KeyNote: A CyberNarratology

I. Introduction

One says ‘narrative‘ instead of ‘explanation’ or ‘argumentation’ (because it is more tentative), one prefers ‘narrative’ to ‘theory’, ‘hypothesis’ or ‘evidence’ (because it is less scientistic); one speaks of ‘narrative’ rather than ‘ideology’ (because it is less judgmental); one substitutes ‘narrative’ for ‘message’ (because it is more indeterminate).[1]

While […] the term [narrative] has been trivialized through overuse, the overuse responds to the recognition that is one of the principal ways we organize our experience of the world – a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected [..].[2]

With the “narrative/narrativist turn”,[3] the paradigm of “narrative” has become an interdisciplinary concept within academia. As a researcher, I was surprised to find that there is no theoretically established, formal key terminology towards a narratology on factual narratives, i.e. news stories, not even to speak of a factual cyber narrative terminology, i.e. on factual narratives distributing in the World Wide Web.

Creating the basic coordinates of a cyber news narratology is, in short, the endeavor of this essay. Conceptualizing a cyber narratology is a virtue-real and complex endeavor. During my work, I found that the fluid, merging and hybrid variety of virtualizations of the cyber medium makes it difficult to define distinct and reliable concepts. I will advise my readership that this cyber journey will be an unsteady enterprise. However, since even virtually represented Cyberia needs a solid ground to sail upon, a close definition of key terms is necessary. My research process is therefore my path.

As a researcher, I believe in precise and a close reading. I will start from the basic model of communication: While the variables of communication (someone speaks, and someone listens, and something is transmitted) are still valid, their conceptualization is challenged by the Cyber. Since my goal is to establish a concise terminology, I will employ a centre-periphery model: Gerald Prince’s conceptualization of the core elements of narrative in his A Dictionary of Narratology,[7] as well as Prince’s Narratology[8], form the center of my approach, and I will frame his approach with the most all-encompassing Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan.[9]

I intend to establish the framework of a cyber narratology. I will concentrate on the core elements of narrative, i.e. the basic definition of narrative, the concepts of narrator and narratee, and the unfinished nature and palimpsest character of the text. My representation of real events and discussion of the “real” world event versus the fictional storyworld world concludes with the term faction. Since dynamics of distribution matter for the relevance and reception of a narrative, I will conclude my terminology endeavor with the dichotomy of masternarrative and counternarrative. Thus, I will concentrate on the main coordinates of narratives.[10]

A Definition of Cyber News Narrative

In regard to the genre, narrative is a representation of a real event; therefore, and my terminology concentrates on factual narratives,[11] i.e. news media relevant events within cyberspace, formerly represented in traditional media, as narrative.

In order to capture the two-directional role of the narrative, I refer to Marie-Laure Ryan’s definition of narrative. A narrative is “in a short way, perhaps the only one, to give meaning to life.”[12] I employ the term narrative to a human disposition to hear stories, as well as a human skill to tell stories. Therefore, I try to include the dimension of storytelling as well as what I call storyhearing into my approach. This concept of “making sense of life” can be found on both the sides, of the narrator as well as the narratee.

To assign the quality of narrativity, i.e. the quality of being a narrative, to a text, I agree with Marie-Laure Ryan that narrativity is not an absolute criterium, but that every text has a degree of narrativity.[13]

For my working definition of narrative, I come back to Gerald Prince’s conceptualization in his Dictionary of Narratology:

The representation (as product and process, object and art, structure and structuration) of one or more real […] EVENTS communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATORS to one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATEES.[14]

Based on Prince, Ryan, and Abbott, I define narrative as follows:

A narrative is the news transmission as well as poetic representation

by a narrator/a community network of narrators

aimed towards a narratee/narratees in the Cyber

representing real events (global issues),

and represented in virtual storyworlds, with a reference to the real world.

Within the Cyber, a narrative text is in a virtual,

hybrid verbal (written or oral) and/or visual (photo or film), sound as well as in a mimic/facial and gestural/bodily text.

The skill of storytelling as well as the striving for storyhearing is a human condition.

Considering their distribution dynamics, I distinguish between circulated (master)narratives and uncirculable counternarratives. Master narratives incite distribution and discourse, while counter-narratives remain un-narratable on the periphery.

A narrative core is interpretable: Different de-codings of narratives are possible.

In the following, I will discuss the terms of narrator/narratee, event/story, text, storyworld, and masternarrative vs. counternarrative.

