On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog
October 3, 2007 | Filed Under Seriously/Real Stuff | No Responses
Over a decade ago, I first saw the now classic Peter Steiner cartoon with a dog at the keyboard of a computer telling another dog: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (Likely this line is © 1993, Peter Steiner). I thought it might be fun at the time to write a novel about a dog whose owner has no idea that the dog is picking up on the details of his life and then writing about it on the Web. “The Electonic Dog,” like all my other ideas for a novel, never came to be.
As usual, art imitates life. On the Internet, nobody knows whether you are lying or telling the truth, whether you are putting out content that is fact-based or half-baked. Wikipedia, for example, with its user-provided content has been known to get it wrong often enough to make me double check anything that I find there.
I mention this because my Tester posting, meant to be entirely tongue in cheek, came up at the top of search results for “Jon Tester” a while back, right in there with the serious news about our Montana senator. I was alarmed, not only because that posting generated a lot of hits from the office of the Sergeant of Arms for the U.S. Senate (I felt watched), but because the playing field was so level that satire and hard news had the same weight (I felt embarrassed). Actually, satire had more weight since my story came first in search engine results.
So as I work with my spam prevention tools (Akismet and Bad Behavior) to keep my comment spam manageable, I am also aware of the broader issues of what it means to be out there, live on the Web. For us bloggers, it means we have to be responsible: identify satire when it is satire (I do) and serious commentary when it is serious (I do). Above all, if we are going to write about something where the facts matter, then by god, check the facts. For Web readers, this means you have to do some work to separate the garbage from the genuine content, not to mention the outright lies from the truth (especially during our elongated campaign season). You might be reading what appears to be fact, when it is actually written by, well, perhaps a dog.
Not that my own dogs aren’t more credible than a large percentage of people spewing content on the Internet. All the same, perhaps I should look into that paw print on my keyboard.
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