Tuesday, March 19, 2024

GOODIES TO GO! ™
April 19, 1999 — Newsletter #24

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GOODIES TO GO! ™
April 19, 1999 — Newsletter #24
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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors…


I wanted to take this newsletter and tell you a story about
what happened to me last week. I was actually, for the first
time, nervous about being on the Web. No, strike that. I
guess I was a little nervous about being so accessible over
the Net.


I remember when I got into writing Web pages: My first
real task, past putting together my own home page (Goodies
wasn’t even an idea yet), was to create the home page for
the Department of Communications at my university. I
waltzed around with my 35mm camera and took pics of all
the professors. I was going to scan the images and post
them to the site. A couple basically told me there was no
way that I was going to put a picture of them on the Web.
I didn’t understand their fears then, but now I have at
least a sense of it.


As I say often enough, outside of keeping the HTML Goodies
site, I’m a university professor. As such, one of my duties
is to publish. You might have heard the jokes about
professors being at a “publish or perish” school? Well, it
isn’t a joke. It’s actually written right into our
contracts. If you’re at a publish-or-perish and you do not
publish… you perish. Well, you don’t really perish, you
just don’t get tenure and have to go somewhere else. It’s
not like a hit squad shows up and knocks you off due to
lack of ink.


There are numerous venues for publishing. One of my
favorites, and one I’ve been pretty successful with, is
publishing opinion pieces, otherwise known as OpEds.
They’re usually on the last page of your local paper’s
section “A” next to the Letters to the Editor.


So one day a couple of weeks ago, my OpEd editor called
me to say it was about time I started writing OpEds again.
(I had been off the OpEd wagon for a while so I could put
the JavaScript Goodies book together.) He always wants
two or three at a pop, so I rolled a couple ideas past
him regarding Kosovo. One he liked: I suggested that the
major wars of the 20th century could be catalogued by the
medium that reported it. World War I was covered via
newsprint. World War II was covered via radio. Vietnam is
often referred to as the “living-room” war because
television brought the horrors right into our homes. The
Gulf War was broadcast 24 hours a day.


Following that logic, I said that Kosovo was the first
conflict to be covered by the Internet. I was going to
write a piece on how the Internet would cover the war
and what effects might occur. Make sense?


The opinion piece went on to state that the Internet,
especially the World Wide Web, was a limitless palette,
accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem. There
are no editors on the Web, and a Web page’s looks alone
cannot denote if a site is valid news or not. Good Web
pages are attainable to anyone who wants to take the time
to read HTML Goodies (plug, plug)! Thus, the ability to
create misinformation and spread it like wildfire is
there for anyone who wishes to try.


In addition, the younger a person is, the more apt they
are to read something on the Web and take it as truth,
simply because it is on the Web. This isn’t a new phenom.
There was a long period of time in which the newspaper
was seen as the voice of authority, same with radio and
television. If it was on the tube, if Walter Cronkite said
it, it had to be true. At least that was the impression.


Anyway, the whole point of the 1000-word piece was to say
“Be careful about what you read on the Web. Check other
sources and different mediums for verification before you
take something as the truth.” I think this is especially
true when a conflict is involved and news is coming from
halfway around the world and most of the reporters have
been expelled from the country. Basic concept: Verify
before you believe. I actually thought it was a little
dull. It didn’t seem like much of an opinion. Luckily
Scripts Howard picked it up and it was in 50+ newspapers
over a weekend Friday through Sunday.


So the e-mail started to come, as it usually does. The
OpEd always lists my name as author and the university
where I teach. People are pretty quick about finding
the school on-line and searching for my e-mail address.
One gentleman wrote to me that he disagreed and that I
was wrong. I wrote back and thanked him for the response
and that his points were valid. I thought that was the
end of it.


Later that night, I received another letter that someone
had taken the OpEd from a California paper and transcribed
it to the discussion page of a Web site. The gentleman who
posted the piece asked if I would come to the site and
join the discussion. That didn’t bug me too much, I said
I would and went to see their posting.


