Fashion for Fake News

These workshops inspired me to think about my idea in a completely new way, and challenged me to think outside of the box as Karl had prompted me to do. When I came home from the workshopping class I sat down and immediately drew out this entire journey map for how my project could use this idea of screen printing to impact my target audience in an experiential way. I think that the 'fun' aspect of the project is less of a forced, intentional part here, but the whole idea about using unusual prints as a way to combat fake news has a humourous appeal to it.

Here it is in it's entirety – things feed off each other to make an immersive campaign with multiple touchpoints. For week 6 perhaps I could mock this up and present it on a large poster so that people can see what's happening?

It works like this:

1. Three designs are made, based on three different topics that are being swayed by fake news at the moment. Topics must be current, because this is part of the 'cool' factor, being in the know. I want the topics to be relevant to kiwis, but also abroad, as with a social media campaign (later down the journey map) the reach is global. Bold patterns are a good idea because they are a current fashion trend, and can convey a lot of meaning without completely spelling the issue out, whereas text is blatant (and less interesting, people are less likely to ask you what your shirt is about if they can read it for themselves). I could also make the designs (or any text if it is necessary) have a newspapery feeling/typeface/style to them, to continue the idea of the news and journalism media.

Producing the shirts in an eco-conscious way is important to this topic, because not only does it align with current marketing and consumer macrotrends, but some of the issues that these shirts will discuss is around climate change and environmental awareness/lack thereof. Places that do this brand transparency well are Wellmade Clothes and Trade Aid. To be hypocritical with the shirts would be another element of fake news, so may be effective if noticed, but it wouldn't go down very well with my target audience (see article here about Beyonce's 'This Is What A Feminist Looks Like' t-shirts, made with slave labour and therefore causing public uproar). Screen-printing might not be the only way to produce these designs, but it's the easiest kind of printing that I can produce on a small scale for starters, and was the one suggested to me in the brainstorming workshop, so I'm going with it for now.

The first challenging sticking-point of this project is making prints that are cool and desirable enough for people to want to buy them and get on board with it, while still having them be enough about the issue they talk about that people will learn something from them.

2. Display and get the word out about these new, hip t-shirts. Another prompt from my brainstorming session was broadsides (large posters, but smaller than a billboard).

The second difficult sticking point of this project is how to market the shirts in a (hopefully interactive, experiential way) that my audience will get on board with. These broadsides could be cool – I imagine them being plain white with simple, coloured text in a modernist style (text treated similarly to this MoMA poster).

The posters would have a QR code in the corner, and when people scan it with their phones, the white background of the poster comes to life, showing video of both sides of the fake news argument and creating an impactful and informative backdrop for these shirts. Although QR codes aren't being used very often at the moment, the newest iPhone update will include a built-in QR code reader into the camera, so the application of these codes is expected to skyrocket as this newly accessible way of viewing them takes place.

The posters would also carry a physical shirt that people could tear down and have for free (underneath would be a photograph of that shirt so the posters will still work) to create hype and buzz.

3. The shirts would be displayed on a website that tells people about the issues that they are buying into. It might have a newspaper feel to it, and you'd be able to learn facts and be educated about the issue as well as buy the shirts. It would also link to the social media channels and support that aspect of the campaign.

4. The shirts themselves would be in three styles that suit my target audience, because they fit with current fashion trends of the time. They are gender neutral so that both women and men can wear them. The will be a t-shirt with a logo and text on the front and a big print on the back, a tunic/long t-shirt with a pattern all over it, and a long-sleeved t-shirt with a pattern down the sleeves and a small front logo.

The clothing tags that come on the clothing when you buy them would also be a design touchpoint, informing the buyer about what the topic/issue of the pattern was that they were buying, so that the wearers of the shirts are clued up about the issues that they represent.

The idea is that people would buy and wear the shirts and be knowledgeable about the topics on them, and their friends and colleagues (people close to them who speak to them comfortably) would ask about the unusual designs on their shirts, thereby being informed by their peers about the issues, which makes them much more likely to take on board the information than if it came from a stranger or an advertising campaign. This means that over time, groups of like-minded, world news interested young people will begin to be clued up by their peers about fake news and how to be wary of it.

Buying the clothing returns money to the screen-printers and t-shirt makers, allowing the process to be sustainable.

5. A social media campaign driven through Instagram from the official Newsbusters Instagram page would post regularly about current events, debunking media myths and doing shirt giveaways and promotion, as well as reposting Instagram posts from the general public of Fake News t-shirt wearers.  Using a social media aspect to the campaign means that it can be accessed and broadcast widely, increasing chance of exposure for potential customers and viewers. 

There would be a hashtag component to it was well, something like '#fakedit' that would help to spread the word about the shirts, promote conversation, and could also be used by people to call out articles of news that they had discovered were fake. That way, anyone reading through the article's comment section may find the hashtag and be more wary, fact checking it themselves.

Both the hashtag and the social media channels would link back to the website, where people can find out more information about each of the issues and buy shirts for themselves.

6. People are impacted by the campaign through the various channels and touchpoints, becoming more aware of fake news in their surroundings, being more skeptical of what they do hear or read, and more capable of researching articles to determine whether or not they are fake news, and call them out.

These people become wiser decision-makers, and, in the long run, cause the consumption of fake news to decline as it gets shut down and exposed faster, and less people believe it's myths. This would lead to more public peace and media transparency, ideally creating a more peaceful planet.

Workshops

 Today in class we had two workshop classes, I chose one with Tristam about 'Blowing Up Your Project' where we had to explain our project to a friend and they drew it. We then put post-it notes on them with either a different User or a different Tool, and then re-imagined our ideas as storyboards. The things that we came up with were completely different takes on the same idea.

