communication +1

Media of Verification

Introduction

Edited by Johannes Bennke

Media of verification permeate our everyday lives and have become a standard way of regulating trust between online and offline realms. Verification is often associated with validating sources in journalism. During times of crisis in trustworthy communication, it becomes a crucial practice among news professionals. However, this issue expands the focus to encompass other media practices of verification. Here, media of verification is understood as an epistemological framework rooted in a legal foundation of evidence, facts, and the scientific method. This framework includes tools, devices, and apparatuses of verification, consensus-making mechanisms that enable rule-based systems, as well as infrastructures necessary for establishing the authenticity of documents, goods, and other tokens. Furthermore, forms and practices of verification even give rise to their own art and aesthetics. The articles in this issue explore not only verification in and through media, its possibilities, and risks but also the fallacies of verification technologies in social relations, the limits of verification, and its varying epistemological practices in journalism, open-source intelligence, digital forensics, media philosophy, and art.