The Year in Internet: The Rise of the #Hoax Economy - Hollywood Prospectus Blog - Grantland
▻http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/95239/the-year-in-internet-the-rise-of-the-hoax-economy
No, 2013 was the year we were tricked, catfished, and hoaxed. Of course it was! We were so empowered by our ability to make a difference via virtual means that we forgot how vulnerable that made us to trickery. When we saw something outrageous, we were outraged, millions of us all at once; when someone was wronged, we jumped at the chance to come to his or her rescue. We didn’t bother to verify our stories; we just believed them.
What these hoaxes say about our culture is too complicated to be fully understood yet. It’s not just liars and half-cats: This is about capitalism, and ambition, and keyboards mightier than swords. Our approach to the digital world, contained within the physical one (still separate but, in many ways, no less important or influential), has been cleaved in two. Some of us game it, identifying its possibilities and how we can manipulate it into serving us under false pretenses; others stiffly obey its rules (still paranoid its quirky logic will lead to our being publicly maligned, somehow) and serve as an audience for the ones who understand how easily we’re tricked. There is always a storyteller and a listener, each with a role we haven’t quite figured out how to occupy. To ignore heart-wrenching stories is to be callous, but to indulge them (we now know) is often foolish: They’re just too easy to fake.
Everyone has a site-crashing story within them. It’s the one you save for a few months into a new relationship or accidentally spill at a booze-soaked dinner party, the monologue that stops any conversation cold and hands you a roomful of eyeballs on a platter. It’s the #secret story, your secret story, and right now you know it’s worth a lot of money or a lot of sympathy. But that’s true for a reason: Those stories aren’t easily given up, and revealing the softest part of your belly allows strangers to spear you with rape-threat arrows. This year we honed our ability to fabricate new ones that served the same purpose. Our confessions became tools we used for either fun or profit.
The difference between skepticism and paranoia is slight, and remaining rational when your emotions are being purposefully needled is an ancient conundrum. As the Internet evolves to more resemble what we used to think of as “life,” we’re forced into the tedious process of applying stale rules to what we want to believe is new and different, a clean and optimistic universe. Don’t talk to strangers (or at least verify their identities before cutting checks); don’t believe everything you see. What was once a confessional campfire now seems eerily lit by studio lights and infiltrated by performers. While we’ve spent the past half-decade mourning the death of fiction, we’ve momentarily forgotten how insulating it is to clothe ourselves in lies. In a way, it’s reassuring to think about how little we’ve changed, how silly it ever was to imagine we could create a virtual world that abolished self-interest by way of exaggerations produced for effect. And just like that, 2013 was over, twerking into the fires of the past.
#paranoïa #individu #identité #personnalisation cf. ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/135547