My second workshop was with Jason, and we looked at how to bridge the gap between our problems and the solution by using different channels of influence on them to persuade them to make a shift. This was really helpful for solidifying my ideas and looking at all of the possible routes I could take.

I need to finish mine off, but here's a start, what I had by the end of class.

Twitter Research/Inspiration

@dylanmarron is starting a podcast discussing why people hate him with those people. He causes people who write mindless bullying comments on his posts to think about their actions, and reconsider why they did what they did. It is an interesting way of seeing both viewpoints, talking maturely about difficult issues and coming to understand one another.

Watch the video here

@justinhendrix posted an important thread about the security threat of fake news, and how President Donald Trump is perpetuating it.

Watch the video here

Continued research into fake news

Cambridge scientists consider fake news 'vaccine'
Researchers suggest "pre-emptively exposing" readers to a small "dose" of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims.
"Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus," said the University of Cambridge study's lead author Dr Sander van der Linden. "The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible."
The study, published in the journal Global Challenges, was conducted as a disguised experiment.
More than 2,000 US residents were presented with two claims about global warming.
The researchers say when presented consecutively, the influence well-established facts had on people were cancelled out by bogus claims made by campaigners. But when information was combined with misinformation, in the form of a warning, the fake news had less resonance.

THE COLLAPSE OF MEANING IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

...Even the way we use language to convey our collective fears and anxieties about the state of society seems fractured. Each of these accumulated shocks have become a kind of touchpoint for some of the cultural, social, and political trends that have emerged. For many, trust in certain public institutions—the media, the police, the government—is broken. Who can you really trust when every day there are so many wild stories—believable fake news, unbelievable true stories—of police brutality and abuse, media machinations, and propaganda as the rusty old gears of government creak onward? 

"In the face of such uncertainty, if you can’t be sure what facts are real, it’s hardly any wonder that many have rejected objective facts and choose to believe what feels right, and real, to them."

Welcome to the so-called post-truth era, a scary kind of world where facts, truth, and the meaning of words may not really matter much anymore. It’s not exactly a euphemism for old-fashioned lies, as some might think, or another way of saying “truthiness.” It’s actually that facts are now somehow sidestepped as irrelevant, and there are fewer social or political consequences for public figures who blatantly mislead the public. Despite Donald Trump repeating numerous dubious statements throughout his presidential campaign, 70% of which were apparently rated untrue, he still managed to be voted into office. Like hiding a book in plain sight among other books, the cumulative effect of so many obvious falsehoods, one after another, seems to have watered down any serious consequences they might have once had for anyone daring to lie in public life.

Mialon and Mialon discuss how using indirect or figurative speech can convey a lot of the necessary information between two people who can figure out the hidden messages from context. By gauging and gaming the conversational implicatures and presuppositions that listeners are likely to make about the speech context, such as when you try and engage in such pleasantries as lying, bribery, or satire (hopefully one of those more than the others), figurative and indirect speech can be more effective than direct speech in persuading others. 

"If your friend wants to buy beer and you say, “There’s a store on Third Street,” it implies there’s beer to be had there. And yet if your friend comes back and accuses you of sending him where there was no beer, you could truthfully say you never said there was."

In a post-truth era, public discourse can become muddled as words rapidly develop new meanings and connotations for different groups, increasing in unwieldy complexity. Thanks to contexts in which implicatures are key, listeners are always reading between the lines and filling in blanks for themselves, usually with their own beliefs and ideologies. And so, the gaps in understanding one another can be as wide as if we were speaking completely different languages.

The rise and rise of fake news

One of them is The National Report which advertises itself as "America's Number 1 Independent News Source", and which was set up by Allen Montgomery (not his real name). "There are times when it feels like a drug," Montgomery told BBC Trending. "There are highs that you get from watching traffic spikes and kind of baiting people into the story. I just find it to be a lot of fun."

One of The National Report's biggest ever stories was a scare about a US town being cordoned off with a deadly disease, and as Montgomery explains they've mastered the art of getting people to read and share their fake news offering.

"Obviously the headline is key, and the domain name itself is very much a part of the formula - you need to have a fake news site that looks legitimate as can be," Montgomery says.

Brooke Binkowski from Snopes, one of the largest fact checking websites which fights online misinformation, believes that while individual fake news stories may not be dangerous their potential to cause damage becomes more powerful over time and when considered in the aggregate.

"There's a lot of confirmation bias," she says. "A lot of people want proof that their world view is the accurate and appropriate one."

And that idea of reinforcing people's beliefs and falsely confirming their prejudices is something that Allen Montgomery says his fake news site actively tries to exploit.
"We're constantly trying to tune into feelings that we think that people already have or want to have," he says. "Recently we did a story about Hillary Clinton being fed the answers prior to the debate. There was already some low level chatter about that having happened - it was all fake - but that sort of headline gets into the right wing bubble and they run with it."
A recent study of local TV stations in the US conducted by Adornato revealed that that nearly 40% of their editorial policies did not include any guidelines on how to verify information from social media, yet news managers at the TV stations admitted that at least a third of their news bulletins had reported information from social media that later was revealed to be false or inaccurate.

"Journalists need to get training so that they can quickly spot fakes, and people in school should learn how to read things critically online - they should learn how to research and check multiple sources online."

Pinterest brainstorming

I have continued finding inspirational images and brainstorming over on my Pinterest board: https://nz.pinterest.com/mehannahfortune/newsbusters/

Looking at typography that shows different angles/perspectives, images that show hidden other images within them, and anything about hiding or deception.

Where to next? Brainstorming

After these dioramas, and the feedback about blowing my project up wide, I needed to brainstorm what I would do next. I honestly had no idea! So yesterday I did a tonne of brainstorming to try and find a new direction to explore down.

Might a typographic route work?