CyberText/CyberPalimpsest

As far as the tricky distinction between channel[15] and text, I define cyberspace as the technological channel, and the text as the transmitted, as the conveyed. Therefore, I see text, which does not form a part of Prince’s Dictionary, as synonymous with his definition of discourse, the “EXPRESSION plane of narrative as opposed to its CONTENT plane or STORY, the ‘how’ of the narrative as opposed to its ‘what’, the narrating as opposed to the narrated”.[16]

Concerning my distinction of discourse, I apply the original Latin meaning of the verb discurrere, (to run to and from), to refer to the dynamics with which the narrative distributes (or not) in cyberspace, i.e. a discourse can be active or inactive, and this activity or inactivity results in a masternarrative or counternarrative. Discourse has an inherent dialogical perspective.

The texts which create “Pictures in our Heads”[17] have evolved from spoken utterances, the printed newspaper, radio sounds, the cinema and television screen, to virtually available images and sounds in cyberspace. The World Wide Web combines all preceding media forms–the printed word, the spoken utterances and sound waves, photo-graphs, and moving imagery as well as audio sounds of television and film–in a hybrid and virtual mode. The Cyber shifts not only between the Visual and the Sound, but also between the Oral and the Written, and the Moving and the Still Image:

A narrative contains an inventory of “signs” in the form of a text in a verbal (written or oral) and/or visual (photo or film), sound form as well as mimical and gestural forms.

Cyberia creates an inherent synaesthetic experience.This hybrid character makes it necessary that the textual approach evolves from a transmedial to an intermedial approach. The next section is devoted to the merging process of narrator and narratee, as well as external vs. internal author- and audienceship vs. narrator and narratee(s). With a center-periphery model of core text vs. endowed text, I intend to capture the role of the narrator as the initiator of cyber discourse.

Narrator and Narratee

Prince defines the distinction between the narrator and the narratee as a grammatical one: “the narrator is the first person [the one who speaks], the narratee a second person [the one who is spoken to], and the being or object narrated about a third person.”[18] The narrator “may or may not be a participant in the events [s]he recounts”[19], i.e. a character or not. The distinction between the empirical author as a “real world agent” and the poetic narrator, “constructed on the basis of textual features”[20] is one of the foundations of Modern literature theory, even though Jannidis remarks:

Even if most theories of narrative communication stress the essential difference between author, narrator, and implied author, often to such an extent as to exclude the author from narratological analysis, most readers use the text as a basis for inferential processes which simultaneously construct narrator, implied author, and author images.[21]

My work has an ethical dimension on how to foster global awareness for global issues, therefore, the incorporation of “the real” in my theory is crucial. As a re-conceptualization of a news story genre is my main focus, my terminology does encompass into “truly” fictional realms. My argument is that the Vergegenwärtigung within the Virtue-Real makes the distinction of the fictional narrator and the author obsolete.

I argue that the distinction of implied vs. actual author- and readership has to be reconsidered on the internet. The World Wide Web, while still being a mass medium, is creating a net(work) of individuals who interact constantly and shape their own discourse, intensifying this community experience within the net(work) itself. The character of this community is vital to the cyber discourse, and the dynamics of the community ground in the narrative. Furthermore, from an economical standpoint, the traceability technology enables that Web users are highly targetable.

As a consequence of this novel technological role as well as societal shaping[22] role, the cyber makes the term as well as the concept of the anonymous mass more and more obsolete. There is no anonymous mass audience any more, and, from the terminology, the question arises whether a distinction of audience as “receiver[s] of a text”[23] versus narrates as “addressees” is still necessary.

There is no anonymous mass audience any more, and, from the terminology, the question arises if a distinction into narratees and (external) audience is still necessary Considering the merging of user and producer, the community network transforms the audience, and the “one who is narrated to”, following Prince’s narrative terminology, become targeted “narratees”.[24]. I argue in favor of a merging of the distinction of the real-life audience vs. the virtual narratees. Online social networks and virtual identities stretch the boundaries of fact and fiction to faction, that I define as a merger of the factual and the fictional.

