Saturday, February 21, 2015

Fifty Shades of Sasha

It could be worse, I suppose. Brian Williams could be piloting a Hind helicopter which would make reporting on his role in the hostilities in the Ukraine even more awkward, but this news item, involving Sasha Grey (I’ll pause while all us guys can pretend to not know who she is) will do for now. 

We’ve all read stories about family pets getting credit cards in the mail and this is sort of along those lines and also the whole “on the internet anyone can be anyone else” (though usually it’s an FBI agent pretending to be a fifteen year old girl) paradigm.

My favorite part in explaining and examining the disinformation campaign is the mention of Josef Mengele and how not even that could deter folks from swallowing (was that an oblique reference to Sasha’s skillset? I’ll never tell) the disinformation  hook, line, and sinker only to end up flopping on the dock.

A lie, said Mark Twain in the pre-Internet era where no one ever imagined a thing such as social media, can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes. These days our self-generated social media news feeds with topics and genres we select have rows and columns of sport shoe ads helping mock and make the point even more.

As if the slaughter in this corner of the world, largely ignored by our mass communications practitioners, isn’t obscene enough, let’s manipulate diminished attention spans to create and enlarge fake outrage based on manufactured  mendacious memories of incidents that never happened in a conflict most of us can’t even imagine.

-bill kenny

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