[Commlist] CFP: Media of Verification, communication +1, vol. 10 (2023)

CfP: “Media of Verification”
communication +1, Vol. 10, 2023

Submission of proposal: November 14, 2022
Submission deadline: April 30, 2023
http://www.communicationplusone.org/dialogues/cfp-vol-10-media-of-verification/


Media of Verification
communication +1, Vol. 10, 2023
edited by Johannes Bennke, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel

 From a global perspective, democracies are under pressure. From 
within, it is threatened by populism and its different forms of 
misinformation, lies, and the spread of mistrust and fear. From outside, 
it faces autocracies and war. Since decades, there has been an epidemic 
of un-trust or distrust in the social fabric of Western democratic 
societies. And modern technology seems to conspire with these 
threatening forces. Among other factors, social media seems to be 
fueling an epidemic of misinformation as well as distrust in science. 
But despite all the distrust – how is trust established with technology? 
From a media studies perspective the focus turns away from the content 
driven analysis and surveys to the operations, apparatuses, and specific 
methods in how trust is being established through media technology. A 
key operation to generate trust, I argue, is verification. Trust is not 
only an element of the social fabric established by interpersonal 
interaction and behavior but also by media technologies and their 
particular operations of verification. Trust has been studied primarily 
in terms of an interhuman relationship in psychology (Thagard 2019), as 
social trust beyond a dyadic relationship in the political and social 
sciences (Uslaner 2018), or as cooperation in game theory (Axelrod 
2006). Here, we intend to take a different, a media philosophical and 
cultural techniques point of view. Taking ,media of verification‘ as a 
starting point to think about trust in a society built on digital 
communication changes the discourse and allows media theorists to frame 
the problem differently.
The proposed issue of communication +1 departs from the perspective that 
considers media by focusing on the materialities, medialities, and 
performative operations and practices of media technologies that deal 
with verification processes. I consider ,media of verification‘ across 
five different modalities:

(1) Verification in Media
Probably the most prominent form of verification happens in and with 
media in the field of journalism. With its specific tools of fact 
checking and the verification of sources, to the extent of open source 
intelligence (OSINT) like bellingcat.com, and forms of digital forensics 
(Weizman 2017) it is especially sensitive with regard to information 
about the what’s, the when’s, the where’s and the who’s that make up 
journalistic reportage. The war in Ukraine is a powerful example of how 
information is being verified with unreliable statements and without 
independent sources based on visual data and OSINT (oryxspioenkop.com). 
This detective work follows new kind of traces and heavily relies on a 
new ,techno-hermeneutics‘ within a paradigm of circumstantial evidence 
(Ginzburg 1989).

(2) Apparatuses of Verification
Second, ,media of verification‘ addresses apparatuses of verification 
like the EasyPASS border control system using passports and image 
recognition at airports in the EU. In other instances passwords are 
needed, or (cognitive-psychological) riddles like reCAPTCHA have to be 
solved, or tickets and the deployment of other keys of authentication 
(dactyloscopy, retina scan, voice recognition etc.) at different 
thresholds are necessary in order to pass the gatekeeping entity. What 
may be very annoying from the users perspective is often part of a 
control and (cyber-)security system intended to prevent unauthorized 
access. Such apparatuses of verification regulate access and denial and 
therefore have a key political and ethical dimension. It touches upon 
issues present within the research literature on the media history of 
passports (Robertson 2010), lists (Young 2017), archives (Vismann 2012), 
modes of surveillance and the abuse of power (“who will guard the 
guardians?”), forms of reappropriation of ones (digital) life in the 
sousveillance movement (Mann 2013) or forms of resistance via 
obfuscation (Brunton/Nissenbaum 2015).

(3) Verification as Consensus Making
Third, we have to contend with the integrity of the document or 
digitized artefact with regard to its materiality and readability, which 
is facilitated by writing tools – like a specific paper, ink, or a 
certain typography (Gitelman 2014) –, or by seals, certificates, 
signatures, coats of arms, stamps, watermarks, or other forms of 
authentication and authorization. At the center of this issue lies a 
legal dimension of consensus making between the different stakeholders 
of particular documents or artefacts (author, owner, messenger, reader 
etc.). Forms of verification are needed, allowing for the 
authentication, authorization, and coherence of the content of a certain 
document. Here, we are no longer dealing solely with apparatuses (and 
algorithms) but rather with a legal dimension of verification, relating 
to cybernetics, governmentality, bureaucracy, administration, and law 
itself.

