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Roger Ebert a Creationist - believe it?
Film critic Roger Ebert has an excellent column on what happened when he wrote a (seemingly) pro-Creationism piece earlier this month. The latter was satire, but apparently that point was lost on the thousands of evolution/science backers, who went into conniption fits and emailed furious posts on the subject to various blogsites.
While Ebert’s original journal post was to point out inconsistencies in creationism as voiced by current proponents, his follow-up hit the bulls-eye with me: a widespread inability to recognize satire and irony (at least in print or text), compounded with a parallel lack of skepticism when it comes to claims or allegations that race like wildfire on the Internet.
I once was fond of writing fake items in the dry style of a hard news story that spoofed whatever I was satirizing. I can’t do that anymore without feeling obligated to hold up a sign to readers “This isn’t true! It’s satire!” And when I do that, that spoils the joke for the readers savvy enough to spot it.
Not only are more readers likely to miss the subtle clues that I’m joking, but there’s now the chance a fake news story loses its context in the course of being forwarded through multiple emails; it then becomes passed on as the real thing.
I say this knowing that in a matter of hours the vice-presidential debate between Biden and Palin will be so spun and respun, sliced and diced in the blogosphere and political campaigns that any factual nuggets that it might produce will be lost in the whirlspin.
Are we in, as Ebert says, an “age of credulity”? I’m inclined to believe it.
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