“Texas Teens Plan Riot on the Internet” – headline in The Inquirer online news service
For some unreported grievance, two groups of kids in a Dallas suburb decided to kick each others’ butts recently.
Being 21st-century teens, the students from Garland High School and South Garland High School arranged the brawl online. They used the Internet to set out the time, place and fighting parameters, and carefully shot a video to establish who won. Presumably the digitized tape will be showing up online soon, perhaps filed next to the infamous Nicholas Berg beheading (which you can still find if you are sick enough to want to watch it.)
The potential for the Internet to be used in weird, wacky and sometimes powerful ways continues to amaze. As does human gullibility. Last week a really intelligent acquaintance forwarded an e-mail urging me to protest the disgusting practice of growing bonsai kittens. Perhaps she was having a brain cramp, or (shudder) maybe she really believes that baby animals can be grown in glass containers, fed through tubes and will then assume the shape of the bottle.
This hoax site, bonsaikitten.com, even has shocking photos and assures us that “once the cat is fully developed, it is removed (or the vessel broken to remove it!), producing the lovable, furry pet you’ve always wanted, but it remains in the shape you’ve always dreamed of.”
Let’s just hope that my friend’s great interest in preventing animal torture outweighed her common sense in this instance.
Another equally smart but naive person recently copied me on an e-mail appeal to boycott Shell and PetroCanada to bring down gasoline prices. This chain letter, which had been forwarded by people at a number of reputable firms and organizations (on company time?) argues that the we can fight high gas prices simply by co-ordinating our anger.
Since we need gas for our cars, we can’t totally boycott gas stations. However, this e-mail reasons, we can hit them in the pocketbook by refusing to buy from certain companies. The message says Shell and PetroCanada were chosen as the largest gasoline retailers. It claims that if they are not selling any gas they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.
If you weren’t lucky enough to receive this e-mail, you can find it posted on sites that compare gas prices. The best evidence that this strategy won’t work is that an attempt to organize a North America-wide gas-buying boycott on May 19 fizzled out. Face it, when that gas gauge hits the E, people are going to pull into the nearest station.
Without question, the best site for sorting out fact from fiction on the Internet is www.snopes.com. It will tell you that kittens aren’t being tortured and that you won’t badger the oil companies into submission by passing up certain stations or not shopping on certain days.
One great thing about snopes.com is that it categorizes stories as True, False or Undetermined. Take, for example, the childless couple in the U.K. who showed up with £7,000 at an in-vitro fertilization clinic because they wanted to have a child. Tests proved they were both healthy and fertile. As the story (Status: Undetermined) goes, their problem was quite simple – they were not having sex. A clinic spokesman is quoted as saying that these were folks who were brought up in a strict religious environment, who simply did not know how babies were created.
Some of the most interesting items on snopes.com are actually listed as Status: True. For example, there is a missive urging a boycott of a certain fast-food giant because McDonald’s has announced that it is going to start importing much of its beef from South America.
This much-forwarded e-mail claims that this is an insult to American ranchers and that food-safety standards are lower for the imported meat. The real story, according to snopes.com, is that it’s true McDonald’s is testing the use of imported beef to augment supplies tendered by American ranchers, but not beef from South America and not necessarily for the reason advanced in the e-mail.
Can an Internet-organized boycott ever really work? According to a BBC news report, a 1999 effort to fight high European Internet access charges resulted in drops of up to 87 per cent in e-mail traffic on the chosen day. Access prices have gone down since the 24-hour Internet strike, but of course other factors may also be responsible.
One thing the Internet certainly can do is deliver lists of companies and products that somebody would like you to boycott. One site alone, www.discoverteenergy.com, provides a shopping list of targets from Starbucks to Coca Cola to the big banks. So, the next time you swear off mocha fraps or high-fee ATMs, check out a boycott site and figure out whose cause you are supporting!
Web watch:
www.theinquirer.net/?article=15876
www.gasbuddy.com
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
