More like, "I used lies about a cartoon to convince some people online that history is meaningless on the internet." Nothing was proved, and I wonder how long that deception lasted. Edit: Title has since been changed.
How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
21–30 of 118 posts
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#22I 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.
Can't find any fault with the argument.
If he did that for fun, tons of others can do it for fan, more with malicious intent, even more for profit, even more than those from idiocy and repeating misinformation, etc.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#23Truth 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 articl…
Maybe you remember https://xkcd.com/978/
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#24This is a jawesome playbook of how "facts 2.0" get created.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#25I don't think it's the internet's fault. In 1941 a couple of friends made a few phone calls to newspaper sports desks and concocted a college football team:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/sports/ncaafootball/the-41...
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#26So, you lied, but it's someone else's fault? After all, what kind of person would intentionally sow lies about Street Sharks across the internet? Well, not a good one.
Meh. I see this more as god-tier trolling. We have no way to easily tell if this piece is a total lie or a long delayed admission of truth. I'm certainly not ever going to research this to determine if it is valid. And that is what makes the troll god-tier. The nugget of truth he alludes to is then instantly suspect for everything now. Though I may forget that the internet of made up of dogs impersonating people from time to time, upon reflection I will remember the Street Sharks guy and be brought back to the 'center'; that everything on the net is a lie. The commentary on epistemology and nihilism aside, this guy is a god-tier troll. Soberly, I'll never trust a thing on here again.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#27I 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.
How many articles have had the premise "You can't trust wikipedia, because it's full of lies! Why, just look at this handful of lies I've put on there!"
But that's not what this is, really. It points out the greater danger of the propagation of those lies. It's entirely reasonable to assume others might similarly lie and this article demonstrates how such lies can propagate through the internet in certain cases.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#28I 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…
I think the problems you're bringing up cannot be solved.
Information (re: "Information Superhighway") is information. In this utopian idea of "quality control", who does the quality control? Houghton Mifflin[1]?
If history is just a set of lies agreed upon[2], I'd rather have the consensus of the Internet than whoever it is you purport should be in control of quality.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/...
2. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968....
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#29Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#30I 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.
If it was just "there are lies on the Internet - I just posted some!" Then yeah. To me this story is more how they propagate. Who knew Netflix didn't get their metadata from the production company itself?