Cooper’s Column

I say this not to establish my undoubted kewl, but as a preface to admitting the serious reservations I now have about the way the Internet has become a medium for rubbish — and no, I don’t mean (just) Viagra and penis enlargement spam (however much both might come in handy at my time of life). I mean its capacity to spread disinformation and bile. A case in point is the inventor of an important piece of music tech history, whom I recently interviewed. He’s getting on a bit now, but he’s not so old that he doesn’t read the Internet forums on which he and his products have been extensively discussed. What really got to him, he told me, wasn’t just that so much of what was being written and discussed was just plain wrong on both historical and technical grounds, but that one or two blowhards on forums seemed to have decided that they knew him personally, and could assure the rest of the world that he was a complete fake. Now that, I know for certain, he most certainly is not.

There is little he can do about this, however, other than suffer in silence, not least because the international nature of the Internet means he can be slagged off by anonymous idiots from anywhere on the planet, way beyond the reach of a lawsuit. In effect, it seems more or less anyone can say more or less anything about a private individual, fairly secure in the knowledge that the victim won’t be able to afford the cost of suing. Moreover, people can, and routinely do, publish complete nonsense on Internet forums, which are widely given the credit usually afforded to the printed word.

But it’s not just on fora that misinformation runs riot. Wikipedia, often slammed down as a trump card to win an argument, is, in my opinion, very far from definitive — not least due to the way it is routinely policed by people with vested interests.

Decades before the Internet was created, Sir Winston Churchill wrote, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. It certainly does today, when a fruitcake with a headache can spread lies, half-truths and just plain old-fashioned nonsense, anytime he pleases, doing untold damage in the process. Can you necessarily believe what you read in a magazine or newspaper? Certainly not. But at least magazines identify their writers, check what they say and are easy enough to challenge when they make mistakes. Have I gone off the Internet? Not at all. But I’m certainly treating what I read on it with ever greater degrees of caution.  0