[-empyre-] Speaking of Fake...

Tue Jun 13 10:43:18 AEST 2017

Greetings Mark and greetings list, I wanted to jump in here at the suggestion of how to teach fake news. Well, I’m not sure I have any real answers to Fake News Pedagogy, but I wanted to share a little story about my Internet Art & Culture class at the School of Art, Design & Media / Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. 

Now Singapore may seem like an odd place to be infiltrating the academy with Fake News skills, but in fact my students embarked on a project to use Facebook Live to incorporate artistic fakery into their online practice. One of the students decided to stage a live broadcast from the student union as a fake reporter announcing that the university had gone 100% vegan. This seemingly harmless fake prank managed to get the attention of the university press office, and well in Singapore, you DO NOT WANT student parody to enter into the mainstream media (MSM) because people simply don’t do things like this and the press will think it’s the actual truth. 

This little incident made it all the way up the administrative ladder until our Chair asked the faculty whose student this was and that they needed to attach a disclaimer. I eagerly said me, because I recognized a real teaching moment here for my terrified student. The fact is, my student had a first-hand experience understanding how fakery can make its way into the MSM, and just how corrosive and disturbing it is to manipulate or distort the truth. In our everyday social media life on the Net, we forget just how volatile and viral our fake utterances can be. 

Of course, I have always believed that art should be dangerous and this assignment turned out to be the perfect way to educate the next generation of digital artists.  

Yours “truly,”

Randall

From: <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Mark Marino <markcmarino at gmail.com>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Date: Sunday, June 11, 2017 at 12:21 AM
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Speaking of Fake...

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------

We continue our discussion of the art of Fake News and art and Fake News (etc.) with a somewhat unusual course.

At the start of 2017, launching on Inauguration Day, Talan Memmott and I offered a course through UnderAcademy College entitled, How to Write and Read Fake News: Journullism in the Age of Trump.  UnderAcademy College is a non-degree granting un-institution founded on the model of Black Mountain College.

The course offered to teach how to write Fake News (is my capitalization of that bugging anyone else but me?), although we may not have entirely been in bed with the devil.   Or if we were in bed with the devil, we were doing an awful lot of faking it.  And, consequently, were quite unsatisfied with his performance but had forfeited our right to blame other people for the bed we had made.  So you know, basically feeling like most of America. You can see the sillybus here:

https://medium.com/the-fake-news-reader/the-fake-news-course-sillybus-d68953d6abf5

All of the materials for this class are freely available online for your own adaptation and perversion.  And I should mention that this course, like all UnderAcademy College courses, is free and that I (still) have not been paid for teaching said course.

Our first lesson was: How to Fake News, which you can see here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex8Zi15UTJo

In that lesson, we introduced our (patent-pending) 80-20-10 method for writing Fake News.  Now, none of our 100-or-so students, real and fake, have reported back on whether or not this lesson led to them making mad money from their  Fake News writing, but most accounts suggest that in spite of (or actually because of) a growing awareness of the scourge of Fake News, there's big money to be had.

And in the age of Trump, what more evidence of a successful educational operation could their be than loads of money -- or at least lawsuits?

How do you feel about teaching people to write Fake News as a response to Fake News? Does that sound sophomoric or are you just being uptight? We realize those aren't the only two options, so we have an open essay response we're also accepting but probably won't count towards your grade.  

Love,

Mark

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