Email and the Disinformation Age

Not very long ago the Internet was hailed as the single greatest discovery since sliced bread. We were, we were told, living in something called"The Information Age". It would, we were promised, be better than The Iron Age, the Bronze Age and hotter than The Ice Age.

The Internet has indeed improved high-speed communication and data transfer. The Internet has made it easier to obtain and to exchange information, but it has in and of itself neither added new information nor changed the inherent character of information. Information, or data, still confront us with the same pre-Internet problems of accuracy, reliability and usefulness.

The opening Attack on America on 11 September 2001 has underscored the problem of information on the Internet. Our eagerness to find out what is going on and to share what we know or what we have read with others has created an Internet exchange of information and disinformation that stuffs our email inboxes to overflowing.

Beginning on the evening of 11 September 2001, I have received emails that proclaimed a gas shortage and advised one to tank up now; that the people in the World Trade Center had advance warning; that CNN faked the video scenes of cheering Palestinians; a chain letter stating that Osama bin Laden profited from soft drink sales; an essay by a Canadian pundit that turned out to have been written thirty years ago; various Nostradamus predictions; a photo from the roof of one of the WTC buildings; quotes from a book purportedly written by a British Special Air Service veteran of the recent Afgan wars who said, more or less, that the Taliban were seven-foot-two and don't mess with them; not to mention the various pseudo-patriotic images of bald eagles shedding tears or bitting off the head of an image of Osama bin Laden himself.

I suspect that many of you have received these and similar email postings in the last several weeks. I also suspect that you may have noticed that the more often such postings are forwarded, the more likely it is that the last sender attaches a short message that serves to enhance the credibility of the posting. Repetition seems to increase reliability and self-authentication is confused for truth.

How is a person to sort these emails out? What can one do to distinguish reasonable from unreasonable information and avoid the embarrassment of passing on bogus emails?

All of us, to be sure, have at one-time-or-another been the victims of a hoax. However, there are some steps each of us can take that will help us sort out fact from fiction on the Internet.

The seventeenth-century scholar and monk, Jean Mabillon of St. Germain-des-Pres, Paris, faced a not too dissimilar problem. He was tasked with determining which medieval legal documents that pertained to the property rights of specific churches and monasteries were indeed valid. His studies resulted in publishing a handbook called Res diplomatica (see the 1681 edition, as well as the supplement added by Mabillon in 1704 and the new edition of 1709) in which he discussed the rules for vetting documents. His work is a significant contribution in the development of the Western critical tradition that today provides the bedrock of both scientific inquiry and the historical method.

The essential questions that Brother Mabillon asked, I suggest, are of use to us in reading our email. Mabillon, tirelessly and fearlessly, confronted each new document, each new source of information, with a few basic test questions: Quis? Quid? Cur? Ubi? Qunado? Today we recognize those questions as the trademarks of journalists, lawyers, historians and researchers in general: Who?, What?, When? and Where?

If one can in a reasonable amount of time find sound answers to those questions about the email we receive, then one might ponder sending it on to another. On the other hand, if we don't know the source of the information or from when or where it originated, we just might want to hold it before forwarding it.

If one cannot quickly document satisfactory answers to those essential questions, one might consider returning the email with those questions attached to the sender or suggesting that our students or neighbors embark on a small research project of their own.

Mabillon's question Cur? or Why?, I submit, might be the quickest or most productive test of veracity for us email users. Why was this message or image posted? Why was it sent to me? And, most importantly, who gains by this message or image and its dissemination? While the meanings of urban legends, propaganda and disinformation are often subtle, they are rarely without a point. So, ask yourself, what's the point? Who stands to benefit from this message? Who stands to lose?

Before one clicks the"send" button, pause and ponder: If Brother Mabillon had email in the seventeenth-century, what would he have done?