Focussing on the oscillating dynamics of communication between narrator and narratee, technology further enables that the former user becomes both of them merging into prod-user.[25]

Discussing the fact that a community of anonymous authors is creating and editing texts, I refer to Barthes’ “death of the author”, and Spivak’s phonocentrism. According to Barthes, “to listen is not only to perceive a language, but to construct a language.”[26] Applying Spivak’s concept of phonocentrism to the phenomenon of anonymous cyber authorship and fluid cyber texts, I argue that cyberspace creates a culture of rumors and un-archived, fluid texts that not only challenges the “manufactured consent” of the dominating, Hegemonic[27] media discourse.[28] Rumors still remain on the soft, speculative perspective; all the while their speculative nature denounces the hard-fact-side:

If, then, ‘rumour is the spoken utterance par excellence’ (EAP 356), it must be seen that its functional immediacy is its non-belonging to any one voice-consciousness. This is supposed to be the signal characteristic of writing. Any reader can fill it with her ‘consciousness’. Rumour evokes comradeship because it belongs to every ‘reader’ or ‘transmitter’. Noone is its origin or source. Thus rumour is not error but primordially (originally) errant, always in circulation with no assignable source. This illegitimacy makes it accessible to insurgency.[29]

The textual fluidity, on the other hand, makes traceability difficult. This anonymous authorship is not only caused by the virtual character. The role of technology is janus-faced in the hiding as well as the revealing of authorship: While it is possible to retrace access of the internet via proxy servers, the internet enables data collection to trace users.

Referring to my point of the self-reflexiveness of cyber narratives, the lack of news media storytelling and the shortage of “parachute” reporters,[30] I would like to introduce the argument that traditional media coverage, however shocking, might not trigger the same amount of response that prod-user material is receiving (any more). A foreign correspondent functions as a translator and storyteller, however, (s)he still transmits, while amateur material offers the immediate, intimate experience that is accessible anytime and from anywhere in cyberspace.

The lack of authorship of cyber material might be replaced with a claim of authenticity, i.e. in the demand for amateur narratives and an Entfremdung from traditional media. From our perspective of global narratives, it is disruptive happenings originating from prod-user material that result in a global response.

I detect a novel cyber aesthetics, that, from the perspective of storytelling, favors the “stream of consciousness” instead of the omniscient storyteller:

Shut out by the near totalitarian powers of the Islamic republic, the mainstream media tracked the stream of consciousness produced by new media.[31]

I argue that this new mode is not the mode of a mere reflector of events or the Kafkaesque disorientation with the modern world.[32] It is the recording-as-is, the unfiltered, live recording of sound and space by the eye, and therefore creating more “authenticity” in a rather anonymous cyberspace against the “established” state and media institutions. With this notion, I do not regard traditional media as less “authentic”, however, I would like to add the notion of trust.

Hegemon vs. Counternarrative: “Wow” and “So What”

The novel trait of cyberspace communication is that it is creating a complex matrix of network distribution and narrative discourse. Within the global information flow, narratives are not only woven globally. Since compelling global narratives establish a receive-and-response network, they connect the world. As systematic structures and story-telling are closely connected, this project explores why some global news become more global(ly distributed) than others.

While the cyber is geared towards the masses within an economically driven framework, the role of the individual within this community network changes drastically. The distribution of information within the community defines its relevance and determines its distributive, circulist value.

The trait of appeal and re-telling forms an inherent part of narrative theory. A narrative may serve as a cultural connector for a community. Compelling cyber narratives therefore can replicate this community feeling within a virtual space. I would only like to hint to the fact that the “de-coding” of narratives is culturally determined. A compelling, appealing narrative can lead to a different, glocal decoding.

compelling narrative → highly globalized distribution ↕ glocal decoding

Gerald Prince defines narratable in his Dictionary of Narratology as a quality of a narrative “which is worthy being told; that which is susceptible of or calls for narration”.[33] Ryan assigns the trait of tellability, a “wow”-reflex versus a “so what”-defect[34], as “a quality that makes stories inherently worth telling, independently from their textualization. […]

The concept of tellability presupposes that stories exist in a virtual state in the mind of the storyteller, before they are actualized as storytelling (or writing) performance – a view that challenges the literary dogma of the inseparability of form and content.”[35] The notion of being narr-able is an inherent trait of highly circulated narratives is not only to be found within narrative, but more so within the audience’s reception.[36]I define counter-narratives as “un-narratable” within the traditional news media realm and not fitting into the news cycle.[37]

Following Herman, I employ the term masternarrative to capture the central role of certain narratives within the discourse. Michael Bamberg describes them as “pre-existent socio-cultural forms of interpretation”[38], and David Herman sees them as “manufactured consent”. [39] Some narratives lead to a high degree of distribution and therefore a high circulist value. While the term masternarrative is often used within academic discourse, the prefix master- reflects the very core issue of Hegemonic discourse. When using the terminology of “masternarrative”, I am using the language and Hegemonic paradigms that I am exactly trying to make an issue of.

David Herman defines counternarratives as the alternative narrative(s) versus the Hegemonic narrative.[40] I define counternarrative as a narrative on a globally relevant event that is unfit to the news cycle. It is my goal to avoid misleading terminology, and in my further work, I either have to seek a different term for untransmitted narratives, and incorporate a term for alternative readings. Antinarrative would be an alternative term, however, the prefix anti- has a denying meaning, which is not what my concept of counternarrative is going for.

