*****A few facts might be harmed throughout the course of this essay. I will honor these facts in my heart always and know that they made a sacrifice for the greater good. They fought valiantly for their fact brothers and sisters. I hope you will join them and me in this fight as well.*****
If I were a piece of factual information, the Internet would terrify me. I would lie awake in the middle of the night, worried, whittling away at my little information brain in a hot panic, kicking off the sheets, and tossing and turning for hours. The Internet would shake my factual core at its foundation in the same way natural disasters, terrorism, over-population, global warming, chemical warfare, nuclear weapons, Sarah Palin, the Friday song, and meteorites terrify my human soul when I think about them. Just as these things challenge the successful existence (and sometimes the validity) of the human race, the Internet seems to be threatening the beloved species of factual information. Did you know that every day over 2 million facts die on the Internet alone? That means we’re killing facts at an alarming rate of 730 million per year. In fact, when your future grandchildren read this, there won’t be any facts left at all. By then facts will be legend, a foreign enigma to a generation that can’t understand how simply saying something doesn’t make it true.
These are the thoughts that keep facts up at night. They are watching helplessly while the Internet cuts them down, a virtual deforestation of information. And they can do nothing to fight back. (It’s a fact that facts don’t have thumbs, duh). But the Internet isn’t doing all of this alone. It’s kind of a like a tree…you see. If the Internet exists and nobody is there to use it, does the Internet make a sound? We are helping the Internet kill factual information. I am helping it with my blog, we help it every day with Facebook, all the major media websites help it with the comment section below every article ever written (that should require you to pass a basic grammar and spelling test before you are allowed to post your comments p.s.), Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, and other polarized “journalists” perform a veritable factual genocide on a daily basis. (Also, a fact doesn’t die just once; it dies every time someone stops believing in it. Kind of like Tinkerbell but sadder because facts are real; Tinkerbell is not.) The Internet has given unpublishable people the autonomy to publish (case in point, this blog and Rebecca Black). In the past, when publications were entirely in the hands of publishing houses, facts were taken very seriously. The people writing were the people who knew the facts. Authors were once called such because they had authority over their subject matter. Now, any old schmuck with a computer or a phone can publish.
You might not believe that this is really a problem, but you haven’t seen the death of factual information first hand. You haven’t been reading 160+ research papers each school-calendar year for the last 4.5 years. According to my calculator use, that’s over 700 research papers that I’ve read (not including rough drafts) in the last few years. This endeavor alone has encouraged me to fight for the facts. To seek them out where they are hiding. To persuade them to stand up for themselves, live up to their potential, help us win the battle of not knowing what we’re talking about…ever, while thinking we do. I see this every year when my students write Googled research papers. Recently, I’ve learned that Edgar Allan Poe currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and his new novel will be released in late 2011. Cigarette smoke can get behind your ear drums and cause brain damage, and also smoking causes AIDS. 75% of new mothers will beat their children to death within the first six months, and 80% of the world population suffers from morbid obesity. I also learned that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically shot while delivering his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the Million Man March.
At first I thought that these research papers were plagiarized or made up. I encouraged my students to “check their facts” while I checked their sources: About.com, Answers.com, Youtube.com, Infoplease.com, WebMD.com, etc, etc. After hearing of a presentation about Thomas Paine, the Southern California realtor who also managed to pen “Common Sense,” helped establish American independence from Great Britain, and lived to the ripe old age of 274, I realized that these students are researching. The Internet just makes it difficult for them to distinguish what is fact from fiction, or in the Thomas Paine case, what are the right (or common sense) facts. I’ve started approaching research differently now with my students. I don’t just teach them how to write a research paper, I teach them how to determine whether a source is credible… or incredible. The distinction isn’t always easy. The virtual world allows a 46 year old car insurance salesman to be a 34 year old CEO. It kind of does the same thing for websites, too.
The Internet is like a giant round of that game telephone that you would play in school. One person whispers the initial message into a classmate’s ear, and the message spreads around the room. By the time it gets to the last person, the class gets to see just how much the original message has changed. The Internet allows this same type of communication, except now the information spreads virally like wildfire or the Bubonic Plague getting a little different each time somebody doesn’t utilize the copy and paste feature. And it isn’t just spreading around the classroom anymore; it’s worldwide. With that in mind, putting facts into the virtual world is powerful and useful but terrifying. The facts themselves cannot become virtual. Factual information is one of the few things that keeps us grounded in our physical world while we spend more and more time drawn to the virtual world. Facts are concrete and real, and it is so important that they stay that way.
I fear for our facts. I worry that they will disappear and future generations won’t have the chance to revel in their solidity, to stand confidently and intelligently on their stability. Most of all, I worry that we will become so stupid and full of convictions for things that don’t even really exist, that we will destroy each other and ourselves. Maybe factual information could be published on the Internet in a different color than non-factual information, kind of like in the New Testament of some Bibles; any time Jesus speaks it is written in red ink. (And calm down my Puritanical companions. I am not claiming that facts are better than the Gospel, I am simply making a statement about the sanctity of facts on the Internet.) That way we would know if we were reading The Word, or something that some other disciple said. I worry if we don’t stop and take a look at this soon, we won’t be able to distinguish between the two.
Until that time, I’m going to live by a quote that I recently read on a highly trustworthy website: “You can’t believe most things that you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln
The Internet killed the factual information....not quite the right meter, but you get the point.
