This originally appear in The Inner Swine Volume 19, Issue 3/4
Author’s Self-Portrait
Going to the Internet for Answers is the Ultimate in Blind Faith
According to the Internet, my friends, I’ve had cancer several times. That’s because every time I have a new annoying pain or symptom (which is, since I am older than my genetic code thinks I ought to be, ALL THE TIME) I am far too lazy to seek a trained medical professional (mainly because someday those medical professionals are gonna tell me to lay off the sauce and after bursting into manly tears I’m going to contact my local cryogenics representative and go out fat, drunk, and stupid like I lived) so instead I head to the Internet to enter in vague and inappropriate keywords and be told, invariably, I have cancer. Because everything is cancer to the Internet:
JSOMERS: My hand hurts when I do this.
CAPNCRUNCHY: We can’t see you, dude, it’s the Internet.
JSOMERS: IT HURTS WHEN I DO THIS.
CAPNCRUNCHY: Probably cancer.
Really, if you think about it, the Internet has become a terrible place to get information. There’s two things going on that make the Internet problematic when you’re seeking data: On the one hand, the Internet is no longer controlled by scientists and academics who startle out of lengthy naps to find french fries in their beards and then enter some facts into the Information Superhighway, and on the other hand every lie, distortion, and mistake gets picked up, repeated, amplified, and endlessly reposted until bullshit crowds out the real stuff.
Basically, ask yourself this: How do you know anything you read on the Internet is true? And the answer hits you: You fucking don’t.
Faith in Humanity
So, basically, every time you use the Internet to find out some quick information, you’re placing faith in humanity that is completely, totally, undeserved.
Let’s consider one possible vector: Search Engine Optimisation.
SEO is how web sites try to make themselves turn up higher in Google’s search results. Used to be, back in the dark ages of 2010, that you could just stuff a bunch of keywords into the metadata of your website and Google would be fooled into thinking that your site was the site for whatever keywords you were working and rank you accordingly. And life was grand, with everyone filling the source code of their sites with endless streams of keywords.
Then Google updated its algorithms and started downgrading sites that used keyword stuffing and upgrading sites that actually had content. And suddenly a golden era of “content” was born, and a million freelance writers began earning pennies per word writing SEO-oriented articles that had a precise number of keywords per hundred words and actually made sense as coherent written works.
And that’s the problem: They have to make sense in order to work as SEO fodder and be rewarded by Google’s spiders. They do not, however, have to be accurate.
In other words, someone with a web site to promote might hire some erstwhile writer – I’m not saying me – to write about, say, car insurance. And that writer – not, you know, me – writes 400 words on car insurance after thirty seconds of slightly sleepy research, very like from another blog post that was also written in exactly this manner. So that blog post you read with all the fascinating facts and figures about stuff? It’s very, very likely it is very, very wrong. And yet it will spawn ten resposts and outright thefts where people will take the ?information’ within and spread it around, until eventually everyone is repeating this bullshit as if it’s totes accurate, and someday soon civilization crumbles because every single fact recorded on the Internet stems from shitty blog posts written by idiots. Who are definitely not me.
Just ‘Cause It’s Raining
The other side to this crippling case of creeping ignorance is the simple fact that people have a tendency to assume their own personal experience is actually applicable universally. This is, always – always! – wrong. But it is natural for people to think so because it is simply what they observe.
Thus, the cancer thing. Whatever your symptoms, however accurately conveyed, there is someone out there who had something similar and it turned out to be cancer. Thus, every other instance of those symptoms must be cancer. This is so obvious to them it’s painful. No matter what you say to them, they will calmly tell you it is cancer because for them it was cancer.
Naturally, the chances of them being right are slim. But it doesn’t feel that way, does it?
Now, combine this with the aforementioned cycle of ignorance via hastily-created SEO blog posts. Suddenly these idiots have actual written evidence backing them up! Now there are INTERNET POSTINGS that clearly back up their insane claims!
World. Ends.
Just Keep Trying
So, next time you Google something like anal scabs or how many times can a man masturbate in one day and live, just understand that you are engaging in a serious experiment in blind faith. The chances of getting accurate information are very low, yet there you are! It’s adorable. If I didn’t imagine my doctor Googling how to remove spleen I’d find it very amusing.
Oh well. We all knew this civilization thing couldn’t last forever, right?