We traffic in lies

The title of this post is a paraphrase of David Reiff, Senior Fellow, World Policy Institute at The New School and author, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. Reiff was a recent guest on Open Source radio. The conversation was intended to be about a recommended reading list for Congressional democrats, a canon of fundamental ideas that will be the backbone of a principled governing agenda.

He went off on a tangent about how we are steeped in lies from the way we conduct our politics and political campaigns to our daily immersion in advertising and the clever avoidances we enact about skirt the subject of our death. I was struck with how little we confront this contradictory "reality of lies," and how the web amplifies the lies as much as mainstream media or cultural myths embedded in our education.

• YouTube is full of political and corporate propaganda. Most of it is exposed, but it will only get worse.
• The "Lonely Girl" video on YouTube revealed how the veneer of amateur authenticity can be copied and exploited. Some called it art, other called it a lie.
• Now there are companies that pay bloggers to blog about products. Ethics demands that bloggers disclose. Many won't. How does this damage the peer review power of aggregated individual opinion?
• Stephen Colbert famously coined the term "wikiality" and attempted to prove that reality can be anything we can make stick to a wiki. His experiment was thwarted perhaps only because it was so public.

This all reaffirms how vigilant we must be at protecting the commons from those who would deface or manipulate it. Educators can't run from this reality. We must help our students gain the literacy to root out the lies. When Alan November visited in early October he showed us how MartinLutherKing.org, on the surface a tribute to the civil and human rights leader, was really a front site for Stormfront, a white supremacist organization. Then using Google search paramaters, revealed how many web sites with .edu extensions were linking to this site.

Shocking.

I see resistance to acquiring this literacy. The web is used to manufacture identity whether through MySpace accounts or Second Life avatars, many lead an online life that is an exaggeration if not reinvention of who we are.

I wonder, if we are not careful, if all the web could become a fun house.

Technorati Tags: Lies, wikiality, YouTube, campaigns