Nick Ripatrazone explores how Walter J Scheirer’s new book A History of Fake Things on the Internet engages with Marshall McLuhan’s ideas.
‘I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits,” said media theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1969, “so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” At the end of that decade, McLuhan was everywhere: magazine covers, primetime television, newspaper columns, college campuses, corporation boardrooms. He opined, he punned, he prophesied.
Younger generations were fascinated; many among them were convinced. Here was a tweedy Canadian professor of literature making wild predictions, and like them, capturing the ire of stodgy traditionalists. McLuhan’s theories were criticised as being not scholarly; disparate wordplay meant to confuse rather than inform.
McLuhan, of course, got the last laugh – and the first. His witty pronouncements and artistic vision were always as playful as they were prescient. When we acknowledge the depth of his Catholic worldview, his fragmentary theories coalesce with Christ as their anchor and amplification. McLuhan feared what would happen to our discarnate selves as we moved into the electronic mode, and yet that fear was tempered by a realism: new, expansive technology was coming, and there was nothing that we could do to stop it.
An incarnational vision of the world is a realistic one. We have bodies; the earth is matter. In the person of Christ, we see a demonstration of how the material and the spiritual are tethered.
In A History of Fake Things on the Internet, a deft and original work of historical and cultural analysis, Walter J Scheirer directly engages with McLuhan’s theories during the final quarter of the book, yet it is suffused with a contemplation of the incarnate and discarnate modes. The book fulfils the prom- ise of its title, and more. A professor of comp-uter science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Scheirer is an expert in media forensics, and like others in that position, was a former computer hacker. The culture of hacking is best understood as a space where play occurs; although there are certainly nefarious actors in that world, hacking is where ambitious and often brilliant programmers hone their craft – a free space of inquiry akin to McLuhan’s linguistic play.
Digital fakery and manipulation, Scheirer notes, has now become an art available to “ordinary people” – those without requisite design skill. His early work in forensics “looked at image tampering and camera attribution – the areas that researchers believed would be relevant to legal in- vestigations”. DARPA, the military’s advanced research agency, which funded the creation of the internet and early work on self-driving cars, had recently announced its media-forensics programme, “the objective being to develop capabilities to detect tampering in web-scale collections of images.” Scheirer’s laboratory at Notre Dame was tasked with research in response to a bevy of government concerns. “Initially,” he writes, “the anxiety was around Photoshop and related image-editing tools. Deepfakes, doctored videos generated by AI, appeared shortly after the programme began and raised the stakes considerably.”
The government gave Scheirer “manipulated images, created specifically for the programme, that were meant to mimic what was believed to exist in the real world”. Although useful for “research and development”, Scheirer pined for real cases, and sent his students into the online wilderness. They discovered a bounty: “social media was awash in fake content”. Yet there “were no deepfakes and very few instances of scenes that were altered in a realistic way so as to deceive the viewer”. Memes (he defines them as “a cultural artefact that is meant to be transmitted from person to person and that can evolve over time like a biological organism”) are creative and eccentric. Although he acknowledges that there “was a lot of violent rhetoric and imagery” in these digital creations, “much of it was tongue-in-cheek – more satirical than diabolical”.
Here Scheirer’s vision as a cultural historian shines. He quotes French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: “the kind of logic which is used by mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied.” For Scheirer, there is a connection between internet myths and their predecessors: “historically memes have always encapsulated falsehoods, mythmaking and culture quite effectively”.
For example, ancient Greek pottery in the forms of vases, bowls, cups and other items “were frequently decorated in whimsical ways that remixed the classical canon,” he writes. “Silly anthropomorphised animals and fantastic creatures like satyrs . . . could be used as comic stand-ins for gods, heroes and other more serious figures.”
Lying and mythmaking, Scheirer affirms, are distinct. Lying is “associated with the negative be- haviour of individuals, while myths are the collective express-ion of an entire community and are meant to be a reflection of the human condition. We cannot live without them.” Myths build connections. They are often rooted in truths.
It should not be surprising, then, that the evolution of technology has resulted in a new mythmaking for the modern age. The media of print, radio and television were all “passively consumed”. Yet the internet is a space where information “[flows] both ways”. In that participatory and democratic space, fake images and stories are inevitable. Yet, like McLuhan, Scheirer cautions us: “We continue to blame technology for long-standing social problems instead of confronting the unethical behaviour that nourishes them. Don’t starve creativity; starve bad intent.”
Scheirer explains that, unfortunately, “the excessive optimism of technologists in the 20th century misaligned our expectations of what we might see on the internet of the future”. His conclusion is accurate, and poetic: “the global village needs its dark alleys to capture the full range of human experience. The ambiguities require us to think deeply about what is put in front of us.”
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.