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Narrative and the power of misinformation
On the 28th May 1982 Colonel H Jones led a charge at Goose Green in the Falkland Islands in which he was killed. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery in the British military, yet ever since the award has been critiqued and scrutinised. The narrative surrounding Jones has played out in the UK media over the last 43 years, with the official version still that he died a hero worthy of the highest award. His last moments and death are one small example of how we choose to frame narratives, who we lionise, and how we sculpt a version of the truth from the messiness of the actual events. In the age of social media it is easy to pronounce your version is the “truth”, yet reality is never that simple.
Elon Musk’s take over of X drove the platform further right, yet Twitter stands as an example of how we crave bite sized versions of reality over substantive time consuming long reads that usually present a fragment of the messiness. Sean Burke outlined in The Death and Return of the Author how the collision of authorial intent and desire to have our voices heard often leads to intent being read into something when it was not there. Culturally we have been led to believe that author-ity, the weight we give to an author’s words, should be taken at face value, or at the very least as a negotiated concept where we er on the side of the author. In…