(4) Infrastructures of Verification
Fourth, ,media of verification‘ addresses questions of the 
infrastructure, the material foundation on which the documents, 
artefacts, apparatuses, transmissions, and administrative regulators 
rely (Parks/Starosielski 2015). Depending on the form of verification, 
it can relate to the postal service in the Middle Ages with its sworn in 
messengers, or it can relate to the energy consumption and heat 
production of decentralized networks and therefore even to the 
ecological dimension. That is to say, that establishing trust by way of 
digital forms of verification heavily relies on an infrastructure that 
has not only technological but other implications yet to be explored.

(5) Aesthetic Dimension of ,Media of Verification‘
Fifth, there is an aesthetic dimension to ,media of verification‘ which 
not only includes other aforementioned dimensions (such as the 
authentication of an art piece by an ,art expert‘), but verification has 
– beyond a certain symbolism such as knots and chains – an iconography 
by its own (i.e. “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio 
(1601/02)). By looking at representation of verification, what becomes 
apparent, is the relation to opacity and transparency (Alloa/Thomä 
2018), and to questions of obscurity and revelation. Recent developments 
in crypto art, NFT-art, or blockchain based art, shift the focus to 
their media ontology (Weidinger 2021). From a media ontology 
perspective, cryptographic operations form the basis for smart contracts 
and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a way to verify the artist, ownership, 
and transaction (Fortnow/Terry 2022) leading to new aesthetic forms of 
expression. From a narratological point of view, there are affinities to 
riddles, plot twists, scams, fakeries, or workarounds. It also relates 
to the apparent wave of dubious characters like the trickster 
(Bassil-Morozow 2015), conman/ conwoman, or the picador in recent games, 
films, TV-series, and novels relating to such imposters (“Among Us” 
(Innersloth Studio, 2018), “Better Caul Saul” (USA, 2015-2022), 
“Inventing Anna” (USA, 2022)).

With vol. 10 of the communication + 1 issue in 2023 on the topic of 
“Media of Verification” we invite scholars from various fields such as 
communication, media, film, and literature studies, philosophy and art 
history to contribute to a field of research that has yet to be explored 
and that spans different disciplines. The aim of this approach is to 
understand these phenomena as generic forms of a digital sovereignty in 
(post-)modernity and late capitalism: ,Media of verification‘ are taken 
as media in their own right in order to acknowledge their particular 
agency and epistemology. What is and what is not is not decided 
independently from any such media eco system. Therefore, a media 
archeology of knowledge production can show competitive forms of 
knowledge with their respective veritas – which leads even before the 
political regulations of inclusion or exclusion to epistemological and 
ethical questions of a mediation between different reference systems. 
Can this be described in terms of a fundamental disagreement or 
dissensus (Rancière 1998/2010) or differend (Lyotard 1989)? What are 
particular practices and operations in each of the mentioned fields of 
verification? Further, can verification be taken as a key mechanism of 
digitality, in order to describe its historical conditions, operative 
logic, its mediality, materiality, and performativity? How, then, is 
trust established by ,media of verification‘? And what histories and 
genealogies does the cultural techniques point of view reveal about a 
particular medium of verification? What is its mediality? And how does 
it relate to thinking about sovereignty, (post-)modernity and democracy? 
Framing trust by way of ,media of verification‘ therefore allows 
theorists of media and communication to push the way we understand media 
studies more generally while getting a better picture of the media 
technological mechanisms underlying the social glue.

In case of interest, please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words 
and a brief academic biography by November 14th, 2022 to 
(johannes.bennke /at/ mail.huji.ac.il).
Full text submission will be due April 30th, 2023, with expected 
publication in September 2023. There are no article processing charges 
or fees associated with publication.

About the Journal
The aim of communication +1 is to promote new approaches to and open new 
horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary 
perspective. We are particularly committed to promoting research that 
seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers of 
theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both 
established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social 
sciences, and arts. Other than the commitment to rigorous scholarship, 
communication +1 sets no specific agenda. Its primary objective is to 
create a space for thoughtful experiments and for communicating these 
experiments.
communication +1 is an open access journal supported by University of 
Massachusetts Amherst Libraries and the Department of Communication
communicationplusone.org.

Editors
Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Zachary J. McDowell, University of Illinois at Chicago

Guest Editor
Johannes Bennke, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Advisory Board
Sean Johnson Andrews, Columbia College Chicago
Lisa Åkervall, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Nathalie Casemajor, University of Québec Outaouais
Jimena Canales, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Bernard Geoghegan, Kings College, London
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University
Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine
Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, United Kingdom
Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
John Durham Peters, Yale University
Amit Pinchevski, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Florian Sprenger, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Jonathan Sterne, McGill University
Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder
Christina Vagt, University of California Santa Barbara
Greg Wise, Arizona State University

For more information about the project in general, as well as short 
pieces, lectures, and interviews, visit communicationplusone.org.

For more information or to participate in the communicationplusone.org 
project, please email (communicationplusone /at/ gmail.com)


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