Media of Verification

“Media of Verification”

communication +1, Vol. 10, 2023

Submission of proposal: January 9, 2023

Submission deadline: April 30, 2023

Edited by Johannes Bennke, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel 

From a global perspective, democracies are under pressure. From within, it is threatened by populism and its different forms of misinformation, lies, and the spread of mistrust and fear. From outside, it faces autocracies and war. Since decades, there has been an epidemic of un-trust or distrust in the social fabric of Western democratic societies. And modern technology seems to conspire with these threatening forces. Among other factors, social media seems to be fueling an epidemic of misinformation as well as distrust in science. But despite all the distrust – how is trust established with technology? From a media studies perspective the focus turns away from the content driven analysis and surveys to the operations, apparatuses, and specific methods in how trust is being established through media technology.

A key operation to generate trust, I argue, is verification. Trust is not only an element of the social fabric established by interpersonal interaction and behavior but also by media technologies and their particular operations of verification. Trust has been studied primarily in terms of an interhuman relationship in psychology (Thagard 2019), as social trust beyond a dyadic relationship in the political and social sciences (Uslaner 2018), or as cooperation in game theory (Axelrod 2006). But inevitably such an approach also shifts the debate to the necessary involvement into a symbolic system. Verification is a key part in (cyber-)security and control systems, or is the basis for any entry in a recording or accounting system in which the entry needs certification to be authenticated when stored and requested. Taking ,media of verification‘ as a starting point to think about the workings of society built on networked communication changes the discourse and allows communication and media theorists to frame the problem differently. The proposed issue of communication +1 is open to all scholars elaborating on the materialities, medialities, and performative operations and practices of media technologies that deal with verification processes. I propose to think about ,media of verification‘ across five different modalities:

(1) Verification in Media

Probably the most prominent form of verification happens in and with media in the field of journalism. With its specific tools of fact checking and the verification of sources, to the extent of open source intelligence (OSINT) like bellingcat.com, and forms of digital forensics (Weizman 2017) it is especially sensitive with regard to information about the what’s, the when’s, the where’s and the who’s that make up journalistic reportage. The war in Ukraine is a powerful example of how information is being verified with unreliable statements and without independent sources based on visual data and OSINT (oryxspioenkop.com). This detective work follows new kind of traces and heavily relies on a new ,techno-hermeneutics‘ within a paradigm of circumstantial evidence (Ginzburg 1989).

(2) Apparatuses of Verification

Second, ,media of verification‘ addresses apparatuses of verification like the EasyPASS border control system using passports and image recognition at airports in the EU. In other instances passwords are needed, or (cognitive-psychological) riddles like reCAPTCHA have to be solved, or tickets and the deployment of other keys of authentication (dactyloscopy, retina scan, voice recognition etc.) at different thresholds are necessary in order to pass the gatekeeping entity. What may be very annoying from the users perspective is often part of a control and (cyber-)security system intended to prevent unauthorized access. Such apparatuses of verification regulate access and denial and therefore have a key political and ethical dimension. It touches upon issues present within the research literature on the media history of passports (Robertson 2010), lists (Young 2017), archives (Vismann 2012), modes of surveillance and the abuse of power (“who will guard the guardians?”), forms of reappropriation of ones (digital) life in the sousveillance movement (Mann 2013) or forms of resistance via obfuscation (Brunton/Nissenbaum 2015).      

(3) Verification as Consensus Making

Third, we have to contend with the integrity of the document or digitized artefact with regard to its materiality and readability, which is facilitated by writing tools – like a specific paper, ink, or a certain typography (Gitelman 2014) –, or by seals, certificates, signatures, coats of arms, stamps, watermarks, or other forms of authentication and authorization. Blockchain technology are based on consensus protocols to verify new transactions. At the center of it lies a legal dimension of consensus making between the different stakeholders of particular documents or artefacts (author, owner, messenger, reader etc.). Forms of verification are needed, allowing for the authentication, authorization, and coherence of the content of a certain document. Here, we are no longer dealing solely with apparatuses (and algorithms) but rather with a legal dimension of verification, relating to cybernetics, governmentality, bureaucracy, administration, and law itself.

