What is it about?
In 1999, the Serbian media issued fake warnings about the presumed threats from the 11 August solar eclipse. All the country hid indoors on the day of the eclipse. Why? Thus far the explanation was linked to the intentions of Milosevic's government's. This paper takes a broader and contextual view to explain the 'great disappearing act' as a result of an exhausted informational cascade.
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Why is it important?
People sometimes assume that a wrong information (such as fake news) has a specific source and can be traced to a perpetrator. This article shows that is not always so and that the judgment on what is 'true' and what 'wrong' depends on how people make sense of what surrounds them and what stakes are involved in believing or disbelieving specific claims. There is no post-truth; all is pre-truth.
Perspectives
This paper was difficult to complete. I started working on it with late Marija Sesis in the early 2000s and have presented several versions in meetings and seminars. I received important help from people close to the government in then Yugoslavia but most of my queries were unanswered. Eventually, after contending with assumptions and political prejudices about what caused the Great Disappearing Act, I've come to the conclusion that both the Act and its intepretations were part of the social amplification of risk framework and that the government itself was part of a cascade rather than its source.
Vladimir Jankovic
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘The sun without a permit’: Serbian solar politics, informational risk cascades, and the Great Disappearing Act of August 1999, Social Studies of Science, July 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0306312718790812.
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