That Worked Out Well For You

Yesterday Washington Post writer Mike Wise decided to conduct his own little social experiment. He made up a news item stating he had learned Ben Roethlisberger's 6-game suspension was only going to be reduced down to five games. Since most people expect Roethlisberger to end up missing just four games, this would constitute fairly interesting sports news. Wise sent out this piece of made-up information on his Twitter feed, saying later the point of the entire thing was to see how long it would take for blogs everywhere to take the ball and run with it, accepting the rumor as truth without doing any work of their own, and also seeing how many would fail to give proper credit back to where they first heard the 'news'. Apparently, this was supposed to prove just how unreliable the Internet is. The problem for Wise is that his timing sucks. While it was probably true that five or six years ago people believed everything online, we have come a long way since then. People now have started to go the exact opposite way, demanding more proof than ever before they will believe something found on a website (unless of course it's on Wikipedia, because that site is never wrong), and as a result the rumor went pretty much nowhere. Also, while this was an interesting and original idea in 2002, in 2010 newspaper journalists are no longer in a position where they can afford to be seen as getting stories wrong. Being seen that way will only serve to drive more readers to sites like ESPN. But, apparently Wise figured people thinking he was incompetent at his job was a small price to pay to show the world that sometimes people on the Internet make shit up. He was promptly suspended by the Post for a month.

Letting the unoriginality of the idea slide, I have other issues with how Wise conducted this little experiment. I feel like he went wrong in two ways. First, this experiment doesn't work for Twitter. The stereotype of news being randomly made up by someone pretty much only applies to blogs. Every corporation has a Twitter feed in today's world, people tend to follow only select accounts of people who they either know or trust and you have to go looking specifically for those accounts. Twitter isn't like a fan chat forum where a random individual can throw something they heard from their brother, who heard it from some guy he knows, out there as gospel truth for everyone who belongs to the forum to see, all the while hiding behind some handle like JoePat6969. The days of random people stumbling onto random pages are long gone. Secondly, you can't work from a position of establishment if you're trying to spread lies - it screws up the entire point of the experiment. Wise works for a huge newspaper and has a proven track record of breaking stories (at least, until yesterday). When you have credibility either built up over time or because of the company you work for, obviously people are more likely to take what you say as truth without questioning. If he really wanted to see how a rumor could spread online what he should have done is create a fake Twitter account and email under a false name, then sent a Tweet saying he had heard the rumor about Roethlisberger's suspension to a few specific blogs and added he had heard it from a cousin or some other relative who works at the league office. Then he could have seen if those specific blogs would have written back to him for confirmation or just accepted it as truth and the experiment would have had a much more controlled sample size. The good news for him is that he has a month to work out the kinks before he tries again.

-I've decided that displaying sneakers on a table at waist-level is the worst way to do so. This is because you should see sneakers from some height, otherwise they look bigger than they are. And yes, this revelation came from me seeing out a pair of sneakers on a table, thinking that they looked massive, but then discovering that they were actually two sizes smaller than the pontoons I need for my feet.

-The Celtics re-signed Delonte West today. This makes me very happy because I bought a Delonte West #13 jersey about five days before he was traded and therefore only got to wear it once and that wasn't even to a game. It is very rare that a jersey is ever brought back into the rotation. So, as long as he isn't assigned a new number (which given my luck could very well happen) this will work out very well for me.