There’s a photo doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment, with this:
How The Sun newspaper reported about this new thing called the ‘world wide web’ in 1992… pic.twitter.com/fI3M7mH9
A colleague of mine retweeted it, I also saw Tom Watson (MP) retweet it, although with a question about its validity.
You don’t need to look for very long at the image before it becomes clear it’s satire: the journalist byline of “Dot Comme”, that it’s a photo of an image from a screen purporting to be of a newspaper article from the early 1990s, that there just seems to be a certain knowing of the future that doesn’t make it make sense. And then if you actually go to the original tweet, you’ll find the author did it simply as an experiment to find out how many retweets it got (40 attributed via Twitter when I looked, but I imagine a lot more where the original source was lost along the way).
Similar things happened a few weeks ago with the Bradley Wiggins tweet – maybe a slightly more believable one, but again a hoax nonetheless.
What can we learn from this?
Well, firstly that within the UK there seems to be an eagerness to knock certain parts of our society; these two tweets were very much focused on our media and media personalities, a section of our society that’s come under intense scrutiny in the past 12 months. Tap into a bashing Zeitgeist and there’s a good chance of going viral.
Secondly that maybe sometimes we want things to be true enough to not worry about their validity or not.
And maybe, finally, that the immediacy of social media is reducing our ability to apply critical analysis. Retweeting involves very little effort; therefore, maybe, the effort that we put into scrutinising the information that we chose to share in this way is maybe similarly reduced?
mmitII 