Disinfosphere!

[cpxbrex]

In this article about the Twitter Iran event, the author creates my new favorite word: disinfosphere. He brings up what I consider to be a legitimate point - the Internet is providing (creating?) a lot of disinformation

Comments

[athelind]

Rather than In addition to creating new expressions of information, the Internet also creates new expressions of bigotry, hatred and generalized stupidity.

...I come from a long line of editors.

[cpxbrex]

You know, there's a special circle of hell for editors. ;)

But I fixed it, hehe.

[athelind]

Yes, it's called Wikipedia.

[bdunbar]

the Internet is providing (creating?) a lot of disinformation.

The internet is the medium. People are creating the content. And they have been doing it forever. The nets just enable more people to read your disinfo bits and make it easier to slap up content.

For what you are calling disinformation .. I like the Cold War term agitprop.

Agitation - Propaganda: it's what's for breakfast on the internet.

[cpxbrex]

I've actually done a fair bit of study in communications theory. What I'm thinking of is not agitprop, but something more related to groupthink. While, of course, the Internet doesn't "create" anything, it is a specific form of communication that hasn't been studied very well - how something a particular idea, true or not, becomes conventional wisdom through the kind of network connections provided by the Internet.

So, what I'm talking about isn't propaganda, but the way that false information becomes distributed through the Internet without a specific originating agent. So, it's really more comparable with Nietzschian philology (as distinct from his philosophy) where we're basically seeing, er, authorless texts appearing in digital format, or perhaps what Masamune Shirow was getting at with standalone complexes. But not, in any sense, akin to conventional propaganda or advertising where a big agency attempts to manage public perception through media.