NEWSPAPER

Conclusion

With media comes concerns over credibility and control. It’s often weaponised and feeds into the dominant discourse the government is using to control us. But knowing there are barriers to the truth, as Moser and Dilling point out, is not enough for our behaviour around the consumption and sharing of fake news to change; “Simply trying to motivate people to change behaviour without acknowledging the real barriers in the way of change will have little success” (Moser and Dilling 2007, p.494). As Fleming explains, “this is especially the case if the barriers are created by discourses and therefore not always acknowledged or known” (Fleming 2010, p.15). Electronic literature often makes academia, and the critical discourse of universities, more accessible to those without the skills the navigate these discourses in traditional forms. It also challenges our notion of what literature is as, by its very definition, it's interactive (Hayles 2007). This interaction blurs the boundary between the world of the narrative and the real world, creating a feeling of strangeness (Hayles 2007).

It is this crossing of boundaries that makes electronic literature a prime space to experiment with the boundaries within society. According to Strehovic, society is “defined by capitalism, which does not leave anything outside of its influence” (as cited in Aardse 2015). As a result “there is also no point in leaving the e-literary text outside” (Aardse 2015). In analysing Mez Breeze’s work, Aardse explains that Breeze explores the “various ways in which electronic literature and hypermedia provide possible outlets for thinking outside of the capitalist sphere” (2015). Likewise, Yelin refers to Derrida’s characterisation of literature more broadly as a “field which is capable of going beyond itself” (2018, p.6). Foucault, like Derrida, saw a grand role for all forms of literature;

“I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes-all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.” (Foucault 1997).

When considering electronic literature and digital forms of narrative, Strehovec finds, much like this analysis into fake news, that, “stable viewing points are difficult to find, and hard and fast lines between different fields are being pushed aside” (2014, p.4). Electronic literature is a good platform to learn media literacy by engaging with texts and critical theory in more interactive ways. For example, in demonstrating how easy it is to create fake news that is unquestioned, two of the headlines in this work were never published and were completely falsified. Can you guess which ones?