[Leica] shift happens

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

George and Ken:  It ain't just people in mental institutions.  You've just 
described one of the monkey wrenches in the works of our Total Digital 
Nirvana.  People are still people.  Some of them lie, cheat, and put bogus 
information out for fun, for profit, or for political and ideological 
reasons. Or just because they can.

Many people are swayed by the most charismatic arguer rather than the most 
reasonable argument.  Yes, it was ever thus.  But the spread of hate 
propaganda by the Internet is a worrisome phenomenon, because the Internet 
amplifies the haters' reach.  Crackpots who would only attract a few dozen 
followers in two counties now can have a global audience.  People who want 
to take us all back to the Seventh Century are gaining followers and 
issuing detonation orders using 21st Century technology.

Case in point:  I recently saw the film "Taking Sides," an account of the 
Allies' investigation of the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtw?ngler 
after the end of World War II.  Unlike some other artists and musicians who 
had the means to leave, Furtw?ngler chose to remain in Germany under the 
Nazis.  His record was a bit ambiguous here and there, but in sum it was 
pretty clear that he was no Nazi himself.  He was tried by a denazification 
court, which effectively cleared him of charges of collaboration.  But his 
decision to stay in Germany haunted him for the rest of his life.

This whole subject of how artists are co-opted and corrupted (or not) by 
totalitarian regimes interests me greatly, so I went online to read 
more.  I started with the Wikipedia article on Furtw?ngler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Furtwangler

I also read several of the references cited at the end of the article, 
including this one:
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n3p-2_Charles.html

Some of the writing in the latter seemed quite reasonable, but every couple 
of paragraphs there was a statement criticizing Jews or Jewish groups, or 
casting cultural life under the Nazis in a positive light.  An alarm bell 
went off in my head, and I hit the Web site's main page and "About Us" 
statement, only to discover that it was the Institute for Historical 
Review!  This is the group associated with convicted Holocaust denier David 
Irving.

Now, I was raised in the obsolete print era, when we were always taught to 
consider the source.  But in today's rapid-fire information age, we have to 
ignore many things in order to make sense of what comes across the 
Web.  I'm in a habit of mentally filtering out extraneous material when I 
surf (ads, cute graphics, etc), and in my haste to read the article, I 
failed to notice the "Institute for Historical Review" banner at the top.

I wonder how many uninformed people read this article and concluded that 
there was some vast, coordinated Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to discredit 
German culture and all innocent German artists who happened to live there 
between 1933-1945.  For that is what the article implied.  The site's 
"About Us" page makes that viewpoint abundantly clear.

But in the course of casual surfing, how many people would bother to find 
that out?  What I'm saying is that along with this exponential explosion of 
information, there is also an exponential explosion of lies and hate 
propaganda.  And an information-saturated, time-rushed audience is a bit 
more likely to believe the lies.  If, as the famous New Yorker cartoon 
stated, "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog," it is also true that 
on the Internet you can hide the fact that you're a hatemonger.

Even in Wikipedia, one of the prime "go-to" sites for information on the Web.

--Peter

At 05:26 PM 8/3/2007 -0700, George Lottermoser wrote:
> > Way back in the early sixties (well before computers) a teacher told
> > our class, "the important thing is not knowing the information, but
> > knowing where to find the information." I never forgot that line. He
> > was of course speaking about the use of "card catalogs, reference
> > books, library tools, interviews, etc." I wonder if he'd still agree;
> > when all one has to do is "google" or "wiki" and assume that you've
> > received all the reasonable answers to the question(s).

Ken Carney wrote:
>         I believe he would still agree, though the issue now, as always, is
>the quality of the information.  I sometimes remind our staff that there is
>a reason why we pay about $30,000 a year for online research access, and
>that the wikipedia article might have been written by someone whiling away
>the time in a mental institution somewhere.