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We’ve all heard about the potential for rumors to spread rapidly through social media, especially Twitter, and you’ve probably seen a false report of a celebrity death or two if you’re at all active in the same. As yesterday’s panic on the Potomac shows us, however, it isn’t only online media that is vulnerable to mistaken reporting. When networks run with unsubstantiated reports, however, the effect is quite different from when such things are spread primarily by citizen reporters tweeting.

Because supposedly reliable news agencies, starting with CNN, were reporting gunshots fired, the DC police department rushed to the scene, while flights at Reagan National Airport were grounded. I’m not sure that a trending topic on Twitter would have had such an impact, yet rumors instigated through Twitter tend to get fact-checked rather quickly through @ replies looking for verifiable sources.

If someone saying “bang bang” over a loudspeaker had started off a rumor about gunfire that was confined to social media, we would all be having a good laugh right now about how silly people were to confuse the two and how gullible the people who passed the story on were. Instead we’re getting a lot of talking-head outrage about the Coast Guard training on 9/11 and letters from networks justifying their coverage decisions. The coast guard is reviewing their procedures.

Now, maybe the Coast Guard should have been more sensitive to people’s fears. That said, the story shows the speciousness of arguing against social media as an information source because it is vulnerable to false information. It also calls into question how we decide which misinterpretations should be anticipated or, failing that, taken seriously.

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You may have heard about the off-duty security guard at the Seattle Art Museum who took it upon herself to perform an “excavation” of Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail, removing notes and business cards other people had tacked onto it. If we look at the work in terms of power, as allowing museum-goers to share the artist’s power to create (if only to a limited degree), then what Amanda Mae (the guard in question) did was to claim all that power for herself.

Taken as a commentary on the role of the curator, this is an intriguing act which makes a fair point. Even the problematic framing of Mae as the savior of the work with a “higher calling” fits this interpretation.

On the other hand, her act is also a real use of power—as real (if trivial) as when some asshole tears down all the fliers on a utility pole because they think ads for indie bands or lost cats don’t belong there.

Whether we look at this as a statement or as a real act, that Ms. Mae apparently referred to public interaction with the work as a “gang rape” shows a total lack of empathy for people who have survived that sort of violation. It also seems to suggest a failure to understand the piece. (As this comment was made in an email to an artist friend rather than publicly, I am disinclined to class it as a poor attempt at commentary on the understanding of curators).

ETA: Jon Hendricks, curator for Yoko Ono Exhibitions, sent a response to Ms. Mae that reads in part:

I think you have to consider art in a much deeper, more profound sense than you do. And also, to have greater respect for the artist, and not presume that you know what she intends. If the artist had instructed the work to be returned to its “austere” beginnings, that would have been her prerogative. But as she did not, you didn’t have the right to dictate what the artist’s intention was, and to rob those many people who had interacted with the work before you of their contribution to this process.

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Recently, Shared Worlds asked five well-known authors of speculative fiction the following question: “What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?”. China Miéville’s answer at least comes as no surprise:

Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

It’s worth noting that not one of the authors, even those from the US, chose a US city. Certainly, I couldn’t make  an argument for any of the cities I’ve lived in within its borders. Seattle is too much on the edge of now, New York and San Francisco too marked by a too recent past.

The cities for which I could make an argument are in Asia. There’s Tokyo of course with its high-tech towers, trains, and phones as well as shrines and forests for the fantasy element; rearranging the syllables gets you Kyoto, where you have a similar level of technology as well as more famous shrines and temples, most of which have been rebuilt to appear ancient. Nagasaki would be my choice for a ghost story; its violent history did not begin with the dropping of the bomb. 

Moving on to the mainland, Kuala Lumpur could be supported as a spec-fic city for similar reasons: there are the tremendous heights of the Petronas Towers and the rain forest of Bukit Nanas. In Cambodia, Siem Reap has its proximity to the ruins of a lost civilization, which presents all kinds of story possibilities; the ever-present tourists, and the contrast between their lifestyles and the lives of the local residents provide for the possibility of sub-plots addressing social inequality.

As settings for speculative fiction, however, all of these pale in comparison to Shanghai. The obvious SF zone is Pudong with its glistening skyscrapers and the retro-future Oriental Pearl Tower. Across the Huangpu (and who knows what creatures might rise from that river, resulting perhaps from experiments conducted by the naval ships that pass?), towers behind the old colonial buildings of the Bund appear to have been fitted with lasers. Contrasting the lives of migrant workers and residents of Shanghai’s older districts with these glistening futurismic areas provides the same sort of opportunity for addressing social inequality that I mentioned in Siem Reap, only it is heightened by the general dystopian air created by the PRC’s authoritarian government. Moreover, like so many of these other cities, Shanghai possesses the temples and shrines that can serve as entrances for powerful and fantastic entities.

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A man broke into, and generally trashed, a South Seattle church while high on PCP. A church being vandalized is pretty much guaranteed to make the news. This case, however, provided the local media with a special opportunity for sensationalization, as the man turned out to HIV-positive (he also has hepatitis, but that isn’t what made the headlines). Over the weekend, local TV news reports referred to the site as a “biohazard” and referred constantly to the dangers posed by blood containing the virus.

One problem though: spattered blood dries fairly quickly and, according to the CDC,

 

To obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies have required the use of artificially high concentrations of laboratory-grown virus . . . CDC studies have shown that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within several hours. Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that which has been observed – essentially zero. Incorrect interpretations of conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have in some instances caused unnecessary alarm.

Results from laboratory studies should not be used to assess specific personal risk of infection because (1) the amount of virus studied is not found in human specimens or elsewhere in nature, and (2) no one has been identified as infected with HIV due to contact with an environmental surface. Additionally, HIV is unable to reproduce outside its living host (unlike many bacteria or fungi, which may do so under suitable conditions), except under laboratory conditions; therefore, it does not spread or maintain infectiousness outside its host.

In other words, the chances of infection are, barring a miracle, nil. Now there may well be a more legitimate reason for treating the scene as hazardous, but the media is failing to report it. Not only is this inaccurate reporting, it’s also highly irresponsible and dangerous. In the early days of the HIV epidemic, people came to fear those with the disease in part because of rampant misinformation about how it spread; the stigma has never been thoroughly erased, and stories like this can only serve to make it worse.

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Last night I went to the cheap wine and poetry event at Hugo House. I came away feeling that it had, overall, been mediocre, but the truth is that by the time the reading began I was in no mood to be open to poetry. It began when I wanted to get a glass of the $1 wine and was carded but had not brought my ID. If someone would like to explain to me how we can call this a free country when a 29-year old can’t even get a drink without showing ID, I would be quite grateful.

But that’s a relatively minor complaint. What truly put me in a foul mood was the introduction to the event, in which the audience was admonished to drink responsibly lest the organizers have to carry you outside “and let the homeless have their way with you”. It’s funny because if you drink too much you get raped! And by gross homeless men! And it’s like totally transgressive to talk about homeless people as a criminal element!

The really funny thing is that I can almost guarantee you that there was a rapist in the audience laughing at the joke. Laughing because it reconfirmed him as not in the class of people usually considered rapists—as too clean, too economically secure, and not lurking in the bushes. Laughing because it reconfirmed the victim as responsible for avoiding the situation in which she is raped, as if rape just happens. Laughing, like everyone else in the room, not because it was funny but because applauding such sentiments means you can be criticized.

Laughter invokes the “just a joke” defense. All I could do at the time was mutter in disdain because if I had made noise about it, I would have been deemed hysterical.

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