Friday, 10 February 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316
Jonathan Coopersmith, Texas A&M University
“Forging the Fax: How Fax Machines Helped Create ‘Alternative Facts'”
John Perry Barlow’s bold 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace epitomized the optimism, excitement—and naivete—of the Internet for promoting communications, political action, and sharing information. But the Internet and now social media have also, as the last election has shown, enabled a post-modern reality of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” dissembling chatbots, leaked information, massive electronic attacks against individuals, spamming, and other discordant challenges to visions of an information utopia. This paper examines how such hopes and dystopic applications also accompanied the rise of faxing.
The evolution of the fax machine and the Internet reflects larger changes in communications based on decreasing barriers to entry, the democratization of production, and automation. One result is a communications version of Gresham’s law, “bad pseudo-data drives out good information.”
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Jonathan Coopersmith teaches the history of technology at Texas A&M University. His latest book, Faxed. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) is a co-recipient of the 2016 Business History Conference Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Currently he is researching the importance of frothy and fraudulent firms in emerging technologies.