(4) Infrastructures of Verification

Fourth, ,media of verification‘ addresses questions of the infrastructure, the material foundation on which the documents, artefacts, apparatuses, transmissions, and administrative regulators rely (Parks/Starosielski 2015). Depending on the form of verification, it can relate to the postal service in the Middle Ages with its sworn in messengers, or it can relate to the energy consumption and heat production of decentralized networks and therefore even to the ecological dimension. That is to say, that establishing trust by way of digital forms of verification heavily relies on an infrastructure and a community that has not only technological but other implications yet to be explored.

(5) Aesthetic Dimension of ,Media of Verification‘

Fifth, there is an aesthetic dimension to ,media of verification‘ which not only includes other aforementioned dimensions (such as the authentication of an art piece by an ,art expert‘), but verification has – beyond a certain symbolism such as knots and chains – an iconography by its own (i.e. “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio (1601/02)). By looking at representation of verification, what becomes apparent, is the relation to opacity and transparency (Alloa/Thomä 2018), and to questions of obscurity and revelation. Recent developments in crypto art, NFT-art, or blockchain based art, shift the focus to their media ontology (Weidinger 2021). From a media ontological perspective, cryptographic operations form the basis for smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a way to verify the artist, ownership, and transaction (Fortnow/Terry 2022) leading to new aesthetic forms of expression. From a narratological point of view, there are affinities to riddles, plot twists, scams, fakeries, or workarounds. It also relates to the apparent wave of dubious characters like the trickster (Bassil-Morozow 2015), conman/ conwoman, or the picador in recent games, films, TV-series, and novels relating to such imposters (“Among Us” (Innersloth Studio, 2018), “Better Caul Saul” (USA, 2015-2022), “Inventing Anna” (USA, 2022)).

With vol. 10 of the communication + 1 issue in 2023 on the topic of “Media of Verification” we invite scholars from various fields such as communication, media, film, and literature studies, philosophy and art history to contribute to a field of research that has yet to be explored and that spans different disciplines. ,Media of verification‘ are taken as media in their own right in order to acknowledge their particular agency and epistemology. What is and what is not is not decided independently from any such media eco system. What are particular practices and operations in each of the mentioned fields of verification? Further, can verification be taken as a key mechanism of digitality, in order to describe its historical conditions, operative logic, its mediality, materiality, and performativity? Framing trust by way of ,media of verification‘ therefore allows theorists of media and communication to push the way we understand media studies more generally while getting a better picture of the media technological mechanisms underlying the social glue.

In case of interest, please submit a proposal of between 500 and 700 words and a brief academic biography by January 9, 2023 to johannes.bennke@mail.huji.ac.il.

Full text submission will be due April 30, 2023, with expected publication in Autumn 2023. There are no article processing charges or fees associated with publication.

About the Journal

The aim of communication +1 is to promote new approaches to and open new horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. We are particularly committed to promoting research that seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers of theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Other than the commitment to rigorous scholarship, communication +1 sets no specific agenda. Its primary objective is to create a space for thoughtful experiments and for communicating these experiments.

communication +1 is an open access journal supported by University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries and the Department of Communication


communicationplusone.org.

Editors
Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Zachary J. McDowell, University of Illinois at Chicago

Guest Editor

Johannes Bennke, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Advisory Board

Sean Johnson Andrews, Columbia College Chicago
Lisa Åkervall, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Nathalie Casemajor, University of Québec Outaouais
Jimena Canales, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Bernard Geoghegan, Kings College, London
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University
Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine
Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, United Kingdom
Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
John Durham Peters, Yale University
Amit Pinchevski, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Florian Sprenger, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Jonathan Sterne, McGill University
Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder
Christina Vagt, University of California Santa Barbara
Greg Wise, Arizona State University

 
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