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Internet versus hoaxes
``` [The enclosed article by Paul Saffo is forwarded with his permission. It was forwarded to me by a reporter who had earlier called on the phone to say, very apologetically, that of course he had to write an article about Internet hoaxes. How does this work exactly? I mean, certain "lines" about the Internet start circulating in the culture. They seem to be able to accelerate from 0 to 60 in about 48 hours. In the case of the "rumors on the Internet" line, one significant factor was the PR operation of Lexis/Nexis, which, faced with a highly successful online campaign against its services, engaged in a very aggressive anticampaign to reframe the issue in terms of "rumors on the Internet". By focusing on the fringe variants and offshoots of the dominant version of the action alert that was circulating on the net, L/N almost escaped having to answer the quite accurate accusations that had gotten a lot of people quite legitimately upset. But it's not just a matter of PR. Part of the problem is conceptual. Everything that happens anywhere in society happens on the Internet too, but everything that happens on the Internet is news, and when something bad happens on the Internet, the "line" instantly arises that the bad thing in question is a property of the Internet. In the case of rumors and hoaxes, yes, of course rumors and hoaxes circulate on the Internet, just like scams happen on the telephone. It is commonly said that the Internet is unique in its ability to spread bad information to large numbers of people, but this is ridiculous, given that the Internet cannot begin to compete with CNN or the New York Times for this honor. It is commonly said that the Internet is uniquely prone to propagating bad information without the possibility of correction, but this happens absolutely all the time in newspapers, which are archived and used as primary research materials for writers of all types, including reporters for other newspapers, whose errors are then archived and propagated all over again. Every new technology goes through a period of social "digestion", in which everybody tries to figure out what it's good for, until eventually a set of cultural forms emerges around it. Cultural forms are not dictated by technology; they are things that we can consciously choose if we want to. Hardly anybody wants to propagate bad information on the Internet, and the Internet community is quite capable of creating the cultural forms (e.g., names for the common patterns of error) and institutional mechanisms (e.g., CERT, CIAC, etc) for self- regulation. That's what Paul's article is about. Let's not let anyone essentialize the Internet and say "the Internet does this" and "the Internet does that" and "the Internet spreads rumors" and "the Internet causes social hierarchies to collapse and brings an era of peaceableness and decentralization to the world forever and ever amen", because those are not things that the Internet itself is capable of doing. Those are things that people do, or don't do, as they collectively see fit.]
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[From Paul Saffo]
Much has been made of the Internet as a global rumor-mill of late. Not yet in the public consciousness is the fact that the Internet is equally good at debunking wacky ideas and limiting their spread, as a recent incident (see below) demonstrates. My hunch is that the recent spate of rumor-mongering has so sensitized the Internet community to the potential for spreading myths, that it will now self-organize aggressively around rumor-quashing, and myth-debunking. The tale of Comet Hale-Bopp and the SLO is, I think, an early indicator of this trend.
**Background: is a mystery object shadowing Hale-Bopp?!?...
On November 14th,an amateur astronomer in Houston named Chuck Shramek captures a CCD image on his telescope of Comet Hale-Bopp and nearby, a mysterious (to Mr. Shramek) "self-luminous Saturn-like Object" ("SLO" as come to be known) that Mr. Shramek reported was following the comet. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Schramek was interviewed on the Art Bell Show, self-billed as "The #1 Late Night Talk Radio Program" (quote from Bell's home page), offering a full serving of UFO conspiracy stuff (see http://www.artbell.com/). Note that audio feed of the show is available via RealAudio on Bell's web page.
From here, Mr. Shramek's story takes off over the net at lightspeed. It came to my attention when someone who knows my interest in millenial movements copied me on a piece of AOL email from someone who heard and was alarmed by the program. Here are some excerpts:
"Allegedly, a massive object 4-times the size of Earth has appeared in space near COMET HALE-BOPP. The existence of the object has been confirmed by 1 major observatory..." "The program was very alarmist and disturbing. It received a massive listener response of outrage and fear all through the night with BELL assuring listeners that the program content was VERY REAL. The response bordered on partial hysteria and anger at BELL and his guest who held their ground." "(Bell's) assertion was that the HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE hasn't been sending back any public images since MAY, and that the GOVT. has known about this for a time."
It seems this listener was not alarmed and upset. When I tried to visit a web site (http://paradise.pplnet.com/shram/comet.htm) advertised as displaying Mr. Shramek's images, I encountered a notice that the site is inaccessible due to the high volume of hits (acc to the indicator, "over 18,982 hits since 11/17" -- barely a week before I tried to log in).
Conjecture, myth and thin fact begin simmering away in an ever-richer broth,as rumor of Hale-Bopp's mysterious and sinster companion hop-scotched from discussion group to discussion group. Even before Mr. Schramek's tale, apocalypse-minded believers had concluded that Hale-Bopp was an omen of the end -- several home pages on this theme can be found on the WWW.
In this charged climate, even scientific questions can be distorted in the service of myth. For example, members of the Albuquerque Astronomical Society recently posted images taken by them of an apparent coma-flaring last summer (see, http:// www.halebopp.com/z05eyes.htm). Amateur astronomers began to refer to the image as the comet's "mysterious right eye," an unfortunate shorthand immediately appropriated by the myth-minded. No one in the amateur astro community is treating this as anything other than an interesting natural phenomenon. BUT in the UFO/conspiracy community, the "Mysterious Right Eye." has become one more evidence that something profoundly wierd and unexplanable is afoot.
