In 1782, Europeans were shocked to learn of reports emanating from a newspaper in Boston that Native Americans were sending the scalps of women, girls and boys to members of the British royal family and MPs as war trophies.
In fact, no such trophies existed. The newspaper was a fake, printed as a propaganda tool by one of the US' founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin.
Fast forward to 2011 and it seems the apparent ease with which some sections of the public and the media can be duped has changed little in more than two centuries.
To the Guardian, Amina Arraf - author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog - was the "unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country". She was quoted by CNN in an article about gay rights in the Arab world. When Amina was apparently abducted by security agents in Syria, thousands joined a Facebook campaign demanding her release.
But of course, as we now know, Amina Arraf was a fiction. The 35-year-old Syrian-American lesbian was in fact Tom MacMaster - a middle-aged, married man from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's perhaps tempting to see the Amina Arraf affair (Aminagate?) as proof that social media can't be trusted as a reliable source of information. Rumours and myths are repeated so often and so quickly via Twitter and Facebook that they seem to take on a life of their own. If so many people are saying the same thing, it HAS to be true - doesn't it?
It's what Alan Fisher from Al Jazeera called the "echo chamber" at last week's POLIS Media and Power conference at the LSE. The amplifying effect of social media, some believe, can help bring ordinary citizens out onto the streets and topple dictators. Equally, though, it can easily lead to thousands of well-meaning people being misled - especially when countries like Syria, where independent verification is difficult, are involved.
Yes, social media spread the Amina myth around the world at lightning speed, but it also played a central part in debunking the hoax as well.
While some journalists and social community organisers initially believed Amina to be genuine, their efforts, along with those of websites like Electronic Intifada, began to highlight the inconsistencies in Amina's story.
The Guardian has promised to redouble its verification efforts. The BBC's Robin Lustig believes the affair will make journalists more sceptical about anonymous blogs in future.
On Monday's PM programme, Tom MacMaster apologised to bloggers in the Middle East for any harm caused. For some activists, however, an experiment that got out of hand has caused real damage - and may even put lives at risk.
"Shame on you," said Sami Hamwi on the website Gay Middle East (GME).
"You took away my voice, Mr MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know," added Daniel Nassar on GME.
"To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back."
Stuart Hughes @'BBC College of Journalism'
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
#polis11: After Wikileaks
Charlie Beckett chaired this debate about what impact Wikileaks has had on the future of journalism. It was part of the BBC College of Journalism/POLIS conference at the London School of Economics.
The panel: James Ball of the Guardian, George Brock of City University, Angela Phillips of Goldsmiths University, Alison Powell of LSE and John Naughton of Cambridge University/the Observer.
Via
The panel: James Ball of the Guardian, George Brock of City University, Angela Phillips of Goldsmiths University, Alison Powell of LSE and John Naughton of Cambridge University/the Observer.
Via
Tales of the Amur
In fact, we should be grateful to the railway also for the book, since its author was born in Chita, its illustrator in Khabarovsk as descendants of railroad building engineers; their work was combined in Vladivostok, and both were inspired by the archaic culture of the Nanais living in the arch of the railway between these three cities.
Dmitry Nagishkin (Chita 1909 – 1961 Riga) studied electrical engineering, but from 1929 he worked as a journalist and illustrator for local papers, while he was more and more fascinated by the then still living Nanai folk culture. He published the tales collected among them for the first time in 1945 with the title Kid Chokcho, followed in 1946 by the Tales of the Amur and in 1949 by the Courageous Azmun. He himself considered as the peak of his literary work not these, but the historical novel Bonivur’s heart, written between 1944 and 1953 on the Far Eastern heroes of the civil war, the “partisans of the Amur”, also remembered in an extremely popular song. This novel, however, is hardly remembered by anyone, despite the fact that in 1969 they still made a film of it...
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Who, What, Why: Why is 'the hum' such a mystery
There are a range of theories from farm or factory machinery to conspiracy theories such as flying saucers. And yet, 'the hum' remains an unsolved case.
Woodland, a village in county Durham, is the latest place to fall victim to the noise. Some residents have reported hearing a buzzing noise like electricity or a car engine that won't go away.
"It sounds like an overhead power line with this constant humming buzz," says Kevin Fail, a 53 year-old bathroom installer who lives in the village.
He said that he and his wife hear it in bed, downstairs in the house and outside in the garden, but some residents have heard nothing. Fail believes it may have something to do with a disused mine shaft in their garden.
