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SO I come back from lunch and find an e-mail from my boss. It's a forward of a forward of a note from a vendor (and friend of the museum). It urges the reader to add his or her name to a petition to save NPR, PBS and the Natl. Endowment for the Arts. It talks about how just last week, the Supreme Court reporter for NPR warns that the Court will side with Congress and doom these groups. Both my boss and her boss were a bit mystified. Was there a new effort afoot to de-fund these groups? What did the Supreme Court have to do with this?
"Alex," the call went out, "get more info!"
And thus I got to do something I don't get to do often enough - research! A few deft strokes and I let Google do the walking. (If you ever wonder how Willow can get all that info about spells and artifacts so quickly, you have yet to reckon with the power of Google!) And I landed at two or three urban legends sites. Not what I expected. I figured that while the e-petition was a worthless endeavor, it was sincere and legit. (Lord knows that NPR, PBS and the NEA have a lot of enemies - I found at least three petitions demanding the government de-fund these groups during my Googling.)
But it turns out that this petition, with its statistics about the cost of these funds per person updated slightly, are from 1995. Which was the last time a move was made to totally de-fund these programs, and which was when two students at the Univ. of Northern Colorado started an e-mail petition campaign. Shortly after, the move to de-fund was a flop, not due to any e-petition drive but to the immense bad publicity Newt Gingrich and friends got. The students declared victory, and that was that.
Expect that nothing on the net stays dead, and like Dracula rising from his coffin this petition kept coming back, with no date on it, with no names of origiantors. Here it is, eight years later, and it still drifts its way into the Museum, where we stay alert for the kind of government anti-action it claims is about to happen. It still circulates, filling e-mailboxes like so much spam. And it haunts the two poor students, long since graudated, and any IT people at the Univ. of Northern Colorado, cleaning out the mailboxes every night like janitors of the World Wide Web.
It fascinates me how this happens. The e-petition is apparently as worthless as the e-mail letter writing campaign, maybe more so, as it fills up with lots of names that mean nothing to any legislator. It impresses no one. This particular one is ancient, but has apparently been revived four times (even though the opening line about the Supreme Court makes no sense). And everyone spends too much time fighting the scourge of spam. But on it goes. Apparently, when a cause near and dear to us is at stake, we don't bother to think. We look at it and say, "that is not right, I must do something" before we ask any questions about what it is we're reading.
And the Internet, repository of more useless facts than a meeting Star Trek-watching baseball historians (the kind of person who knows Buck Bokai's batting average, I guess), makes it possible to turn the clock back over and over and be indignant like it's 1995 all over again. Sometimes I wonder just what we've unleashed in this Internet. Surely its pluses - you're reading my blog, after all - are huge, but the odd sociological quirks of all this information and misinformation and diinformation could be rather large.
And all the while, the 1995 petition circulates...
"Alex," the call went out, "get more info!"
And thus I got to do something I don't get to do often enough - research! A few deft strokes and I let Google do the walking. (If you ever wonder how Willow can get all that info about spells and artifacts so quickly, you have yet to reckon with the power of Google!) And I landed at two or three urban legends sites. Not what I expected. I figured that while the e-petition was a worthless endeavor, it was sincere and legit. (Lord knows that NPR, PBS and the NEA have a lot of enemies - I found at least three petitions demanding the government de-fund these groups during my Googling.)
But it turns out that this petition, with its statistics about the cost of these funds per person updated slightly, are from 1995. Which was the last time a move was made to totally de-fund these programs, and which was when two students at the Univ. of Northern Colorado started an e-mail petition campaign. Shortly after, the move to de-fund was a flop, not due to any e-petition drive but to the immense bad publicity Newt Gingrich and friends got. The students declared victory, and that was that.
Expect that nothing on the net stays dead, and like Dracula rising from his coffin this petition kept coming back, with no date on it, with no names of origiantors. Here it is, eight years later, and it still drifts its way into the Museum, where we stay alert for the kind of government anti-action it claims is about to happen. It still circulates, filling e-mailboxes like so much spam. And it haunts the two poor students, long since graudated, and any IT people at the Univ. of Northern Colorado, cleaning out the mailboxes every night like janitors of the World Wide Web.
It fascinates me how this happens. The e-petition is apparently as worthless as the e-mail letter writing campaign, maybe more so, as it fills up with lots of names that mean nothing to any legislator. It impresses no one. This particular one is ancient, but has apparently been revived four times (even though the opening line about the Supreme Court makes no sense). And everyone spends too much time fighting the scourge of spam. But on it goes. Apparently, when a cause near and dear to us is at stake, we don't bother to think. We look at it and say, "that is not right, I must do something" before we ask any questions about what it is we're reading.
And the Internet, repository of more useless facts than a meeting Star Trek-watching baseball historians (the kind of person who knows Buck Bokai's batting average, I guess), makes it possible to turn the clock back over and over and be indignant like it's 1995 all over again. Sometimes I wonder just what we've unleashed in this Internet. Surely its pluses - you're reading my blog, after all - are huge, but the odd sociological quirks of all this information and misinformation and diinformation could be rather large.
And all the while, the 1995 petition circulates...
