My colleague Asif Devji and I are doing the Digital Literacy course at the University of Manitoba and I thought this interchange might be worth posting
To give some context:
We were asked to read several online papers on Information Literacy and suggest ways we might include this in our classrooms. That lead to Asif Devji's response and our discussions below
Asif
As an exercise on information literacy, I might ask my students to visit the following web site: http://www.nytimes-se.com/After they checked it out, we'd have a discussion about what they found there and about the reliability of newspapers as sources of information.I'd then inform them of the source of that site:From democracynow.org (Nov. 13, 2008):
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.This could open up an interesting discussion on the hoaxters, their motivations, and the hoaxes they were hoaxing It would also lead to some (re)consideration of available authoritative information sources...and their vested interests.
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.This could open up an interesting discussion on the hoaxters, their motivations, and the hoaxes they were hoaxing It would also lead to some (re)consideration of available authoritative information sources...and their vested interests.
RationalBob
Asif:The reason this spoof is so humorous is because, lkke in all great comedy, the kernel of truth that rears it's head and makes you sit somewhere between gut-wrenching laughthe and head-pounding sobbing. Lennie Bruce and George Carlin (among others ) were masters of this visionary style of comedy. The glimmer of hope in some of the 'fake' headlines is what draws people in, only to realize much to their chagrin that it's not ( as they were hoping) true. There is something really sad and disconcerting about this breif glimmer of hope that things could be as in this paper. Alas it is not to be so and we trudge back to reality and the "REAL" news headlines which never seem to change or enligthen. I think this is a great jumping off point then for students to analyze newspapers as complicit in the status quo instead of being a critical and informative medium , a watch dog for society which is shamefully inadequate today.In my optional tech classes I had to drop my media literacy unit as too many kids were dropping the course due to the "ELA" component, a death knell for my courses if I continued. Sad!
Asif
Hi Robert,That "brief glimmer of hope," which momentarily allows us to 'believe' something we know is not true, is scary.It says something about our current technologies of simulation, and how easy it is to create a 'reality' or a 'truth'.It is also encouraging, because it shows that we are able to 'see' things from alternative and even contradictory perspectives -- Another world is possible and Yes we can describe politics of change based on conscious articulations of alternative visions of reality/truth and the future.
RationalBob
Asif; I love your optimism. I truly hope that it will be, as Siddharaj Dhadda says in the movie FLOW:For the Love of Water,"the century of the common man" since our current unsustainable and undemocratic systems create a demand for something different if homo sapiens are to survive. Yes another world is possible, but it will come I fear, as history tends to keep repeating itself, at a tremendous cost to the least fortunate in the world: those without the money or the infrastructure of 'knowledge-based' economies. This is implicit in every document I read from the UNESCO or UN but no one seems to addressing it.It's a case of "treat the symptom's not find a cure." The current power/control structures in the world represent to me an enormous hurdle which almost makes discussions about Open Source and Online or distributed education moot. Not that we can't strive toward these ideals, but I think a very critical eye must be focused on those who exert the control or who dictate knowledge to the uncritical minds of the world. Remember "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790 As always, nice chattingCheers!
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