In 1973, Dr. Albert Einstein, Malcolm Jamal Warner, and Jerry Lee Lewis crowded into a smoky hotel room in Fresno, California for eight days on a mission. When they had finished, they unveiled their new creation, which they dubbed, “The Internet.” Little did they know what havoc their creation would wreak. Only three years later, the members of ABBA, former President Richard Nixon, and a 9-year-old girl from Butte, Montana named Trixie revolutionized the Internet when they created a website called “Wikipedia.”
Think this sounds made up? Then my post probably isn’t about you, because it is. Now, my real gripe is about how, despite the fact that we live in a time where we have unprecedented access to information, people will believe some of the dumbest s**t that you can put in front of them. Anyone who can create a twitter feed, facebook account, or blog can hold themselves out as an expert on any subject and, sadly, people are prone to believe them.
It wasn’t always this way. It used to be that ignorance came in the form of forwarded emails, which were easy to delete. Sure, there was the remotest possibility that Bill Gates might give you money for forwarding emails to people, but in our heart of hearts, we all knew it was too good to be true. And, yeah, there might be a chance that flashing your headlights at someone might result in a gang intiation shooting, but the odds of that were low. Luckily, there were websites like Snopes and even the occasional news outlet that would debunk these things.
But this isn’t really a post about the history of email stupidity. It’s just stupidity in general. It used to be that the Internet was a Wild West sort of place, completely unregulated, but also not a viable source of authoritative information. Used to be. Nowadays, you would be hard pressed to find too many people that look elsewhere for information. Not to exclude myself, I haven’t seen a set of Funk and Wagnalls anything since I was writing a high school research paper, in the earliest days of the ‘Net. With the trend toward online research and news, you would think that people would be able to discern what was reliable information and what wasn’t. Turns out you would be wrong on that one.
Because the Internet is so unregulated, anybody can post anything. Unfortunately, that fact doesn’t stop people from believing whatever they read. Just look at how quickly the recent end-of-the-world religious group was able to get their message out across the internet. Sure, most people just laughed at them, but there were a lot of folks that suddenly found themselves not making plans for late May. It doesn’t just end with random weirdos and their own pages though.
For example, today the Wall Street Journal has an op-ed piece on its website about tort reform. Now, I have very strong personal opinions about tort reform, and they aren’t particularly favorable–but 3 years of law school will do that to you. But, I am always willing to listen to another legal practitioner or expert give their views on the subject. So, who did the Wall Street Journal, one of the leading business publications in the world choose to talk about this subject? A law professor? A business analyst? Some other scholar? Nope, they chose Chuck Norris.
That’s right, Chuck Norris wrote an op-ed piece on tort reform, and the friggin’ Wall Street Journal published it. That’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger writing a piece on delightful entertaining for Ladies’ Home Journal. Or Gary Busey writing a fashion column for Vogue (not that I wouldn’t read that).
The news is no better. It used to be that journalists like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow were among the most trust people in America. Woodward and Bernstein actually brought down a presidency with their reporting. Today, we have talking-head opinion programming that masquerades as news. Yet, people don’t seem to care. The fact that we had scores of Americans who, until recently, seriously entertained doubts about whether the President was an American citizen underscores my point.
In the end, all I am asking is for people to look at things a little more critically. Just because someone on tv or the internet says something doesn’t make it true. Do your homework people! That’s exactly what Bob Barker said when he accepted the 1976 Republican nomination for the Presidency:
“If you want to know what Americans should do, it’s think for themselves and never stop learning. Go out, learn, question, price it out. We never know where the great wheel will land when it spins with our fate, but all we can know is what we don’t know and find a way to fill in those blanks. Also, don’t forget to have your pets spayed or neutered.”
Tags: Famous Americans, Memorable quotes
June 3, 2011 at 11:02 am |
Jody, you need to read Neil Postman’s book _Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business_. And then once you’ve enjoyed that one, move on to Marshall McLuhan’s _The Medium is the Massage_ [sic] and _The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man_. They were earth-shattering when they came out decades ago and no less so even now.
June 11, 2011 at 1:43 pm |
Always entertaining, Jody! I was listening to NPR the other day talking about how regulated Google searches are now and how tailored search results are to confirm the beliefs of individual users… So now, even those who want to seek out other beliefs, facts, opinions on the internet may not be able to do so as easily because of user profiling. I’m a bit behind on realizing the extent of such profiling, but one way or another, it sounds like I’ll be logging out of my google account and/or using bing or other search engines to cross check now? Scary…