by Jen Paton
This American Life, the American radio program, has posted an episode called “Retraction”, which retracts performer Mike Daisey's story on Foxconn – adapted from his stage series, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Daisey, since the TAL story ran in January, has become one of the most visible critics of Apple. But it turns out that the most memorable stories in the piece- about a man with a subcontracted-factory-injured hand touching an Ipad screen with wonder, and a girl employee telling him Daisey was thirteen – were untrue, at least to TAL's level of comfort. When interviewed about all this in the “Retraction” piece, Daisey sounds abashed, and half-heartedly apologies to Ira Glass for allowing something that merely met the standard of truth for theater onto a journalistic program. Daisey tells Glass, “I really do believe stories should be subordinate to the truth….everything that is in this monologue is built out of the truth I took.” On his Web site (http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/), Daisey writes that he “uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell [the] story, and I believe [I do] so with integrity.”
Seemingly all of a sudden we (some of us, many of us) can instantly share our built truths, our ideas, our revolutions. Polish writer Piotr Czerski recently published a manifesto on “us”, the Web literate generation (he is three years older than me). Admitting that he uses “we” as a convenience, he describes us as communicating on a level “more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.” This seems a bit grandiose – volume does not equal efficiency, intensity does not equal clarity – but Czerski raises many interesting points. I am most interested in his discussion of how we use the Web to find things out, to weigh the evidence, to triangulate at truth. He writes that: “we have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible.” While I agree more or less with his description of how to arrive at “the truth,” I'm not sure if the Web really makes “us” better at finding it.
I'm not sure we are so good at assessing credibility – the credibility of others, or perhaps worse, our own.