on wiki-pr or how information & public relations become indistinguishable

Is Wikipedia for Sale? | Motherboard

this article is about wikipr, a delightful capitalist concern that does brand management by altering information in wikipedia and replacing it with infotainment symmetrical with the interests of the clients that hire them.

here's the corporate website. if you read it as if this appeared in the onion, it's pretty funny. but it isn't in the onion:

Wiki-PR: Wikipedia Writers For hire

it seems to me that this is symptomatic of a much bigger problem--the blurring out of any meaningful distinction between information and public relations. versions of this tendency are obvious in media-spaces like fox news. but this is a wider issue. with wiki-pr, the message could be paraphrased: if you, corporate person, do not like the way reality is treating you, then change reality.

in a sense, this is a logical extension of the viewpoints outlined in the 20s by edward bernays, the founder of public relations.

what do you think of this specific example of a pr firm whose focus is to alter information in wikipedia in order to help with "brand management"? do you accept the characterization of wikipedia presented in the article? do you think the piece correct in its assessment?

the broader questions of information and public relations becoming indistinguishable is disturbing, i think. the maintenance of a separation is fundamental to a democratic polity. what do you think its erasure says about the nature of democratic politics in the states?

this seems to me to point toward a kind of creeping dreamworld, a capitalist version of socialist realism, one that enjoins people to live beautifully (as did socialist realism from a certian viewpoint) by living in a fantasy shaped by brand identities and their maintenance in the elimination of dissonant aspects of that pesky reality thing. there's something at the least creepy about it. what do you think?

 

I watched a documentary about Deep Throat in the wee hours of this morning and in it was Gore Vidal and he said this:

We lie about human sexuality because we're taught to lie about everything. When you have a nation that totally lies, then you have no reality.

It gave me a start. And, yeah, I think our continued 'fluffing' (yes, in that sense) of the truth makes us as a society pathologically insecure and unstable because we can never live up to the lies that we so fervently believe about ourselves. Like genuinegirly, I am not so surprised that this is going on because it has been going on in one way or another - textbooks, novels, tv shows, movies, etc. - for a very long time. We are already in it.

 

The first casualty of war the Internet is truth....where bloggers are self-proclaimed journalists and popular "independent news" sites have no integrity or code of ethics.
--- merged: Oct 22, 2013 at 12:48 AM ---

Not to compare Wikipedia to Fox News' invasion of the sock puppets

Fox News Unleashes Horde of Sock Puppets on an Unsuspecting Blogosphere | Mother Jones

 

i don't see the connection between 18th century arguments against democracy and the effects of a pervasive public relations industry.

there is a kind of interesting question, though: if there is little distinction between pr and information---it's all the same once you group both together as "content" yes?----how does one go about separating one from the other? what would verification mean? shifting from one level of brand-identity to another?

take for example a self-enclosed media environment. because i am, rather against expectations, tinkering with a chapter in the interminable cook project at the moment, i am thinking about the french communist party...but one could also think about any number of other self-enclosed, self-referential media spaces (tunnels, if you like).

any given media space is dense with infotainment. what makes it a discrete space is a function of political affiliation, which would mean consistency of line or perspective.

infotainment circulates within such spaces in part to inform and in part to reinforce an underlying worldview. the worldview at play would be shared by writers and readers, so it's not a matter of some puppeteer who stands outside and cynically places consistencies as a means to an end. it's a circular relation based on shared dispositions.

a worldview cannot be static if it is to be functional---it has to be amenable to motion in a sense---so the reinforcement of a worldview is a matter of consistency in emphasis and de-emphasis (of shaping salience, what is foreground and what background) and interpretation (explanations for salience)...

the question, i suppose (if i am formulating this in a coherent way...not sure) is what would count as verification within such an environment. it would seem to me a matter of moving from one level to another within a relatively homogenous infotainment climate (environment, space, climate...are these interchangeable?)...

it'd be easy enough, then, to have procedures that'd give the impression of checking facts that would amount to little more than movement across levels of the same. in such a situation, basic interpretive moves would be filtered out, i would think. the process of verification would provide you no impetus to move beyond that information environment. so in a sense, you wouldn't verify anything, really. you'd just move around.

i suppose this kind of situation would be set up/enabled by a substitution of aesthetic criteria for other possible criteria that can motivate one's judgment. information is "true" if it can be "verified" by shuffling about various registers of information...if the space within which these registers operate is as i outline above, then that's all it is, shuffling about---but the sense of "being-true" is as much a matter of symmetry with one's prior dispositions as anything else. it seems to me that this is a relation that would follow from treating information---and politics---as something that is consumed.

maybe i digress.

 

I don't know that it is possible. To verify something that happened in the past. Things that are written down, filmed, recorded - they don't necessarily represent facts. It's like looking at a drop of seawater under a microscope. You can't understand what you're looking at without context. And that's where our imaginations come in to play because context is an ocean of information that is lost to us. At least, that's what I've come up with. Right now. Feels accurate.

 

I don't know if I'm unusual for doing this, but a lot of the time when I'm looking something up in Wikipedia, especially if it's a controversial idea or person, I'll read into the talk page of the article. Reading the discussions, edits, and rationalizations that have gone into making an article can give an interesting perspective into biases that come into edits, and the admirable effort a lot of editors put into ensuring that articles maintain a neutral point of view.