Month: February 2023

Forgotten in this project does not just mean that the memory of news is forgotten, but also that it is blocked or hidden or deleted by the government. Most of the news content we see now is what the government wants us to see after vetting.

This project is more about censorship and how does censorship affect the authenticity of news events. So my enquiry moves from, “why do the news events that have been highly visible get forgotten by the Internet? Shifting to“How does the Internet’s forgetful behaviour towards news affect the accurate dissemination of news?”

In this week, I tried some temperature-sensitive inks that are printed on the entire text. When the ink senses a higher temperature, it will produce a discoloration effect, and the blocked text will also appear. It’s like when some news is clicked by everyone on the screen, as the number of clicks and popularity increases, more truth will be presented. As the heat dropped, this piece of news was gradually covered in black and forgotten.

Moreover，When the finger is in contact with the paper, the ink will change color with increasing temperature. The blocked information also appears, like the presentation and hiding of information manipulated by the government or the power behind the Internet. To the Internet, however, government manipulation of online news is invisible. So the manipulation of information through publication is much more traceable.

This black newspaper’s content comes from the web code of an article that revealed news events that were blocked and hidden in 2022. I translated this article through code programming, but within a few days the page was blocked, and the code I recorded became the only trace. So I tried to translate the content of this article directly in the form of the original code of the page, and published it as an invisible news.

A printed version of news content is more valuable because print is a fixed version that is difficult to tamper with. Any change will be magnified. Yet news presented on the Internet can easily be copied over and over again. Even tampering is hard to spot.

In my reference, it is mentioned that “the easiest way for the online newspaper archives is to put up barriers so that they are not as easily accessible as they are today “. So all the experiments I did were to represent this forgotten behavior by creating some dyslexia.

This process I simulated the Internet to create a content full of dyslexia. This is used to show the impact and challenge of this forgetting behavior on communication.

In the current era of big data, a great deal of news and information is presented in digital form on the Internet, and we can access the information and news we want to know whenever and wherever we want. These news are in a seemingly stable internet system, yet they are very easily altered and even gradually forgotten by the internet through obfuscation, deletion and hiding.

So my enquiry moves from, “why do the news events that have been highly visible get forgotten by the Internet? Shifting to“How does the Internet’s forgetful behaviour towards news affect the accurate dissemination of news?”

I have tried to experiment with publication and printed materials by translating digital content through publication. This is a way of showing how the forgetting of news on the internet is presented on publication. Because it is more traceable to use publication to represent information being forgotten.

For this experiment I have selected a video that has been silenced by the internet, featuring a debater speaking about gender equality. Throughout the video, this large section was de-voiced because of the number of sensitive words and content she mentioned.

So I tried various visual ways to simulate the internet’s forgetfulness of this textual content. This includes by creating a set of blurred fonts replacing sensitive words, and through irreversible hollowing out to delete or block sensitive information.

In addition, I would like to try some silver printing inks that can be scratched off, to show a limitation in this way. In my reference, it is mentioned that “for online news, the easiest way to make it more difficult to obtain such information is to set up obstacles to make them less accessible and readable”. So all the experiments I did were to represent this forgotten behavior by creating some dyslexia.

The purpose of news is to quickly and accurately disseminate important social events. However, this phenomenon of being forgotten by the Internet has violated the original intention of news dissemination. This dyslexia caused by this forgetting behavior also poses challenges to the dissemination of information.

I talked on the topic of hot news being forgotten. More specifically, some of the once-high-profile news events have been forgotten by the Internet. I have googled the definition of news. News, is a kind of literary style that truly records society, spreads information, reflects important events of every moment and transmits information through media.

Nowadays, once a news event represented by the supervision report of public opinion is exposed by the media, it will always spread rapidly through the Internet platform, even overtaking all news, creating the Hot news and attracting the attention of the public at a time. However, as time goes by, the hot news events that once attracted attention gradually disappear, and the related websites and comments are deleted, even as if it never happened. At the same time, due to the dependence on the Internet, the memory of many netizens is gradually blurred or even disappeared with the loss of Internet memory.

So my enquiry is, why are the news events that have been closely watched forgotten by the Internet? What affects the memory of the Internet? Is it because the information spread too fast in the era of large Numbers of data, too much information gradually covers up the previous news events? Or is it influenced by some power that these high-profile content is restricted to dissemination, hidden or blocked? So will these gradually missing information pose a challenge to the dissemination of information?

Therefore, in my proposal, I plan to explore the process of news being forgotten through experiments of visual and printed materials. I did some sketchmaking this week. I tried to extract the headlines from the news report and blurry the pictures and text through the Color Halftone visual way. It’s like the picture has been reposted countless times, and the picture pixels will become lower and lower.

In the context of printing, information is printed by dots to plane way to gradually present clear information and picture. On the contrary, in the same context, whether the information can be carried out from clear to fuzzy or not, the clear picture gradually blurs into various dots, which means to express the process that the information is gradually forgotten. The use of this more transparent paper to print these headlines is to show the stacking effect of information, and the overload of information leads to the gradual disappearance of many news that has been widely watched.

In this visual way, you can see the content clearly from a distance, but when you want to go into the details, you will find that the content is blurred and difficult to identify, just like the news you may have heard, but when you want to search for details, the news has been forgotten and deleted by the Internet.

In the process of my research, I found that the “right to be forgotten” in the law may be the key to causing hot news to be forgotten and deleted by the Internet. In the era of big data, everyone’s personal data and information are becoming increasingly transparent. This “right to be forgotten” protects people’s personal information to some extent by means of human intervention on the Internet, but challenges people’s “freedom of speech” and “public right to know”. So I will be the next thing I will continue to study.