Featured in
- Published 20230207
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-80-1
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
About the author
Melinda Bufton
Melinda Bufton is the author of Moxie (2020), winner of the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2019.
More from this edition
Living in kayfabe
Non-fictionOn free-dress days, I wore my sister’s dance tights to school because they made me feel like I was a real wrestler. I would’ve worn my Speedos if my mum let me. Other kids stared at me and asked ‘What are you wearing?’ and I’d tell them that this was my wrestling gear.
Vaudeville
PoetryIf the magical colours aren’t even across the page, it’s a failure of art according to aesthetes. An obscenity of blues and reds, they say.
The future is hackable
Non-fictionDeepfakes occupy the epicentre of an escalating tension between fact and belief in the digital media economy. Their rise coincides with the emergence of video as the preferred information format for the majority of consumers. The text-driven churn of Twitter now vies with the visual distractions of TikTok: recent studies indicate that users retain 95 per cent of audiovisual messaging and only 10 per cent of messaging read as text. In a post-truth arena already besieged by the comparative virality of fake stories over real ones, with public faith in ‘facts’ and ‘expertise’ eroding across the legal, political, academic and media spheres, deepfakes, in their five-year life span, have inspired dystopian prophesies that swerve from dread to moral panic. In 2019, US Congressman Adam Schiff warned deepfakes could ‘turn a world leader into a ventriloquist’s dummy’. Political researchers Cristian Vaccari and Andrew Chadwick concurred, asserting the ‘stakes are too high’ for deepfakes to be treated as ‘mere technological curiosities’. In the lead-up to the 2020 US election, computational scholars modelled seven credible deepfake scenarios that could undermine democracy.