Yeeeee! The site was blatantly anti-media. No, I’m not
going to tell the name of the site because I don’t want
anyone going in and attempting to defend me… or anything
else ;-). It has been basically dropped and I want to keep
it that way.


The OpEd post took about three-fourths a printed page.
The comments went on for 17. Pick a name. I was called
it. I was a mouthpiece for the Clinton administration,
an ivory tower intellectual who wouldn’t know the real
world because I am hiding behind my books, a Luddite
(I actually laughed at that one), and basically a bad
American.


The people on this Web site thought the press was
controlled by the government to the point where the media
was just a PR camp for the President and his party. They
believed their Web site was the right-wing voice of
truth on an otherwise liberal media. I was stating that
people should check with the traditional media to check
facts on the Internet. I was apparently the enemy.


Okay, fine. People have opinions and they have every right
to state them. I wasn’t all that nervous yet. Then toward
the end of the posts, someone had made links to my picture
and my e-mail address. Yikes! The post suggested the
readers of this Web site write to Joe “The Great One”
Burns. Comments were dripping with sarcasm and full of
anger.


Then I saw a post where the gentleman who invited me to
the discussion group wrote that I would be posting very
soon. Guh! Now the posts were trash talking, waiting to
tell me what a jerk I am. One person wrote that he
awaited my arrival so he could use his “Cyber Squirrel
Gun.” I didn’t post. It wouldn’t have made a difference
anyway. No matter what I would have said, it would have
been torn apart. The people in the discussion groups
smelled blood and were just waiting for me to show up
to call me more names. I figured they had my e-mail
address, they knew where to write me if they really
wanted… and some have.


The funny thing was, they proved my point. This was a
group of people who, from what I gathered, all posted to
the Web site and looked to it for their “unfiltered” news.
They continually claimed the Internet was the bastion of
democracy and true freedom of the press. They openly
shunned the traditional media, although they did use it
as source material to write their own stories, or posted
what they found in media with like agendas.


What I found most interesting was that the posts to the
discussion group claimed the site as a place where truth
and unfiltered accuracy could be found. Yet in their posts
there were glaring errors. They got my title wrong: I am
an Assistant Professor; some wrote that I was a teaching
assistant. There’s a big difference. An editor might have
caught that.


Some of the posts gave examples of the traditional news
media deceiving people. Dateline NBC’s planting a bomb on
a truck so it would explode was the one most sited. ABC
News’ bad reporting of Food Lion was also mentioned. Yet,
there was only one post even mentioning any of the scares
that float around the Internet, and that particular post
just glossed over the subject by saying that yes,
sometimes people “get” them, but they always get the
story right in the end. Still, the posts did make some
very good points. The one I liked best read that since
there are no reporters to videotape the ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo, the Internet allows a method for those still
in the country to get word out. I agree. But shouldn’t
we make a point of checking the source to make sure the
post actually came from Kosovo, rather than simply posting
it? What is to stop a smart programmer in Yugoslavia from
routing mail through Kosovo, thus giving the appearance
that the e-mail is legitimate, and saying things that are
not true?


I stand by my opinion. Take the news and opinion you get
from the Web with a grain of salt. I never said not to use
the Web, just be careful about taking what you get at face
value, especially if the story is a real blockbuster that
you don’t hear anywhere else. If the story does turn out
to be true, then you can revel in the fact that you were
one of the first to know. If it turns out to be false,
you can pat yourself on the back because you were smart
enough to take a watchful attitude.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


And that’s that. Thanks for reading, and don’t think I
don’t like getting e-mail! Please feel free to write and
tell me what you think. I am more than open to discussion,
as long as both sides are open.


Joe Burns, Ph.D.


And Remember: Do you like PEZ? It was invented by Eduard
Haas, an Austrian doctor’s son. PEZ was first marketed as
a mint to help stop smoking. It wasn’t until the mint got
to America that it was marketed as a kid’s candy. And in
case you’re wondering — the first PEZ dispenser was
shaped like Santa Claus.

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