A Question of Truthiness (Makeup Post)

Both of the authors we've covered up to this point (Ong and Baron) have at least touched if not focused on the truthfulness of written communication in the absence of the author. However, Baron explores the potential the Internet has to instill a sense of honesty or truth back into written communication by giving readers and authors a place to asynchronously interact and challenge/discuss things with one another. He uses the example of Facebook and various profile pages to examine the feasibility and reliability of such a "verified" space.

Baron points out that although social networking and interactive sites like Facebook bring back the discourse aspect of communication/rhetoric present in face-to-face and oral communication, there is no ability to ascertain whether or not anyone is actually who they say they are or are presenting true facts. The Internet acts as a facilitator of discourse, but the inability to really engage and challenge the author remains because the author is still this ambiguous/anonymous thing pushing information or the idea of themself. On page 185 of A Better Pencil Baron talks about Facebook and the profile pages of people such as Joseph Stalin, Abbie Hoffman, and George W. Bush that have an air of reality thanks to Facebook's "claim that people on Facebook are who they say they are and behave the way they do in the real world'"(185). Due to inaccurate information associated with the profile, the impossibility of that person creating a profile, or some other reason, these profiles, which are theoretically factual, are clearly not factual or true. If written communication through the Internet and Facebook in particular can't filter out obvious fiction, which is in essence unchallengeable since the author of record doesn't exist/isn't present, what hope is there that substantiative discourse can be restored through this relatively new medium of the Web?

It seems apparent that without stifling controls on freedom, how people are represented, and "tracked" online, it is nearly impossible to use the Web and the internet to restore the same level of veracity that was present in oral cultures and oral "texts." We can get close and achieve a variation of that level of truthfulness, but it requires that we all buy in to the understanding that any discourse we have with the author is merely a version of or an idea of "the author" and the author is available to us, but conceptually just as removed as they were when print was king.