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.