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Fake News: The Importance of Media Literacy and Morality

     “WTF. A lion just got out of the zoo into the public streets.”

     Would you believe this sort of suspicious tweet or post on SSN? Most of us would say “nope.” However, what if you were in the middle of a natural disaster? 

     At 9:26pm on April 14th 2016, a foreshock earthquake with a magnitude 6/2 hit Kumamoto City in Kushu Region, the southern part of Japan. The series of earthquakes including a magnitude 7.0 killed 50 citizens and injured over 3,000 others, which is the worst natural disaster since The Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Fortunately, many social network services allowed the suffers to communicate and share information with their families, friends and rescue teams speedily and efficiently during the disaster. In fact, the government launched its official twitter account for natural disaster/crisis information feeds after 3.11, which contributed to minimizing the Kumamoto earthquakes. 

             By contrast, another tweet introduced significant confusion into this emergency. A twenty-year-old male suddenly posted an alert tweet that a lion was walking on a city street which escaped from the zoo near the seismic center, attaching a picture of describing the situation. This tweet was immediately spread out, resulting in over 20,000 retweets, more than 100 phone inquires to The Kumamoto Zoo. A few hours after the zoo worker requested a damage report, the police in Kumamoto found out that the twitter was an outright false and arrested the twitter user for obstruction of business. This vicious tweet did not only hinder the zoo workers from preparing for security for the animals but also delayed Kumamoto citizens from moving to the designated evacuation sites from the inside house in fear of the beast. A man’s  imprudent conduct has brought out unnecessary disorder in the midst of the disaster. 

     According to the police, the criminal used a random picture taken in Johannesburg showing the city’s low public safety. Indeed, there are apparently many false points on the photo; the two signals, signboards on the buildings and the driving lanes are different from ones in Japan. Then why did so many people believe in this tweet?   

     The key concept here is “Post-truth,” defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” by Oxford Dictionary. This was selected as 2016's international word of the year, mostly influenced by the series of fake news about the US Presidential election. We can see the nature of Post-Truth in the lion-scare tweet case. 

     According to NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization, the tweet was spread out by the following types; those users with only very good intentions to save the suffers, without any thought and who did simply because “it was funny.” Ironically enough, the number of followers of the first one, such as their family and friends, was the smallest and that of the third one was the largest more than 100,000, who specifically are the members of the user’s online community in Japan, called “2 channel.” No matter which purpose they had, all of users did not have a good media literacy on the original tweet or its retweets. 

      One of the best ways to look into the truth-ness of articled on media would be to look for the same content from several different platforms ranging from newspaper, broadcast news and online news feeds, and compare them. This view is important especially on the internet where infinite number of websites exist. However, many users have recently tended to rely on only news from SNS such as Facebook and Twitter. Portable smart phones allow us to have constant access to the internet anytime, anywhere, removing the needs of buying newspaper and sitting to watch TV. Moreover, SNS’s algorithm intentionally select what you would like to see and hide what you wouldn’t. This tendency can make us picky about biased information and thus impair our media literacy.

     In the very first place, why do people even want to make fake news? According to Marco Chacon, the owner of “Real True News,” a fake news site, he at first founded it just for fun with his friends but now one article can have over 20,000 accesses from net users. In this way, there are some fake news makers who obtain benefits from the advertising fee such as Paul Horner, who makes $10,000 a month by creating fake news on Facebook. Fake news have already entered the field of business rather than of mere entertainment. 

     Finally, the reason why he posted a false tweet is because he just wanted to make some jokes. Considering that the place where he lives is even far away from the center of Kumamoto, he might not fully understand how significant the earthquakes damaged Kumamoto and helpless the suffers were. He must have underestimate the influence of one tweet on his smart phone toward the society. The online anonymity cannot be ensured once the law was violated.There are still gray zones in the legal treatment for internet crimes, balancing with freedom of expression online, for instance. In fact, The public prosecutors decided not to prosecute him. This case might be one of the tip of the iceberg; interests than truth, and money than truth. Now we are facing the issue of our media morality and literacy in this era of digital technology world. 

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Obsolete Media Project: Have Vinyl Records Become Extinct?

“Just take those old records off the shelf, I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself “                                                                                                                  - From Bob Seger’s "Old Time Rock and Roll" in 1979

As of now in 2017, is this still a thing?

A vinyl record or gramophone record is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat polyvinyl chloride disc. The history of vinyls began with the phonograph, a prototype that enables both recording and reproducing sound invented by Thomas Edison In 1877. Through several innovations and the growth of music industry thanks to popular music, the sales of vinyls was over $2.78 billion at the peak in 1979. 

The commercial success of vinyls fell down as new form of sound storage media came out. Digital sound data storage format, CDs are more “compact” and durable. Gaining popularity in the early1980s, CDs surpassed vinyls in the sale in 1988. The advent of digital downloads and streaming web site in the 2000s helped the decline of vinyls even more, resulting the smallest figure in 2006. 

So are vinyls really dead? That might be too early to conclude. 

Since 2006, vinyls sales started to increase year by year,  hitting around $422 million in the US alone in 2015. This comeback is known as “Vinyl revival.” There are several reasons for this phenomenon. 

1. DJs still like to use vinyls when scratching, a technique to move one back and forth on a turntable and unique sound effects and rhythms, especially in Hip Hop and Rap music. Vinyls enables DJs to control the sense of touch and the range of sound quality rather than CDs. 

2. Many listeners claim that the sound quality of vinyls is better than that of CDs and MP3. In fact, vinyls can cover above 20kHz of frequency whereas CDs typically don’t store it and recent digital compression could impair the dynamic range of the original recording. At the same time, the warm and fuzzy sound made by the analog media still fascinates record fans. 

3. Nostalgia; Compared to the convenience of digital formats, vinyls still has the attractiveness or warmth as an physical object. Record lovers enjoy looking at big album cover as an art, displaying on the shelves as interior design, and playing the music on your on - taking out from the cover and putting on the turntable and lowering the needle onto it. This whole materiality, humanity and emotional connection cannot be replaced with the formless digital music. New media technology also helps this old media adapt to the modern era: self-making vinyl records web site like QRATES and USB turntables. 

According to John Durham Peter, “Obsolescence has an importantly different sense than disappearance or destruction —it is precisely the persistence of the thing in a straitened or muted role, not its vanishing, that defines obsolescence. Things are obsolete when they fall out of love or out of use, not when they cease to exist” (P7, "Why Analog is Thriving in the Digital Age.") In this sense, I think vinyls still not “obsolete” at all and attracts people with cultural distinct meaning of use. 

New media don’t always take over old ones as hard copy books and Radio are still preferred by some users as of now. I think vinyls will not become obsolete soon as long as people do not forget something special about them mentioned above . 

“Today's music ain't got the same soul. I like that old time rock 'n' roll”

Maybe there are still many folks like him in 2017.

(Lastly, this is my first time to use Tumblr or any kind of blog platforms. I found it very useful especially when combining visual media like GIF with documents, and gathering information from social media and blogs. I think with Tumblr, projects look more easy to read and not too formal.)