‘Fake News’ as a Symptom of Mediatisation

Next up in this ICA 2018 session is Harry L. Simón Salazar, who continues the ‘fake news’ discussion. He notes the longer history of this topic, especially in Latin American countries such as Venezuela. Hugo Chavez supporters suggested that an attempted coup against him was driven by ‘fake news’ stories circulating through the mainstream media, for example, and Latin American media have a long history in such political propaganda.

This can be linked to longer-term trends of mediatisation across many societies: mediatisation is a variety of ways in which possible orderings of the social by media are further transformed and stabilised through continuous feedback loops. Such mediatisation processes can be analysed by tracing the transformation of artefacts that are produced in social life, from primary material artefacts through the mediatised representations of artefacts to the relatively autonomous world of abstracted, imaginary, tertiary artefacts that transcend the immediate contexts of their use.

’Fake news’ might then be approached as tertiary artefacts, but they might no longer be rooted in actual, primary origins: they are a symptom of the mediatisation of politics, rather than a function of truthfulness; they represent a quantitative category that generates an all-inclusive (actual facts and ‘alternative facts’, constantly churning ‘fake news’ cycle; and that category is quasi-oppositional and crypto-critical.

Such ‘fake news’ must be understood in part by tracing how individual ‘fake news’ items work their way through the process, and how they transition from obscure origins to potential mainstream coverage. Its proliferation is a consequence of broader shifts in the overall media environment, and an unintended by-product of the mediatisation of politics; it has the power of transforming the process of politics itself.