I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Radiolab that completely changed the way that I think about the future of our society’s media obsession and the way we navigate the digital world. In it, they discuss two recent developments in technology that will potentially have a profound impact on all the many ways we communicate information through audio and video. The first is called Adobe VoCo, a program that allows users to edit voices . Beyond just rearranging words in a voice recording, Adobe VoCo can make a person “say” something they never said at all. The editing is completely seamless and the human ear is not able to notice it. The second development is technology created by the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory at the University of Washington, Seattle. This is essentially a new type of video editing that enables anyone to download a video of a person (George Bush is the one in their example), and then filming someone else making any kind of facial expressions. In real time, those facial expressions are superimposed on the person in the original video, such that is appears that George Bush is actually raising his eyebrows or smiling when in reality he did no such thing. It is essentially a form of puppetry. Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizelman, the professor in the computer science department at the University of Washington who helps run that lab, claims that the most exciting potential use of this technology is to develop “telepresence”, or a type of hologram (modeled after science fiction stories). In other words, the ability to virtually bring someone back from the dead (think Star Wars: The Last Jedi). This technology also has practical applications for movies, television, advertising, and other media. Video manipulation joined with voice manipulation creates the ability to makes videos of anyone you want saying anything you want. When asked about the potential nefarious uses of this technology, Ira’s reply was that scientists are just “doing their job” and inventing the technology, and it’s the user’s responsibility to utilize it in a responsible way. This made me think about what we have been discussing about the responsibility of the “wreader”, and the changing identity of the “wreader” when engaging with digital text.

Since the beginning of reading as a practice, we have learned to establish a “semantic landscape” (Levy, Becoming Virtual, 47) out of which we fabricate meaning, or actualize it. Therefore, even when what we are actualizing is fictional, the text must still be able to reach the images and words already in our minds, must be able to establish those semantic geographies, must initially have a certain kind of stability in order to enable us as readers to create meaning (even if it then disappears in the process). But what if there is no longer any semantic stability? What happens when the borders between fact and fiction, news and entertainment, become blurred? If text is an interface to ourselves, how do we then understand ourselves if what we expect to be “truth” is actually fiction?

Levy points out that with hypertext, our opportunities for producing meaning is exponentially multiplied because it connects us not with a specific, fixed text but with constantly updating data. Because of this, text becomes deterritorialized, no longer fixed, and text now approximates the fluctuations of human thought itself. This capacity of text in cyberspace has made it possible to create a symbiosis between personal learning and collective learning, because whenever one person uploads a kind of text online, it is open to editing, sharing, incorporation into other text, etc. Everyone contributes to the organization of information by classifying it, creating metadata. This enriches the text/data by incorporating it into an “ecosystem of ideas” (Levy) This is the process that Levy has termed “collective intelligence.” Taking into consideration the example I have given of the way in which our digital reality has lost all connection to any kind of possible objective truth, thanks to new developments in technology, I cannot help but wonder – what kind of ecosystem are we creating here? When one can create, post, and share any distorted reality in the form of text, video, or sound, how is our “collective intelligence” being enriched?

Perhaps we have become too reliant on images and video to relay “truth.” Perhaps this is why in recent years, the political “tell-all” book has become so important. This is a book written by someone close to a politically important figure (usually a behind-the-scenes person writing about a president) that has the objective of revealing something shocking, scandalous, or counterintuitive about that figure, or just portraying a different perspective on that person. It’s interesting to me that in this context especially, the printed book retains a certain kind of authority. It has a specific impact that is different than if the author had, let’s say, published the text on a blog. It has the power to impact that person’s legacy forever. “Fake news”, on the other hand (text in the form of articles, tweets, videos, etc.), can have lasting ramifications, but the text itself does not have to last. This indicates to me that there is something still valuable in the printed book, that it still might have a lot to teach us.

For the field of literature and the humanities, this new video technology could mean that we could soon be able to have Shakespeare’s sonnets recited to us by a hologram of the bard himself. But considering the negative implications of this new digital technology, even from within the field of the humanities it is difficult not think about where one’s responsibilities lie. My hope is that by fully embracing the positive applications of this technology, we can be part of the solution not only for purposes of teaching, research, and collaboration, but to lead by example with a heightened methodological and epistemic awareness.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/fake-news-technology

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/breaking-news