In my opinion, this prank is very intricate and took a lot of effort while not actually proving the point that "history is meaningless on the internet" because the subject matter - the Street Sharks - are/were essentially forgotten by history itself. Sometimes things just naturally slide away and nobody cares. It's like, "What year did the black Power Ranger turn good?" or "What was the top selling Rock band in the years 1975-1983?" and then making up an answer because, well, it's not really pertinent stuff. There are much better cons online, I like to think...edit...even if this is some kind of meta-joke where it turns out all the fake parts are being faked...sigh...
How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
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Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#12think about how much worse it was before the internet
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#13To those who are questioning how much truth the 'confession' has in it, you are definitely getting in the spirit of things.
The confession is sort of a buzzfeed-ish version of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and he digs in, at length musing on lies and truth and how they mush together in ways that are very hard to untangle.
At any rate, if you liked the essay, I recommend the book.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#14Truth is such a slippery concept. How easy it was to create by a school kid, and how organically it grew over time despite being entirely made up. Imagine how much better people with professional tools and desire can generate much more harmful information than fake Henry Winkler appearances.
A while back, I forget who, but someone tracked down some false facts that were supported by circular references in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia doesn't allow you to cite Wikipedia, of course, but the trickster added an unsupported, false fact to Wikipedia, which was quoted by someone's blog, which was quoted in an article by a "science" "journalist", and then the trickster updated the Wikipedia page to reference that article.
I think it's important to take note that this can happen instead of dismissing it as childish pranks. We should apply the "security mindset" to our sources of information, not just to our computation.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#15Back in the early days of the IMDB, and before they got strict with verification, my brother uploaded information and credits for his high school movie assignments, which I had 'acted' in.
A Google search for my real name still returns my IMDB actors page as one of the top links.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#16I can't help but read this like: Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are by telling you the story about the time I went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat at every passer by. It was great fun, but it demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.
No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat. Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic world on poorly monitored sites. However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed…
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Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#17I can't help but read this like: Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are by telling you the story about the time I went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat at every passer by. It was great fun, but it demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.
I don't think "be wary of lies on the Internet" was the message, more "I did a funny thing and the Internet is dumb sometimes" - I was in tears laughing at some of the stupid episode summaries. And the irony that free-for-all Wikipedia was the only accurate source was pretty good too
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#18I honestly don't understand the animosity towards the author.
I consider this sort of mischief to be a healthy thing. If you are exposed to true facts constantly, all facts are true, in the same way that a TSA X-ray tech who sees ten thousand not-bombs might miss the one actual bomb.
I think of lies and disinformation as good for a mental agility, and an adjunct of storytelling. Is there no space for the trickster in our lives?
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#19I think Rox->Roxie is a pretty plausible confusion even without "malicious" interference, so I'm not sure those parts prove anything.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
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