Instant inaccuracy
May 22nd 2009 01:44
Is inaccuracy a price of today's instant information?
This was something Shane Fitzgerald, a 22-year-old Dublin sociology major, decided to find out. Fitzgerald invented a quotation for the French composer and three-time Oscar winner Maurice Jarre, who died on March 28. The quotation was uploaded to Jarre's Wikipedia page hours after his death.
Fitzgerald's fabrication read, "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
The quotation was picked up and used by dozens of blogs and newspapers in the US, UK, Australia and India.
Fitzgerald says he was testing how our globalised, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news. Journalism failed the test despite the best efforts of Wikipedia, whose editors twice noticed the lack of attribution on the quote and removed it.
A month after the hoax, with nobody apparently noticing it, Fitzgerald went public.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, told Associated Press. "I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up. It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
From the Salient Point blog, by Chris Champion
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Comment by Norm
Consumption Malfunction
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Food for thought, for sure.
I'm a regular kind of a guy.
How's the Salient Point going, Chris?
Comment by Chris Champion
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We're building and they're coming. In droves is not, perhaps, an accurate way to describe their coming, but it's happening. Slowly. Occasionally I'm already nearly busy.
Comment by Morgan Bell
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i dont see the big problem in this particular case, if Wiki removed it doesnt that mean they passed the test?
Comment by Chris Champion
LettersToNorm
Vyoos
Zoomies
Bloggercises
The Blog of Lists
Wikipedia passed the test, yes. They removed the "quote" because there was no corroboration to Fitzgerald's claim. When Fitzgerald resubmitted it, they removed it again.
Meantime, journalism failed the test. The "quote" was there when everybody was looking, just after Jarre's death, and many journalists were happy to grab it.
Fitzgerald has shown that news gathering, which traditionally has meant checking everything, has become flawed.
The reaction to Fitzgerald's admission of what he had done was interesting. In the immediate aftermath, only one paper, Britain's The Guardian, printed a retraction. Some blogs removed the quote, but other blogs, like some newspapers, just ignored it altogether. They didn't care!
Of course, it's probably fair to say that some journalists and bloggers had the same reaction has Wikipedia - we don't get to hear about them. But a lot didn't. Fitzgerald has done a service in pointing out the way things have changed with instant information like Wikipedia.
Comment by Morgan Bell
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thanks for explaining, Chris