Alternate Title: Why Sony have made Baudrillard the Go-To Philosopher for the ‘Net.

There are moments on the Web in which the speed at which information disseminates raises some very interesting questions about truth and power. Case in point… A couple of days ago, Sony announced that they were about to release new firmware for the Playstation 3 that would include some new features. This is a pretty regular occurrence and PC World, as they do, reported on the news. However, Peter Cohen, the writer of the article, made a mistake: he claimed that a particular feature – the ability to copy from a Blu-Ray disc to a portable device – was included in this update when it was in fact not. It was an easy error to make – Sony had mentioned something about copying media to a Playstation Portable and they themselves have said that the ability to make little portable copies of movies was a feature that was coming sometime in the future – so it’s not as if Cohen committed a cardinal sin. It was poor fact-checking and unfortunately it happens. (The article has since been updated and no trace of the original mistake remains).

What was fascinating though was the way in which this filtered and spread very quickly through the web. At its end point, when mainstream CNET blog Crave posted about the new firmware, they stated the following: “despite widespread rumors to the contrary, the update did not include the ability to copy portable versions of Blu-ray movies to the PSP”. There is, I think, a palpable sense of disappointment in both this and many other posts and comments. It isn’t at all new that a rumour flew around the web at breakneck speed; this happens all the time. What did strike me though was the way in which the dissemination of the rumour, the way in which was reproduced a thousand times, added to the weight behind it such that, when it was proved false, it was as if Sony were at fault for not including the feature.

When I first read the story on PC World, I knew it was a misunderstanding. When it had shown up twenty times in my RSS feeds, I started to wonder if they hadn’t gotten the inside scoop. The point – besides the now obvious fact that Baudrillard is the philosopher for the Web – is that the linear movement of a rumour sets up a situation in which falsity comes ‘before’ truth. Here, many are disappointed that something that was never promised did not materialise. What has happened is that the pace of the movement of information produces an expectation that, once not met, is read as an example of failure. While this has existed in the past in the form of rumour-mongering, the situation seems to be made exponentially worse by the pace of the ‘net, specifically in two ways: first, a mistake such as Cohen’s needs to only exist for a moment for it to spread like wildfire; and secondly, that this same speed may in part be a cause for the sort of poor fact-checking that was at the root of this minor misunderstanding. It’s a very specific, localised example, but it does make one wonder about how the multiplication and reproduction of a ‘fact’ can add weight to its ‘sense of truth’ even when it is totally false. And while it makes little difference whether Sony included this feature or not, it is very hard not to think of ‘Swiftboating‘ or other political uses for this ‘speed’.