In the second time in as many weeks, a peculiar phenomenon has swirled around the Internet: the erroneous meme. [0]
Within minutes, it seems, of Barack Obama’s statement disclosing the death of Osama bin Laden, Facebook, blogs filled up with quotes attributed to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and others about nonviolence, turning cheeks, and so on, particularly those that warned against taking joy or pride in the suffering or death in others. Primarily, one particular quote by Dr King became all the Internet rage, highly shared and published. Too bad it wasn't completely, or at all, Dr King's words verbatim, or even a close mash-up.
Flash forward a week. After the American public has come down from its cathartic high of an apparent end-of-a-chapter regarding the world’s (or, at least, America’s) most wanted terrorist, we see a new phenomenon spread across the ether in the form of remembering that there was a royal wedding of some sort or another in England recently. As such, posted all around the Internet-world is a photo – an apparent study in the uncanny – showing supposed similarities between the recent royal wedding and the Disney animated film Cinderella. Too bad that it, too, is a fake. Or, at least, in part. The comparison photo is doctored significantly to “factually” match the pictures from the royal wedding, but in the original film, Cinderella is a blonde, not a brunette; her enchanted gown is blue, not pristine white; the prince has dark hair – he’s no ginger or mussy brown-haired feller. The stepsisters’ gowns are likewise, obviously, altered to match the occasion. As one social media friend put it before
the facts were unleashed, “Disney must have a crystal ball.” While that could be true to a degree, the crystal ball needs some servicing. [1], and other social media across the digital realm sported – from humanist-minded individuals – a quote that has been misattributed to Martin Luther King. There is no evidence that King spoke those exact words, and at best, the quote is a conflation of various sources. The sentiment – to a humanist-leaning person like myself – is a beautiful one, but it was born out of inauspicious means as it takes portions of various speeches by King and throws them into a soup with other persons’ quotes.
The juxtaposition is below; underneath it are screen captures from the film itself.
My, my, my... I don't mean to sound catty, but it looks like you've had some work done.
The Original Ugly Sisters. (Not pictured: British folks) Yellow is the new red.
Our seeming lack of competition to debunk this faster than we raced to disprove the authenticity of the King quote aside, this speaks to a number of problems in how we absorb and understand information. Granted, these are no different from perpetual problems in journalism and historiography in general: how do we know what is truth? How can we compare records? What sort of research can we do in order to access actual facts? How do we know when we’re being lied to?
Rather, this attests to our seeming immediate acceptance of information without validating a source – and with a collective mentality of groupthink or sheer numbers outweighing the voice of reason, disproving the King “quote” or the doctored Disney pics becomes difficult in the face of a viral mimetic: if a person does not immediately spread the information and agree with a mass of persons who have already been sold to believing the information true and irrefutable, that person is seen as conspiratorially paranoid or cast into a bifurcated division. Or, worse, that person is seen as a non-actor, or a non-vector in a world of practically simultaneous information flow, and that person’s credibility as a source of information or an authority of any sort is questioned through demonstrated opposition to participating in perpetuation of a fallacy. Regardless the actual “truth” of the matter, that person, that non-vector, becomes diminished in the eyes of other participants.
This also attests to our submission of will to that of blind authority as well as to that of the benevolent lie.[2] Certainly, no one is harmed, per se, by altering a picture from a 1950 animated movie. If anything, just the opposite: a feeling of gratification, of familiarity, washes over the participant of the info-virus. It may even spur a few more sales or rentals of the film to see if the similarities are indeed that spot-on between Cindy and Prince, and Harry and Princess. If nothing else, YouTube will receive more ad revenue from people searching for copyright-infringing clips from the film or wedding. But, there is still something pernicious in this: some party knowingly alters a piece of information – something historically documented and very easy to verify or disprove with very little effort – in order to meld it with their own aims or agenda; or, in the King case, more innocently (perhaps), one person’s words are adjoined to another person’s words, and delineation – whether knowingly or unknowingly out of the heat of the moment or perceived immediacy – becomes unimportant, and, indeed, erased.[2,3] Again, this is nothing new. Tabloids, FOX News, MSNBC, “Journalism” programs on radio, the Internet, and cable – these all in some way or another alter, leave out, add, or decontextualise (or recontextualise) information in order to promote an agenda and promulgate a particular mode of thinking in line with their “core message” or their constituency (that is, the niche market that watches everything, commercial warts and all).