If I were a piece of factual information, the Internet would terrify me. I would lie awake in the middle of the night, worried, whittling away at my little information brain in a hot panic, kicking off the sheets, and tossing and turning for hours. The Internet would shake my factual core at its foundation in the same way natural disasters, terrorism, over-population, global warming, chemical warfare, nuclear weapons, Sarah Palin, the Friday song, and meteorites terrify my human soul when I think about them. Just as these things challenge the successful existence (and sometimes the validity) of the human race, the Internet seems to be threatening the beloved species of factual information. Did you know that every day over 2 million facts die on the Internet alone? That means we’re killing facts at an alarming rate of 730 million per year. In fact, when your future grandchildren read this, there won’t be any facts left at all. By then facts will be legend, a foreign enigma to a generation that can’t understand how simply saying something doesn’t make it true.
These are the thoughts that keep facts up at night. They are watching helplessly while the Internet cuts them down, a virtual deforestation of information. And they can do nothing to fight back. (It’s a fact that facts don’t have thumbs, duh). But the Internet isn’t doing all of this alone. It’s kind of a like a tree…you see. If the Internet exists and nobody is there to use it, does the Internet make a sound? We are helping the Internet kill factual information. I am helping it with my blog, we help it every day with Facebook, all the major media websites help it with the comment section below every article ever written (that should require you to pass a basic grammar and spelling test before you are allowed to post your comments p.s.), Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, and other polarized “journalists” perform a veritable factual genocide on a daily basis. (Also, a fact doesn’t die just once; it dies every time someone stops believing in it. Kind of like Tinkerbell but sadder because facts are real; Tinkerbell is not.) The Internet has given unpublishable people the autonomy to publish (case in point, this blog and Rebecca Black). In the past, when publications were entirely in the hands of publishing houses, facts were taken very seriously. The people writing were the people who knew the facts. Authors were once called such because they had authority over their subject matter. Now, any old schmuck with a computer or a phone can publish.
You might not believe that this is really a problem, but you haven’t seen the death of factual information first hand. You haven’t been reading 160+ research papers each school-calendar year for the last 4.5 years. According to my calculator use, that’s over 700 research papers that I’ve read (not including rough drafts) in the last few years. This endeavor alone has encouraged me to fight for the facts. To seek them out where they are hiding. To persuade them to stand up for themselves, live up to their potential, help us win the battle of not knowing what we’re talking about…ever, while thinking we do. I see this every year when my students write Googled research papers. Recently, I’ve learned that Edgar Allan Poe currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and his new novel will be released in late 2011. Cigarette smoke can get behind your ear drums and cause brain damage, and also smoking causes AIDS. 75% of new mothers will beat their children to death within the first six months, and 80% of the world population suffers from morbid obesity. I also learned that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically shot while delivering his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the Million Man March.
At first I thought that these research papers were plagiarized or made up. I encouraged my students to “check their facts” while I checked their sources: About.com, Answers.com, Youtube.com, Infoplease.com, WebMD.com, etc, etc. After hearing of a presentation about Thomas Paine, the Southern California realtor who also managed to pen “Common Sense,” helped establish American independence from Great Britain, and lived to the ripe old age of 274, I realized that these students are researching. The Internet just makes it difficult for them to distinguish what is fact from fiction, or in the Thomas Paine case, what are the right (or common sense) facts. I’ve started approaching research differently now with my students. I don’t just teach them how to write a research paper, I teach them how to determine whether a source is credible… or incredible. The distinction isn’t always easy. The virtual world allows a 46 year old car insurance salesman to be a 34 year old CEO. It kind of does the same thing for websites, too.
The Internet is like a giant round of that game telephone that you would play in school. One person whispers the initial message into a classmate’s ear, and the message spreads around the room. By the time it gets to the last person, the class gets to see just how much the original message has changed. The Internet allows this same type of communication, except now the information spreads virally like wildfire or the Bubonic Plague getting a little different each time somebody doesn’t utilize the copy and paste feature. And it isn’t just spreading around the classroom anymore; it’s worldwide. With that in mind, putting facts into the virtual world is powerful and useful but terrifying. The facts themselves cannot become virtual. Factual information is one of the few things that keeps us grounded in our physical world while we spend more and more time drawn to the virtual world. Facts are concrete and real, and it is so important that they stay that way.
I fear for our facts. I worry that they will disappear and future generations won’t have the chance to revel in their solidity, to stand confidently and intelligently on their stability. Most of all, I worry that we will become so stupid and full of convictions for things that don’t even really exist, that we will destroy each other and ourselves. Maybe factual information could be published on the Internet in a different color than non-factual information, kind of like in the New Testament of some Bibles; any time Jesus speaks it is written in red ink. (And calm down my Puritanical companions. I am not claiming that facts are better than the Gospel, I am simply making a statement about the sanctity of facts on the Internet.) That way we would know if we were reading The Word, or something that some other disciple said. I worry if we don’t stop and take a look at this soon, we won’t be able to distinguish between the two.
Until that time, I’m going to live by a quote that I recently read on a highly trustworthy website: “You can’t believe most things that you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln
The Internet killed the factual information....not quite the right meter, but you get the point.
I am laughing out loud at "Recently, I’ve learned that Edgar Allan Poe currently lives in Baltimore Maryland and his new novel will be released in late 2011." : )
ReplyDeleteThank you for this post!! I have been struggling with people who think Wikipedia is God and wondering what will happen to our race.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the Lincoln quote. No wonder he as the first man on the moon!
1. Saddest/funniest post ever.
ReplyDelete2. 100% factual.
3. "By then facts will be legend, a foreign enigma to a generation that can’t understand how simply saying something doesn’t make it true." - This line reminds me of "The Invention of Lying". I never saw the movie, but I read somewhere that Charlton Heston was totally snubbed by the Oscars for his performance in it.
Thanks for reading guys!
ReplyDeleteAmy, thank you so much for the belly laugh to accompany my tears of sadness as facts are rapidly approaching the "endangered species" list.
ReplyDeleteI'm suggesting this post to my friends. You're very talented.
Steve in NJ
http://grantingsirenity.blogspot.com