**The debunkers arrive..
Well, faster than you can say "Pierre Salinger," other netizens jumped in to counter the spreading SLO myth. In particular, amateur astronomer Russell Sipe, who maintains a leading home page on Comet Hale-Bopp (http://www.halebopp.com) put up a posting on Nov 15th showing that the "SLO" was in fact an 8th Magnitude Star (SAO 141894) overlooked by Mr. Shramek.
As it would turn out, this star was listed in the MegaStar software program that Shramek had been using, but Shramek apparently had set the software parameters incorrectly (see details at halebopp.com) and thus the star wasn't displayed. And in the days that followed, Sipe and others on the net would publish Mr. Shramek's photo along with supporting data (including photos from the Palomar Digital Sky Survey) conclusively demonstrating that the SLO and the catalogued star are one and the same. Better yet, pointers to the analysis began appearing all over the net, in such locations as Sky&Telescope's home page.
**But it is shaped like Saturn...
Of course, stars don't resemble Saturn, and Mr. Shramek's CCD images do show a featureless Saturn-shaped object. However, an expert astrophotographer reporting to the Hale-Bopp home page, makes a convincing case that this is merely an artifact of Shramek's telescope or the manner in which he captured the images.
**And Mr. Shramek is not just an amateur Astronomer...
Mr. Shramek turns out to be a bit more than just an amateur astronomer. On his home page (http://paradise.pplnet.com/ shram/index.htm), he describes himself as follows:
"Chuck Shramek is nearing 20 years of radio broadcasting in Houston. Chuck is an adventurer, inventor, lecturer, New Age healer, psychic, philanderer and noted expert in 41 fields not currently recognized as sciences by Harvard, MIT or Yale."
The pointers listed on his site also imply a certain predisposition towards the outre. Here are a few, followed by the annotations made on his page:
"Free Energy" ("Sounds like perpetual motion, but I'm convinced the supression of these devices is the biggest coverup of all!!!")
"50 Greatest Conspiracies" ("extremely entertaining, often true.")
"Conspiracy Nation" ("goes out on a limb and falls a lot, but there's still more truth here than you'll hear from Rather or Jennings.)
Perhaps Mr. Shramek is in fact a well-intentioned, cautious and scientifically-detached amateur astronomer, but the foregoing suggests that at minimum, it is equally likely that he is predisposed to find evidence of nonexistent UFOs and conspiracies in the emptiness of the night sky. And do read his page carefully --especially the item titled "the Mad Faxer"-- as it suggests that he is not above tweaking the facts a bit, or pulling a prank or two in the service of a cause he happens to believe in.
**Bunk and debunk...
As quickly as the SLO-myth grew, the debunkers responded with explanatory fact. The result has been assembled as a page within halebopp.com devoted to the continued debunking of this controversy (http://www.halebopp.com/slo1.htm). I strongly recommend visiting it, as it contains a complete (and witty) summation of the origins of the SLO myth, and it's debunking, complete with responses from the SLO-believers, and pointers to all the relevant sites, pro and con. It is a model of how to quash crazy rumor on the web.
Also, as I write this, comet-phobia is growing as rapidly as Hale-Bopp's tail. H-B will bepeakin March 97, and I'll bet we see some serious social wackiness then. In the meantime, halebopp.com is a good place to visit periodically for updates on both rumor and fact.
**The bottom line: the myth's spread is blunted.
Myths on the net may move at lightspeed, but so can fact and analysis. The debunkers arrived barely 24 hours after the myth-makers began spreading their talk over the Net. Mr. Sipe and his colleagues haven't extinguished the myth created by Mr. Shramek, but they have seriously curtailed it's spread. Thanks to the debunkers, the SLO is one story that will (unlike the TWA800 missile myth) never be taken seriously outside of the fringe community of credulous true-believers who already accept the soft-headed tales of martian ruins, crashed saucers, and dark government conspiracies.
But this is just the start. The info on halebopp.com has slowed the spread beyond the saucer/conspiracy fringe, but that community seems to be stubbornly hanging onto the myth. As one individual emailed me after a copy of an earlier version of this posting was indirected to him: "Wrong!!! There are still true believers out there who swear it is not a star. And Mr. Bell is still promising more information." And of course, several astronomers have received nasty-grams from folks like this accusing them of being dupes of some dark government conspiracy...
We can count on more myths arising as Hale-Bopp draws closer. The task remains to find ways to bring hard evidence of the SLO's mundane actuality to the attention of those who have already concluded that Hale-Bopp is something sinister than an itinerant cometary snow-ball.
**The larger challenge
In the great tradition of the Net's rapid evolution, look for the debunkers to do even better in the future, making the Net a steadily less convivial place for rumor and soft-headed myth.
BUT we need more sites set up to serve as clearing points for rumor-suppression and myth-dispelling fact. HaleBopp is an excellent example of the pragmatics of doing this in one domain, but the task still remains for someone to take on a larger clearing house role for myths and hoaxes more generally. Clearly, it cannot be government agencies (imagine the howl from the conspiracy-types if NASA or JPL tried doing what halebopp.com is doing!). So, then, who? ```
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