REALITY CHECK by Valerie Laws

Recent events have thrown up the question - what’s really real? Judging fake from true is tricky, and some argue the internet makes fakery more prevalent. I would disagree, but you have to learn the signs and keep your googling finger at the ready. Apart from the phishing scams, pretending to be our banks or Word or Yahoo, we’ve all had emails sent from friends’ accounts. If it says something like ‘hey, look at this!’ and a link, I’d never click on it without checking with the supposed sender first. I beware of Greeks and their gifts, to avoid Trojan Horses galloping through my hard drive. Twitter direct messages from followers are almost always scams, with ‘someone’s spreading rumours about you!’ and a link. Again, delete, sigh, scroll on by.

Facebook can stray into unreality too. Well-meaning friends share and pass on messages which are either hoaxes or have ceased to be true. I now never share appeals about missing persons without googling first. Often it turns out the person turned up back in 2008, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, sometimes after only three days or so. Yet the original heart-tugging appeal has been circulating all over cyberspace spreading exponentially ever since! Especially exasperating are deliberately started privacy panics, suggesting that Facebook has now signed a pact with Satan and if you don’t change settings for every single friend while facing a full moon, your soul will be ripped out with dirty tweezers. Many believe these scares and post long, boring status updates warning us of the coming apocalypse and asking us to soak their name in dettol and throw flea powder at the screen or some such. Again, get googling! Yes I know what you find then might be fake too, but you do get a feeling for faux. I’m sure others will have found this. There’s a particular linguistic register, a preachy tone and style, which is popular for fake stories especially those designed to make us feel smug or shocked. It’s worth checking Hoax Slayer before sharing or passing on. 


'I'm, oops I mean he's a genius, honest!'

People who avoid, fear and distrust the internet often worry that somehow people in blacked-out vans are monitoring their every move if they venture online. Of course some of this goes on, but really, the sheer amount of traffic makes it impossible to do more than search for product names etc. Just imagine how many cat pictures those shady men in vans must look at. Enough to make them ailurophobic. One reason the DDR fell to bits was that so many people were busy monitoring each other, nobody was making the dinner. And that was pre- internet. Which brings us to writing, and reality. Recently in the crime fiction world, daggers were drawn at learning that not only did Stephen Leather cheerfully admit creating sock puppets to review his own books, but it turned out that hugely successful RJ Ellory was doing the same not only to praise his own work but to rubbish that of rivals.



'Pop behind the screen and fill this with metaphors please'

More recently, my fellow poets have been shocked by a plagiarism scandal. Literary plagiarism is rife in the education world, with students using copy and paste to the point where quoting becomes wholesale nicking. Lecturers are supposed to check for this, difficult though it may be. In the poetry world, however, it hasn’t been so often discussed or even suspected. Yes occasionally poets are incensed to find an ‘homage’ has crossed the line into plagiarism of some of their best images or structures. But many of us are haunted by the fear of actually committing plagiarism by mistake, somehow subconsciously recalling something read or heard or seen years ago as our own invention. The Christian Ward scandal began when he won a poetry competition. These are big draws to starving poets, and make big money for organisers, some have prizes of £1000 or more and winning also gives kudos and CV brownie points. The poem turned out to be Helen Mort’s ‘The Deer’ with only a couple of teeny changes. At first comments on facebook and in the media were inclined to be charitable, until the two poems were widely shared online. Ward’s ‘apology’ seemed slippery and ambiguous. Then more poems he’d ‘homaged’, had published, gained from, began to be discovered. This must have been going on for years. (See here  - the two deer poems are quoted in full further down for comparison.) So how many other poets are far more successful than they know, though someone else is grabbing the credit? Just as athletes have to take drug tests, successful poems, at least in competitions, will have to be well and truly googled.

Every star hard-earned I tells yer!

The sockpuppet scandal has led to some strange effects for ebook bods like ourselves. Amazon, in an attempt to purge their reviews of fake people, best buds and authors’ mams and grans, have tried to check readers’ reviews are bona fide. This is quite ironic. In the dead tree book world, writers are regularly, indeed some almost exclusively, reviewed by their friends. If you see a hysterical blurb on a cover, ‘Pant-wettingly hilarious, tear-jerkingly moving, buy this now it will change and indeed justify your life! Sunday Snobb’ then read the novel to discover it’s just meh, it’s surprisingly common for the author’s biog to include ‘journalist on the Sunday Snobb’... It’s a bit cronyist, yes, but what can you do, writers get to know each other, as in any other world. Are our readers, who may be friends, not allowed to post reviews like any other readers?

Some of Amazon’s suspected tactics include looking for any admission of knowing the author, even reviewers using their first name. Fans who follow successful writers eg via facebook often do feel they know them, and as readers not professional reviewers, don’t know the convention of referring to an author by either full name or last name only. Publishers send out books and requests for reviews, yet ebook indie publishers are made to feel dirty for soliciting reviews. If some of us politely and diffidently suggest, if a reader contacts us to rave about our book, that they might like to post that same opinion on Amazon, is owt wrong with that?

The internet tells us truths other media don’t -  media owned by interested parties. What are politicians really up to? Who’s telling us we’re scroungers while snout-deep in the expenses gravy train? What have scientists found out that we’re not being told because it interferes with big corporations making money? It’s all online, nobody controls it, nobody owns it. Revolutions are planned through it. Totalitarian regimes can’t censor it and can’t afford to block it. For every piece of fakery or vicious comment some sad little troll posts online, there are shedloads of truthful information. The e-world may allow lies to spread quickly, but it’s far far easier to discover whose pants are on fire. Before the internet, how many poets, novelists, got away with literary theft, undetected? How could anyone check?

But google exists, and much of what you find through it online is true (though I’d double check before betting my savings). We live in a wonderful time, when books can be shared, bought and sold online, in seconds, often cheap or free. Ancient classics which someone has voluntarily scanned page by page and converted from jpeg to Word to Kindle. Books which nobody has been able to censor or prevent. A time when people, for no return, purely through an altruistic urge to share knowledge, will post information online at considerable effort. Almost anything I need to know, there’ll be a forum, a youtube film, Wikipedia entry, with all of it there. I find this truly heartening.

Valerie Laws' two e-books are
LYDIA BENNET'S BLOG (comedy) and THE ROTTING SPOT (crime)
Find out about her 11 published books on her website www.valerielaws.co.uk or on Facebook or Twitter.