But here, we have an even more confounding problem: absent authority. The King quote started popping up rapidly on Twitter and Facebook without attribution of where it first originated. TheCinderella photo arose spontaneously, with no attribution of who created it. (Both things can be found through a lot of tedious backtracking) The democratization of information, ironically, has brought about (and this is just a pair of mild, recent examples) a democratization of authority [pi] ; paradoxically, rather than verifying or refuting each other in order to obtain the truth, we immediately accept as true and veritable that which can easily be shown to be untrue. This schizophrenic relationship invariably has existed for much longer than the past two weeks: snake oil salesmen, quack doctors, chain letters, and so on are but a few examples of blind or unknown authority, with greatly varying degrees of harm.[4] Still, the larger problem is that of a completely absent authority: a piece of information, a meme, something of the like is encountered, embraced as res ipsa loquitur, and disseminated immediately with a stark, stock reaction and greeted as factual – that is, until ownership, authorship, or creatorship is found, verified, vilified, debunked, or destroyed. Until such time, we appreciate and codify as true the piece of information without any apparent need or even desire to access authorship and creative ownership. [5]
Maybe McLuhan was ultimately correct in stating that medium is indeed the message.[6] And, to a quote I now attribute to Jim Nabors for no other reason than because I can, "you simply can’t believe everything you see [or read [on the Internet [or anywhere]]]." [7]
I should also, after the fact, editorially state that I am well aware that, at least, the Cinderella meme most likely originated from someone wondering aloud, "You know, this looks an awful lot like Cinderella," upon watching the Royal Wedding Highlight Reel and then potentially altering screen captures from the film and creating the "uncanny" juxtaposition document. However, it was most likely not presented as a hypothetical document, but proferred as a standalone, factual text that - regardless of disclaimers - was immediately encountered and assumed as truthful information by consumers and/or receivers of the information. And, as a true fallacy, it ballooned across the Internet like the dream of making $6000 a month working from home stuffing envelopes: a nice idea, sure, but impossible and rooted in benevolent deception.
Likewise with the King "quote" - the cobbler of the bastardized quote (who was revealed in the second link above) most likely meant no harm and was possibly not thinking of besmirching King's legacy - but rather a mildly opportunistic bent to have one's own words permeate the humanist-cybersphere (I know, I see the irony in it) was at play. Once the quote went viral on social media, it begat a kind of sanctity: it didn't look like King's words, or something looked amiss - but who, in a moment of national catharsis, whatever one's political or ethical ideals, is going to question such a pervasive object, or question the authentic authorship, without potentially invoking the sancrosanct (or sanctimonious) ire of the person reblogging or retweeting the quote? In a moment that generated a sort of undercurrent conflict through the apparent resolution of a larger, deeper, ongoing conflict, why stir up the waters and be seen as an attacker or discreditor of a text, especially if it is attributed to Martin Luther King - a legacy and personality we tend to look upon with awe and veneration?
Shrug.
***
0. I'm certain there are millions of erroneous or fallacious memes out there. The two discussed here are the only ones I noticed. So it goes.
1. In Disney's packaging,anyhow, Cinderella is the Beast That Takes on Many Forms: she is a redhead on the 1995 VHS cover; she appears as a blonde on the most recent packaging above – and she reappears with noticeably lighter hair in each sequel. In the 1950 film itself, she seems to vacillate between a run-of-the-mill blondie and at worst skews slightly ginger. There is also a fallacious, if not contrarian, assertion that the "wedding panel" in the comparison photograph originates from Sleeping Beauty; I don't buy it, because, well, it doesn't.
2. I refer in passing to a good deal of discussion in Sissela Bok's Lying and Secrets. In both, she deftly differentiates between forms of lying, actions versus intentions, and how we invariably strive but fail to ever attain or achieve such a thing as a "whole truth." So help us god. She also (in the latter book) discusses patterns of information flow and how we perceive, alter, diminish, or inflate information at every point during our existence, making ideals of truth-telling, confidentiality, and objectivity damn near impossible to ever attain.
3. Another interesting point of academic departure here is Zizek's characterization of secrecy and our knowledge - or lack thereof, willful or otherwise - of horrific ideals and actions. Using Cheney's half-hearted 2005 admission that there was indeed torture going on as contextual frame, Zizek calls into question the morality of what more there is to hide by making a feeble admission to an atrocity. This idea of "if you're going to do something secretly, why tell us" as a moral conundrum seems to fuel the sensationalism and apparent perfidy to truth as witnessed by the vast majority of "news" outlets: are we more morally reprehensbible because we didn't want to hear the truth, or are we more morally reprehensible because once we learned the truth - in whatever small, incomplete form - we were incensed and wanted to either unlearn it or end the truth? Zizek contends that through these actions and confrontations of partial truths, we slowly degrade a "spontaneous" moral consciousness - which seems to be a perpetual catalyst for compassion fatigue and disaffection. Or, maybe, this is a wild and elaborate way of saying that humans can only through perennial naivete retain a proper sense of shock at atrocities, crises, disasters, and falsehoods.
[pi]. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR! DEATH OF THE AUTHOR! DEATH OF THE AUTHOR! (Maybe?)
4. For a good time - if rather verbose and occasionally convoluted - I suggest Adorno's collection "The Stars Down to Earth," wherein Adorno dissects (too thoroughly) and problematizes the phenomenon of horoscopes as agents of blind authority and our willingness - nay, eagerness - to hear vagueness from unknown sources as auspicious harbingers for our daily mundanities.
5. Let's not get things like scientific or mathematical theorems, axioms, and the like mixed up with this. There are constant, fixed pieces of information that may or may not have authorship but can be verified through scientific and mathematical reasoning, and then there are informational pieces and elements of human experience that have creators: namely, for example, our entire recorded history.
6. Don't quote me on this.
7. Especially this essay.
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