We're perpetually warned about the contemporary rise of cynicism, but
a parallel American contagion, often infecting the same citizens, is
credulity. The postmodern cynic cum naïf mistrusts the government,
the media, and the other élites even as he recklessly embraces this or
that line of grassroots make-believe. You believe that a majority of
women were sexually abused as children? You believe that Ben Franklin
was an anti-Semitic propagandist? You believe that you have seen a
documentary videotape of government doctors performing an autopsy on a
captured extraterestrial? Whatever.
This laissez-faire ultra-populism finds its perfect medium in the
Internet. Not only is every citizen entitled to his or her opinion
but he or she is entitled to deliver it instantaneously, studded with
chunks of fake information, to the whole world.
...[One site]
contains dozens of dense, competently written reports on subjects as
various as the Hale-Bopp coment, AIDS, and TWA flight 800, and its
frequently updated pages look as professional as those of brand-name
news-media sites; the articles assert, however, that the comet may be
travelling alongside "a gigantic spacecraft," that H.I.V. grew out of
a "U.S. biowarfare program," and that Flight 800 was brought down by
"a rift in the space-time continuum."
Thanks to the Web, amateurism and spuriousness no longer need look
amateurish or spurious.
-- Kurt Andersen. "The Age of Unreason: Welcome to the
factual free-for-all." New Yorker 2/3/97 p.41