Durham County Council says it is planning to send someone with sound monitoring equipment to the village to investigate. There are "crackpot theories" doing the rounds about UFOs, and Fail says his daughter, whose hobby is ghost hunting, hasn't ruled out the possibility that the mine is haunted. But unlike some residents, Fail says he's not worried. "This has been happening all over the world for decades. Whatever's out there is not going to hurt you."
Another resident of the village said they had received media interest from all over the world.
"The hum" is an international phenomenon. The beach front neighbourhood of Bondi in Sydney was afflicted by it two years ago. One local resident told Australia's Sunday Telegraph at the time: "It sends people around here crazy, all you can do is put music on to block it out. Some people leave fans on.''
One case that was partially solved was in Kokomo, Indiana. The source of "the hum" was located to a fan and a compressor on an industrial site, and yet even after these were turned off some people complained the noise had not stopped.
The Largs Hum in Scotland and Bristol's mystery noise in the 1970s are two of Britain's most famous cases. Often the source of the noise is never found but disappears unexpectedly.
The truth is no-one really knows the cause of "the hum", says Geoff Leventhall, a noise and vibration consultant who has advised the government on the issue.
Despite years working in the field, he has never heard the hum himself and has only rarely been able to pick it up on recording equipment. In one case, his recording equipment picked up a 200 hertz signal at a complainant's house that was detectable in the lab. He managed to trace the buzz to a neighbour's central heating. But this, he says, was an exception.
"Some experts say if you can't measure a noise the presumption is tinnitus," he says. "It all gets rather fraught because people say there's nothing wrong with my hearing.""The hum" is sometimes heard in cities but is more likely to be audible in the countryside and at night, when there is less background noise. Most complainants are people aged 50-60. The most plausible causes are industrial compressors and fans or farm machinery, Leventhall says.
In the 1970s he worked with the News of the World on their campaign to discover the mystery behind "the hum". They received 800 letters from readers complaining of the phenomenon - some of them citing UFOs. But no specific explanations emerged.
In 2009, Dr David Baguley, head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital told the BBC that in about two thirds of cases no external noise could be found. He believed that sufferers' hearing had become over-sensitive. "It becomes a vicious cycle. The more people focus on the noise, the more anxious and fearful they get, the more the body responds by amplifying the sound, and that causes even more upset and distress."
In the end, the solution for sufferers may be to adopt a more accepting mindset, Leventhall argues. He prepared a report for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that suggested cognitive behaviour therapy was effective in treating the symptoms. "It's a question of whether you tense up to the noise or are relaxed about it. The CBT was shown to work, by helping people to take a different attitude to it."
As for the source of "the hum", don't expect a breakthrough anytime soon, he says.
"It's been a mystery for 40 years so it may well remain one for a lot longer."
@'BBC'
For Sale: Childhood Home of William S. Burroughs
So what's the problem? Are potential buyers put off by the $587,900 asking price? Or that it's nearly 100 years old? Are they afraid the place is haunted by the spirit of the boy who would grow up to write Junkie and Naked Lunch, become a guiding spirit of the Beat and hippie generations and have all sorts of exotic adventures, including accidentally killing his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell"?
Actually, it's much more prosaic than that, says Armor. "There's no garage. And the house is landlocked, so there's no way to put a garage in. That's the one thing that's making it hard to sell."
The Burroughs family sold the house and moved to Ladue when William was in high school (John Burroughs, no relation). In later years, when the writer returned to St. Louis, he would be far more nostalgic for the old skid row on Market Street downtown than he was for tree-lined Pershing Place.
Although the house lacks two fancy plaques announcing it as a Historical Site like the ones on T.S. Eliot's childhood home on nearby Westminster Place -- or even one fancy plaque -- it still garners a fair amount of attention. Armor says the current owner, Jackie Millstone, has spotted passerby stopping to stare and point. Recently she arrived home to find a crew from HGTV filming on the sidewalk. But Armor's not sure if the attention is because of the house's famous former inhabitant or if it's just because it's a really nice house. She's inclined to think the latter.
"Jackie's got literature on Burroughs and one of his books out on the coffee table," she says. "She puts it out to show to people who come to look at the house. Some people don't even know who he is. But some raise their eyebrows and say, 'Oh, really?'"
Aimee Levitt @'Riverfront Times'
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