Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy 

Editor's Notes

• #3: I have a terrible story about social media. SPIT IT OUT. Lying is easier on the internet. Does your body panic? Mine does, and in response, I experiment towards something saner, stronger. I am deeply involved in the 2nd stage of an adapting project on fake news, and radical digital media literacy about it, in the time of Trump. In my talk today, I will quickly map some of the processes, outputs and findings of the first two stages of the project: first, the writing and building of an online primer on digital media literacy during the first 100 days of the Trump administration, which I called #100hardtruths-#fakenews. And second, and more importantly, some of the processes, outcomes and findings created during the 2nd and current stage of the project (like the poem above), what I call Fake News Poetry Workshops, a series of fifteen and still growing, that have been held around the world and within various communities in 2018. This is my Radical Digital Media Literacy, my approach to what the conference has expressed as a CRISIS OF TRADITIONAL REPRESENTATION that demands NEW WAYS OF SEEING and speaking, listening, and sharing. By making poetry, together, located in our own places and situations, we celebrate literary and artistic ruptures within the relationship between language and object and in the name of our own truths. I understand this work primarily as public intellectualism and engaged citizenship in a time of confusion and I have a terrible story (and some wonderful poems) about social media.
• #4: So: What if we aimed for gentle truths? For now. And what if some of these gentle truths were first written on paper as responses to collective engagements into internet falsity. This one was penned in Toronto at a Fake News Poetry workshop that was more like a cabaret social for queer feminist media scholars and artists. Only now, six months later, is it shared in Barcelona. I want to engage in alternative formats for the generation and movement of meaningful fragments, post truth but gentle, not easily spreadable or digestable, not expendable, but rather demanding your attention and care—so perhaps for this moment at least, made for and consumed by small local groups that will listen together in time. With diverse participants in unique places, I am exploring truth and authentication systems that veer away from cameras, and indexical “truth,” thus mobilizing other systems outside of journalistic evidence or slick socials. I want to engage in alternative formats for the generation and movement of meaningful fragments that can mobilize and save honest expressions about our lived experiences of the internet’s deceptions in ways that might momentarily liberate us, or at least partially remove us from the logics of capitalist and governmental watching and lying that have underwritten this dangerous dishonest flow. What if we aimed for gentle truths? For now.
• #5: Technology is a weapon, a knife. A gun. How do you authenticate a person? You pay them. The truth is . . . candy? I don't know.
• #6: My experiment begins by working with a poet in and with her unique community, all of us being together in a shared place: talking and listening as we contemplate and express our own truths about social media and its core falsities. To do this, we use poetry — a historically established method of being heard and making sense. The poetry is an excuse and an opportunity, a better way to be smart, ethical, true and heard in this time of post truth abetted by anti-social media. “His behavior on Instagram/ was not far from his/ reality,” writes one of about eight, twenty-something feminist poets from Brighton England, members of a poetry collective called Devil’s Dyke.
• #7: Poetry allows us to communicate with and reflect upon each other’s truths outside of the structures and vernaculars that, in the name of rationality, proof, and power, are producing our current chaotic, disturbing, and often fake digital reality. “Could our bodies be recording/ devices that receive + share other’s/truths?” At my fake news poetry workshops we set the stage to write some poems about Fake News through a set of simple instructions.
• #8: First, each participant shares a truth about herself, her place, her experience, of any sort, superficial or deep, private or public.
• #9: Forget the Audience Text buzzes and belly rumbles Could our bodies be recording devices that that receive and store other’s truths His behavior on instagram was not far from his reality
• #10: And then we say what technology would be needed to verify or authenticate this truth about ourselves. At this juncture, I’m quick to define technology to include any tool that extends the self to others through place and time: sure, the internet and other digital devices, but also pencils, flesh, and books. People get it: they grasp the formative inter-relations between lived reality, bodies, and our many mechanical and digital devices. We live with and use this combination of technologies as a complex verification (and falsification) machine.
• #11: We all have terrible stories about social media. At Fake News Poetry workshops people have the permission to tell these terrible stories (and good stories, too). This is an algorythym that might generate a poem to pay attention to the world written by artists and technologists who participated in a workshop at a conference on Art and Technology. “Go for a walk. Observe your surrounding. Allow associations to relate to observations, and so on…”
• #12: Next we spend some time looking at my #100hardtruths-#fakenews online primer. This was built over the first 100 days of the Trump administration, after I pledged to disrupt: the new President’s First 100 days by posting #100truths-fakenews with linked actions, analyses and organizations committed to digital media literacy. In so doing, I will produce a 100 point digital primer to counter the purposeful confusion, lack of trust, and disorientation of the current administration’s relation to media, offering instead a steady, reasoned set of resources seeking clarity and justice. Workshop attendees are asked to find something on the primer that feels resonant to them: an image, some writing, one of the #100hardtruths (over half of which are written by others or refer to others’ work). This is to remind us that there is much to find and learn outside of ourselves and on the internet. We can rely on other people’s work to nourish, encourage, inspire, and even change us.
• #13: But the primer was only a first step; it needed to be used and built from. I do this in my workshops. The #100hard-truths fake news online digital primer is a strong and dense and deep body of work, useful for teaching and learning, and I invite you to visit and use it for your own pedagogy.
• #14: So now we’re cooking: After people share a personal truth, name tools that can verifiy it, and engage with some complicated, diverse, and exciting ideas about fake news and all that havoc and violence that people in power have done with it, the poet steps in. She has planned some ways to share the relations between creativity, writing, metaphor, truth, reality, fiction, and daily living. She might ask a question or suggest a prompt for a free-write. She helps us return to the noise of our bodies, leaving the internet for awhile, and clarify those noises through our words.