Within the Neda narrative, I will touch upon the fact that a “reading” of a narrative happens also within paradigms, differentiating between the Hegemon and the (Oriental-Exotic) Other.[41] In regard to globalized communications, my focus is on the globalized reading of the Neda narrative, and therefore leaves out glocal readings, which is also a necessary point to discuss further.

The Reality of the CyberNarrative

I will alter Kreiswirth’s minimalist definition slightly to describe the connection between event, news story, and narrative:”Something [of significance] happened”, and “someone [is] telling someone else that something happened.”[42] The term narrative embodies the poetic representation of an event.

Offering a convincing concept distinction of the real world event versus the storyworld story is one of the most difficult tasks. Abbott defines a narrative event as “story is an event or a sequence of events (the action)”.[43] I distinguish between the real-life event, the“ ACTION or ACT […] by an agent […] or a HAPPENING (when the change is not brought about by an agent”,[44] and the story, the “CONTENT plane of NARRATIVE […], the ‘what’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘how’”.[45] Plot is the “arrangement of incidents”,[46] therefore a scripting.

However, considering the fact that all cyber knowledge of the world is not deriving from a “hands-on” experience, but non-verifiable, one is only confronted with a story, not the event, so I am using both terms rather exchangeable.

Regarding the question, “Are news more real than narratives?”, I do not see narrative and news as juxtaposed to each other, in other words as antonyms of “true news event” versus “fiction”. Both news and narrative are a representation of the “real” event and construct reality,[47] following a specific scripting of the event, the plot. Only the real event captures the realm of the real world.

Cyber communication happens only virtually through the means of a technical apparatus. While all experience through the cyber is non-real, the cyber takes on a part of our real-live interactions. The Cyber strives for the perfect “reproduction” of the real, the virtue-real, or, as Baudrillard calls it, the “Simulacrum”,[48] aiming at making the real world superfluous and therefore destroying it.[49] While the virtual is futile and defined as “the reinvention of familiar physical space in cyberspace”,[50] I argue that the cyber universe is not completely “counterposed to the real”. A medium is as an “extension“, as McLuhan describes,[51] whilst not the “real thing”.

The virtual is not parallel or completely independent from the real world. I argue that the mathematical metaphor of parallel worlds–striving in the same direction and evolving simultaneously, all the while never touching each other–, does not fully grasp the nature between the real and the virtual. Considering how much of everyday communication is vehicled online, one could argue that the “real” world and the fictional cyberspace merge.

Going back to my theoretical approach of narratology, Kreiswirth states that the inherent concept of narrative defies to the distinction between fiction and reality:

There is nothing in narrative’s intrinsic form, nothing in its inherent structural or textual properties (the content of the form), that can be used to separate fictive from nonfictive stories; it is, rather, the different functions they perform, manifested in their different claims about their connection to the world and the web of responses to these claims, that create the distinction.[52]

While it is an important moment to grasp that a narrative connects both realms, it must be stressed that the realms of real and fiction are still vital frameworks. Experiencing the outside world, as Lippmann described, derives from indirect experience. With a uniquely virtual experience and no graspable storyteller, global media system becomes more vulnerable and is prone to “hoaxes”.[53] Do the pictures in our heads become more accurate, when told through a local, amateur perspective?

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[1] Prince, Gerald: Revisiting Narrativity. In: Grünzweig, Walter/Solbach, Andreas (eds.): Grenzüberschreitungen. Narratologie im Kontext. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1999, p. 45.

[2] Peter Brooks, as quoted in Ryan, Marie-Laure: Towards a definition of narrative, p. 22, in: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007,

[3] For a meta account on the narrative/narrativist turn, see: Kreiswirth, Martin: Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences. Poetics Today 21:2 (Summer 2000), p. 293-318, and:

Kreiswirth, Martin: Tell Me a Story: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences. New Literary History. Vol. 23, No. 3, History, Politics, and Culture (Summer, 1992), pp. 629-657.

[4] Herman, David (ed.): Introduction to: The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 3-21.

[5] For an overview, see: Prince, Gerald/Noble, Arlene: Narratology, Narrative, and Meaning. Poetics Today. Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 543-552, and the edition of Communications, 11, 1968.

[6] Aristoteles: Poetik. Griechisch/Deutsch. Translated by Manfred Fuhrmann. Stuttgart: Reclam 2005.

[7] Prince, Gerald: A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press 1987.

