Published: July 05, 2008 08:56 pm         

The Internet: A communication miracle

The Internet truly is a wonderful thing. It’s a fantastic resource filled with a treasure trove of information.

Of course, it’s also filled with a lot of junk.

The key is to figure out which is which, and that’s not always easy.

All the time, I get e-mails from folks letting me know about some little known fact that needs to be disseminated to the masses.

Last week, I got a message saying that the Indiana General Assembly had passed a law making it illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving. The law supposedly had taken effect last week with little or no fanfare.

Why hadn’t anybody told folks about this? Are they trying to catch us by surprise?

It was one of those chain e-mails, and one of the folks on the chain had even gone to the trouble of checking the state’s Web site, www.in.gov.

Sure enough, the writer said, the bill is right there.

And she was right. It is.

What the writer didn’t realize, though, was that this was not a law but simply a bill. The measure would have taken effect on July 1 if it had passed, but in fact, it never came up for a vote.

It was filed in the Indiana House of Representatives last January, and it was promptly assigned to a committee where it languished and died, never even getting a hearing.

Believe me, if that measure had gotten serious consideration in the legislature, it would have made the news. Folks would have been talking about it.

Newspapers would have published editorials. Folks would have written letters to the editor.

And if such a law were about to take effect, police agencies would have been sending out news releases letting folks know they needed to have their telephone conversations before they got in the car or after they reached their destinations.

Laws like that don’t just sneak up on people. They arrive with a good bit of publicity.

That’s not to say that you won’t learn anything in an e-mail. The Internet is an amazing tool allowing the spread of both information and misinformation at lightning speed.

My first rule of thumb when I get one of these mass e-mails is to use my own judgment. Does it ring true? Does it make sense?

Often you can check other sources to determine the veracity of these e-mails.

One of my favorite places to check is www.snopes.com.

The site is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, who do the work of checking out the urban legends that travel the Internet. Snopes is often cited in the mainstream media, and it’s a great place to go if you read a legend you’re not sure about.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that the legends never seem to get old. They sometimes circulate for years, changing slightly with the passage of time.

In some ways, the Internet is like the childhood game of telephone. A reference might start as accurate and gradually change as it passes from one sender to the next.

Take for example an essay supposedly written by comedian Jay Leno. It refers to a Newsweek magazine poll saying 67 percent of the country was unhappy with the president’s performance.

Leno was responsible for part of the message.

In September of 2005, he told a joke on the Tonight Show: “As you know, Hurricane Rita is headed toward Florida, Texas and Louisiana. Another hurricane. It’s like the ninth hurricane this season. Maybe this is not a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance.”

A year later, a man named Craig R. Smith wrote an essay for WorldNetDaily concerning the Newsweek poll.

What are we so unhappy about, he asked.

“Is it that we have electricity and running water 24 hours a day? Is our unhappiness the result of having air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter. Could it be that 95.4 percent of these unhappy folks have a job?”

He went on to call Americans the largest group of ungrateful, spoiled brats the world has ever seen.

“No wonder the world loves the U.S., yet has great disdain for its citizens,? he wrote. “They see us for what we are. The most blessed people in the world who do nothing but complain about what we don’t have, and what we hate about the country instead of thanking the good lord we live here.”

The reason so many folks were unhappy, he said, wasn’t because of the media.

“Stop buying the negativism you are fed everyday by the media,” he wrote. “Shut off the TV, burn Newsweek and use the New York Times for the bottom of your bird cage. Then start being grateful for all we have as a country.”

At some point, somebody shortened the essay slightly and then added a paraphrase of Leno’s joke. Eventually, someone added an introduction crediting the entire essay to Leno.

By the middle of this year, some versions were giving the credit to Leno’s late night rival, David Letterman.

Actually, we’ll probably never know who really wrote the edited version. It was, indeed, like that old game of telephone. Someone tells a story to one person, who tells it to the next, who tells it to the next. And with each retelling, the story changes just a little bit. A tweak here and a tweak there.

And finally an essay quoting Jay Leno becomes an essay written by Jay Leno. Or was it David Letterman?

Ah, the Internet. It’s a wonderful thing.

Kelly Hawes is managing editor of the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached at (574) 732-5155 or kelly.hawes@pharostribune.com