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Saturday, April 30, 2005
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QUICK RECAP OF LAST WEEK’S HOAXES The guys who claimed to find money in their backyard; the woman who said she found a finger in her fast food; the minority student who admitted sending racially threatening notes to her classmates because she was unhappy at college and wanted to go home; the bride-to-be who faked her kidnapping because she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married and needed some time alone -- when Americans and their tv friends got wind of these stories (this is just last week’s batch) they got all excited and scared and indignant, just like Kerri Dunn’s students at Pomona College. Television needs melodrama, so we shouldn’t be surprised that “On Fox News last night Sean Hannity was actually speculating that [the bride-to-be’s] fiancé looked guilty and should submit himself to more police examinations.” But we ourselves are free to learn skepticism and emotional restraint. We’re free to look at patterns, the repetition of certain sorts of events… The commenters at Lucianne.com, a representative enough group of Americans, are grappling with this morning's breaking hoax, the one about the bride-to-be. “We were played. We were played like absolute fools,” one of them notes. “Who are we in this?” asks another. “Spectators. The media turned this incident into a nationwide cliffhanger drama. Sometimes the news staff inform us... sometimes they manipulate us.” Many commenters are indignant that no charges will be filed; they see this freedom from consequences as typical of the privileges of the well-connected. They want the bride-to-be to repay the expenses incurred in the national hunt for her. Yesterday they were praying; today they're sniping. Poster ‘Dolley Madison’ has “a difficult time believing these were influential families; I saw that hairdo on the stepmother, and she cannot even tell how to put in rollers so that it looks like a hairdo and not a hairdon't! If that's influential, I'll eat my hat.” “She should get that anorexia treated while she's at it,” writes ‘Spiralman.’ Most of the posters are jumping from one pulp fiction to another, leaping over Friday’s beautiful innocent victim of our violent society in order to get to Saturday’s evil psycho machinator. But one commenter nails it: “I had no idea she faked this. What she did is extremely cruel to her parents. So cruel I can't get my mind around it.” ------------------------------------------------------------- Update: Forgot this one. Hard to keep up: "Three M.I.T. graduate students have created a computer program that generates nonsensical scholarly papers. Last month, one of its productions, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy," was accepted by the Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. The invitation was rescinded after conference organizers learned of the hoax." |