Web 2.0 Narratives- Wikipedia Vandalism
Here, I tried to weave a story between a series of fake Wikipedia articles I had written. I think the idea came from my hatred of the mass of garbage on that internet that web 2.0 sites keep enabling– from vanity sites and irrelevant blogs, to the ignorant comments and arguments on youtube written by twelve year olds and unemployed middle-aged men. Rather than take a high road, I wanted to add to the mess of misinformation and non-information that the Internet user has to sift through. But aside from my pettiness, the real point of this kind of project is to create “real” stories that unfold through interactions between these constructed Internet identities, to show the power of this anonymity, and to simply have fun coming up with unusual narratives.
Alas, Wikipedia fiends crack down on fake articles almost instantly, so I think I’m going to have to recreate this project on youtube with fake personalities instead. Still, here are some of the archived articles with a story loop. Basically, I made up an unsung American “founding father” who originally chopped down a cherry tree, attributed to George Washington– but the tree was more of a bush, named by a botanist– who was later brutally murdered– and the murderer was supposedly violent music like Marilyn Manson and the Popscops, a band that, absurdly enough, wants America to have another violent revolution- much like the political founding fathers of America encouraged.