[8] Prince, Gerald: Narratology. The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin, New York: Mouton 1982.

[9] Herman, David/Jahn, Manfred/Ryan Marie-Laure (eds.): Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. New York: Routledge 2005.

[10] Missing in my analysis is a concise discussion of the representation of event. I understand story as the sequence of events, the action, and the plot as the “scripted” event. I will discuss these terms in my section on the real vs. the virtual.

[11] Genette, Gérard: Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative. Poetics Today 11, pp. 755-74.

[12] Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.): Narrative Across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2004 (Frontiers of Narrative), p. 8.

[13] Ryan, Marie-Laure: Towards a Definition of Narrative, In: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 32.

[14] Prince, Gerald: Narrative. In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 58.

[15] Barthes, Roland: An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (Winter, 1975), p. 237.

[16] Prince, Gerald: Discourse. In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 21.

[17] Lippmann, Walter: Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company 1922.

[18] Prince, Gerald: Narratology, p. 7.

[19] Prince, Gerald: Narratology, p. 13.

[20] Jannidis, Fotis: Author. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, p. 33.

[21] Jannidis, Fotis: Author. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, p. 33.

[22] I wish not to employ the terms active or passive here. Reception is per se not a passive act.

[23] Rabinowitz, Peter J.: Audience. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory p. 29.

[24] Prince, Gerald: Narratee. In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 57.

[25] Bruns, Axel: Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Lang 2008.

[26] Barthes juxtaposes listening to reading, which is “to name [a language].” See: Barthes, Roland: An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (Winter, 1975), p. 254.

[27] The capitalization of the term “Hegemonic” reflects the dominating discourse.

[28] Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 278. For “manufacturing consent”, see: Lippmann: Public Opinion, p. 248, and

Herman, Edward S./Chomsky, Noam: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon 1988.

[29] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London, New York: Methuen, 1987, p. 213.

[30] Utley, Garrick: The Shrinking of Foreign News: From Broadcast to Narrowcast. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 2 (March/April, 1997), pp. 2-10

[31] Chua-Eoan, Howard: What the World Didn't See in Tehran, Howard Sunday, June 21, 2009,

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1906040,00.html#ixzz14R40fojX, 12 November 2010.

[32] Stanzel, Franz Karl: Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman. Dargestellt an „Tom Jones“, „Moby Dick“, „The Ambassadors“, „Ulysses“. Wien/Stuttgart: Braumüller 1955, and Stanzel, Franz Karl: Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: utb 1995.

[33] Prince, Gerald: Narratable. In: Dictionary of Narratology, p. 56f.

[34] Ryan’s “catchy” vocabulary of “wow” versus “so what” is insightful here. I employ the nouns “reflex” vs. “defect” to describe the human reaction vs. non-reaction to a narrative.

[35] Ryan, Marie-Laure: Tellability. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, p. 589.

[36] Herman, Luc/Vervaeck, Bart: Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation. Narrative, Vol. 17, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 111-129.

[37] However, the phenomenon occurs that a narrative might not “fit” within news realm, but occurs in alternative realms, such as documentaries.

[38] Bamberg, Michael: Masternarrative. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, p. 287.

[39] See: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 257.

[40] See: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 257.

[41] Said, Edward: Orientalism. New York: Random/Vintage 1979. For a counternarrative and the “Other” view, see: Buruma, Ian /Margalit, Avishai: Occidentalism. The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York, London: Penguin 2004.

[42] The original quote is: “Something happened; or, better, someone telling someone else that something happened”. Kreiswirth, Martin: Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences. Poetics Today 21:2 (Summer 2000), p. 294.

[43] Abbott, H. Porter: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, p. 16.

[44] Prince, Gerald: Event. In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 29.

[45] Prince, Gerald: Story, In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 93.

[46] Prince, Gerald: Plot, In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 73.

[47] Schulz, Winfried: Die Konstruktion von Realität in den Nachrichtenmedien. Freiburg, München 1976.

[48] Baudrillard, Jean: Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press 1995. [Original: Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Editions Galilée 1981.], Barthes, Roland: Die strukturalistische Tätigkeit, in: Kursbuch 5, Mai 1966, pp. 190-196.

[49] Schmidt, Siegfried: From Aura-Loss to Cyberspace. In: Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich/Marrinan, Michael (ed.): Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford University Press 2003, p. 81.

[50] Jordan: Cyberpower, p. 1.

[51] McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill 1964, p. 7.

[52] Kreiswirth, Martin: Merely Telling Stories?, p. 314.

[53] Interestingly, however, no major global Cyber news hoax has occurred so far, which could be a sign of increasing control of the community.