• #15: Participants are primed. We and I express new truths outside or alongside the systems of mediating interfaces from which we learned to lie.
• #16: Excerpt From “Call the Man of the Year a Liar” By Mika Judge There are a lot of small things about him, but his lies are enormous. like his crowds. Like his supporters. like his heart. like the coal mine he’s reopening right under our feet —America, how does black lung feel?
• #17: How does it feel being cheated by a cheesy smile balanced on an emergency red tie? How did a small loan of a million dollars become the ruining of billions of lives? How does it feel to be led by the lovechild of racist comments on Facebook and unimaginable power? America, get your heads out of your echo chambers. There is more to politics than what you want to believe.
• #18: There is more to know than what they show you. Do not mistake easily obtainable for true. Do not mistake your agreement for divine Approval. Where there is doubt, there is still hope. Period.
• #19: The literacy is in the doing and the saying and the listening. It is in the power of a podium and a big media wall. Where there is doubt, there is still hope. Period. We do not need to teach people doubt about the internet or the internet’s model president. They know they are being watched, and counted, used and lied to. We all hunger for formats, forums, teachers, and friends who see us for who we are and might be.
• #20: The radical digital media literacy is in the listening and writing and reading together in time and space: I don’t Cite you, I sit with you We could make private archives on paper. These archives could go public when we choose, made for audiences that are asking the right questions, and engaged in relevant research. We can prove to each other that we like and respect each other by watching and learning in proximity. By making things for ourselves and for interested, careful others.
• #21: Unburdened by books We can strive to remember what said to each other when we spoke and listened. We can archive that memory in our bodies and hearts.
• #22: Questioning the structure outside of the body But trust our bones I don’t know, maybe we’ll forget some details or facts. But larger lessons will be lived and larger truths known.
• #23: We can: Have conversations
• #24: Or protect yourself from them
• #25:  The radical digital media literacy is in our bodies These young women told me that when they share online, they are doing it for “their audience.”   They said that things they do and live that are not recorded, shared, watched, and liked, are not exactly doing or living. When they are watched they feel alive; and they feel bad; and they feel like they are in some sort of half-life lit by a screen’s metallic glow. Without a digital trace, they are nothing. They think a surveilled life might be better than not being at all, but they are doubtful.
• #26: The radical digital media literacy is producing a psychotechnology of care according to particpaitng teacher-poet, Kyle Bottenwho writes: “Let me put aside for a moment the notion of “poetry” and think instead of a broader category, what philosopher of media Bernard Stiegler has called “psychotechnologies,” techniques and regimes through which cognitive faculties (especially attention) are formed or destroyed. According to Stiegler, the contemporary “programming industries,” which would include social networks as well as digital advertisers, operate psychotechnologies on an industrial scale in order to control, sell, and corrupt attention.
• #27: Fake news, from this perspective, is only an especially egregious symptom of a pervasive malady: even those of us who (we assure ourselves) have not been duped by viral fake news are still constantly distracted and manipulated by other arms of the programming industries. In this light, we don’t simply need to solve the specific problem of fake news. We need new psychotechnologies through which we may be able to reclaim our capacity to pay attention in ways that are not self-destructive.” These and other observations have been written by participating poets on the 10 Tries: 100 Poems blogging project about the diverse workshops on an online poetry publication, “The Operating System.”
• #28: And this is my almost finished website which holds the poems, images, and ephemera from the workshops, like this poem, written by a student at Sussex University in Brighton England in a workshop held at his experimental writing class: do not be distracted from the truth that you make with your own bodySolidity is a useful illusionIt gets us through the daysolidity (gets us) resists ustectonic assurance is fragile ground 
• #29: the truth is the emptiness in the middle of the atom the truth is the impressionability of matter, of us,the truth is the space we fight to shape-M. AstleyA response to #100hardtruths-#fakenews #34: "Place Matters/re-flecting the border."
• #30: The radical digital media literacy is in our communities, our courage, our desire to be powerful and free, to be heard and seen, to be loved: Sam Soloman, poet-teacher in at Susex writes: I hold the phone in my hand. My hand is freezing. I look at the phone. I look away from the phone. There’s a world there.  
• #31: The phone says that’s a lie. The world is in the phone. I face the phone and tap. I flip from phone to face. You face the phone and walk away. Phone, get in the sea.  
• #32: We’re doing this for everyone. You’re everyone else. Come on, come out.   It’s for the thing we’re not yet. It’s true I haven’t missed you. It’s also true I have.
• #33: Aerobicize with me. It isn’t for me, I promise. I promise I’m more than me.”
• #34: I agree with Sam. I learn from him, and so I build from and with him and conclude: It’s for the thing we’re not yet. It’s true I haven’t missed you. It’s also true I have.
• #35: The radical digital media literacy is in our teaching,, writing, listening, and sharing, which is in our bodies and also online. It is a mutual promise for a future that can’t be fully recorded: It’s for the thing we’re not yet and all we still have to do.
• #36: https://vimeo.com/301961829 Thus, this Fall, I have been changing things up a bit. I am now leading Fake News Poetry-Video Workshops: after e talk about fake news and internet truths, and then learn a bit from the many ideas and questions in my primer, then we learn something more, we listen to the poems already written by others before us, from another place, artifacts and gifts of their attempts to speak their truths to us as art. A new sort of flow between people and their ideas and images is generated, but not a cruel or careless one (like a like or a retweet) or a meme. We are creating new formats for networking internet artifacts about deceit by listening, writing, reading and performing — about and outside the platforms provided to us for free and for the profit of America’s behemoth corporations. Our efforts at media literacy keep us attentive and inspired by others, like us or not, to thoughtfully make more art that derives from felt truths, vigilant listening, concentrated research, and conscientious words. We pass on some parts of these truths to others. Who will make new and different truths from them.