Wag The Bird, Or How We Can Abuse Twitter To Create An Alternate Reality
Twitter made a lot of waves over the past few months. From a voyeuristic, “I’m eating”, “can’t sleep” kind of ‘lifestreamer’, it has become a news media sensation. Earlier on it was just early earthquake reports. But Twitter hit big with the Iran elections, leaving dust to most traditional news channels in terms of realtime coverage of event and popularity amongst readers . That’s one hell of a powerful medium.
Wag The Dog is a brilliant 1997 satire, starring some big names (de niro, Hoffman), about a U.S. president inventing a war to increase his chances to win the upcoming elections. The president’s staff calls in a famous Hollywood producer to create a non-existing war (see trailer below, it’s a great, smart, funny movie).
When I discovered the news about the Jakarta bombing earlier today using tFeeder, I thought about Wag The Dog and Twitter. Think about the Iranian elections - how many of us actually been in Iran? How much do we know about what REALLY happened there? Many pictures were tweeted, sure, but do we really know when they were taken? Could some of them been taken in other parts of the world? Maybe, Maybe not.
What I’m trying to say here is that Twitter can easily become a tool to create an alternate version of reality. Since we learned to trust twitter so much, it shouldn’t be too hard for a small team to create a large event on a global scale that never really happened. It could be a simple mashup of pictures, videos and a large group of twitterers, all tweeting at the same time (preferably in an exotic time like late night or early morning). If I had to pull one of this acts, I’d produce an alien invasion.
But a strong organization (governments? secret agencies?) might use Twitter to generate a view of reality that will serve their own interests.
Will President Barack Obama (a social media star) ever ‘Wag The Bird‘?
Wag The Dog Trailer
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Excellent article. Twitter can be used to provide real information. But, it can also be used to provide fake information. As news media outlets are all using twitter, and can easily put a spin on the news they report.