Winston 1998; Kittler 1999; Zielinski 1999; Marvin 1988).

With Web 2.0 maturing into a functional infrastructure, users moved more of their everyday activities to online environments; these activities were not simply channeled by platforms, but programmed with a specific objective. This move shifted the emphasis from providing a utility to pro- viding a customized service—a transformation akin to the change from delivering water through pipelines to distributing bottled Evian water or to a water-filtering system. Whereas before, websites were generally operated as conduits for social activity, the new platforms increasingly turn these conduits into applied services, rendering the Internet easier to use but more difficult to tinker with. Social media platforms, as they are now commonly called, epitomize the larger conversion from all-purpose devices to linear applied services—a development that Jonathan Zittrain (2008: 104–7) has persuasively touted as “appliancization.” When companies started to build their platforms on the generic Web 2.0 infrastructure, they often presented themselves as utilities transmitting communication and information data. But even if many big platforms still want people to think of them as such, this layer of applied platforms is anything but a neutral utility exploiting a generic resource (data): they built on the “ideological and technological” foundations of Web 2.0, as Kaplan and Haenlein suggest in the definition quoted above.

Indeed, most Web 2.0 platforms started out as indeterminate services for the exchange of communicative or creative content among friends. These services often emanated from community-bound initiatives—a group of college students, photo aficionados, video enthusiasts—who adopted a specific niche of online interaction and developed a mediated routine practice. It is a common fallacy, though, to think of platforms as merely facilitating networking activities; instead, the construction of plat- forms and social practices is mutually constitutive. Sociality and creativity happen while people are busy living their lives. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), proposes that people use tactics to negotiate the strategies that are arranged for them by organizations or institutions. That is precisely what happened with the development of social media plat- forms and the apps built on top of them: users “negotiate” whether and how to appropriate them in their quotidian habits.

Many of the habits that have recently become permeated by social media platforms used to be informal and ephemeral manifestations of social life.

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E NGINE E R ING S O C I A L I T Y IN A CULTUR E OF CONNE CT I VI T Y [ 7 ]

Talking to friends, exchanging gossip, showing holiday pictures, scribbling notes, checking on a friend’s well-being, or watching a neighbor’s home video used to be casual, evanescent (speech) acts, commonly shared only with selected individuals. A major change is that through social media, these casual speech acts have turned into formalized inscriptions, which, once embedded in the larger economy of wider publics, take on a different value. Utterances previously expressed offhandedly are now released into a public domain where they can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects. Social media platforms have unquestionably altered the nature of private and public communication.

From the late 1990s onward, Blogger (1999),Wikipedia (2001), Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), and a wide array of ensuing platforms began to offer web tools that sparked old and new online communication tactics. Most organizations operating these platforms aimed at penetrating a particular online activity with their coding technologies, and, ideally, their brand name would become the marker for a specific mediated activity. Brands such as Twitter, YouTube, MSN, and Skype have become synonyms for microblogging, video sharing, chatting, and videoconferencing—novel communicative interactions these platforms either co-developed or helped redesign. The pinnacle of a com- pany’s success in permeating a social activity is when a brand turns into a verb. The earliest example of such coding and branding phenomena in the online world is the evolution of “googling,” now a synonym for online search. Googling, following Gitelman’s definition above, could be called a “ritualized collocation” that developed in a “larger economy of inscription.” Online searching—for example, looking up the meaning of a word, check- ing for the latest movies, or finding a specific scholarly source—has become part of an everyday routine. Simultaneously, this routine nested itself in the heart of a larger online economy of inscription, where search engines form the valves of content distribution. Few platforms have reached the stage where their brand has turned into a verb; at this point in time, “skyp- ing” and “tweeting” perhaps come closest.2

Evidently, social media platforms, rather than being finished products, are dynamic objects that are tweaked in response to their users’ needs and their owners’ objectives, but also in reaction to competing platforms and the larger technological and economic infrastructure through which they develop (Feenberg 2009). In the year 2000, the Web that would come to sustain online sociality and creativity was still a vast unexplored territory, where boundaries between different mediated activities had yet to be demarcated. It was a new frontier, a bonanza where rules and laws from the “old” territories no longer applied and new ones had not crystallized yet.

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[ 8 ] The Culture of Connectivity

The earliest cultivators of this new land were search engines, browsers, and web directories; of the many search engines that sprang up around the turn of the millennium, Google Search—including its many specialized services— has emerged victorious, leaving a few small engines trailing behind.3 Like web browsers, search engines tend not to be presented as applications built to search, navigate, and connect information on the WWW, but they are conspicuously equated to the Web itself.4 Over the past decade, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of social media platforms as each one of them tried to occupy the largest possible chunk of this new terrain. Whereas some have succeeded (Facebook, YouTube), others have waxed and waned (Flickr, Myspace), and yet others have quietly disappeared (remem- ber Xanga?). On top of this layer, millions of application program interfaces (APIs) and services have been built that depend on the services of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so on, for their success, and new ones emerge every day. The entire ecosystem of interconnected platforms and applications has been in flux and will remain volatile for some time to come.

While it would be virtually impossible to inventory all platforms and their individual evolutions, it makes analytical sense to distinguish various types of social media. A major type involves what is called “social network sites” (SNSs). These sites primarily promote interpersonal contact, whether between individuals or groups; they forge personal, professional, or geo- graphical connections and encourage weak ties. Examples are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare. A second category concerns sites for “user-generated content” (UGC): they support creativity, fore- ground cultural activity, and promote the exchange of amateur or profes- sional content. Well-known UGC sites are YouTube, Flickr, Myspace, GarageBand, and Wikipedia. On top of these, we can add the category of trading and marketing sites (TMSs): these sites principally aim at exchang- ing products or selling them. Amazon, eBay, Groupon, and Craigslist come to mind as noteworthy examples. Another distinctive category consists of play and game sites (PGS), a flourishing genre with popular games such as FarmVille, CityVille, The Sims Social, Word Feud, and Angry Birds. This classification of social media platforms is far from exhaustive, and integrat- ing the various types into a single book-length argument would be undoa- ble. For this reason, I will focus primarily on SNS and UGC sites here as the main grounds on which online sociality and creativity have developed.

Important to add here is that there are no sharp boundaries between various platform categories because carving out and appropriating one or more specific

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