{"id":5666,"date":"2008-03-24T16:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T07:09:17","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-07-11T13:09:17","modified_gmt":"2011-07-11T07:09:17","slug":"testing-the-veracity-of-the-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/testing-the-veracity-of-the-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing the Veracity of the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThis is no scientific test, but it is amusing. What if you were a famous celebrity? How accurate is the Internet&#8217;s information about you? What if you could sit said celebrity down in front of a laptop and go through Wikipedia, Internet Movies Database, fanboy sites, anit-fan sites, fan-fic boards, YouTube, celebrity sightings, the whole nine-yards, and get confirmation or not for the facts? Can you believe anything the Internet says?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nAJ Jacobs (one of my favorite magazine authors) performs just this test with &#8220;sexiest man alive&#8221; George Clooney in the current issue of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.esquire.com\/features\/george-clooney-0408\">Esquire<\/a>. It&#8217;s a very funny exchange.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/kk.org\/ct2\/200803241510.jpg\" height=\"304\" width=\"228\" border=\"0\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\"200803241510\" \/><span style=\"font-size:12pt;\"><br \/>\n<br \/><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<em>&#8220;In a bold and unprecedented move for a celebrity, George Clooney openly admitted to having cosmetic surgery.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I love this one,&#8221; he says. &#8220;This was everywhere. Oprah did a show where Julia Roberts and I interviewed each other. And Julia said, &#8216;Would you ever consider plastic surgery?&#8217; And I said, &#8216;I got my eyes done, what do you think?&#8217; &#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Clooney opens his eyes wide, like Betty Boop.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I was in Italy when it aired, and all of a sudden it was all over the Italian papers. Once it switches languages and loses all sense of irony, and it&#8217;s bouncing back and forth&#8230;. They used to say you can&#8217;t make a joke in print, but you can get away with it on film. But now you can&#8217;t get away with it there.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He pauses.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I did get my balls done, though. I got them unwrinkled. It&#8217;s the new thing in Hollywood &#8212; ball ironing.&#8221;<span style=\"font-size:12pt;\"><br \/>\n<br \/><\/span>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\nJacobs didn&#8217;t supply a final score for the internets, but I would estimate it is a C minus. Clooney is not gay, not running for Vice President, not planning to wed in a few months, as the Internet Tubes say. But a great deal posted about his life is accurate, probably more than I expected.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI wrote to Jacobs and asked him for the grade he didn&#8217;t give in the article. What score would he assign to the hive mind for Clooney&#8217;s entry? His reply:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI would say that the Internet was about as accurate as I expected. I was surprised &#8212; and I guess I shouldn&#8217;t be, having spent 15 years in journalism &#8212; by how inaccurate the articles from the mainstream newspapers and magazines were.&#160; Not much more accurate than the wikipedia-type sites.<\/p>\n<p>Also, I&#8217;ve come to rely on the wikipedia a huge amount in my every day life. I generally figure that about 80 percent of each entry is accurate. Clooney&#8217;s wikipedia entry seemed about 70 or 75 percent accurate. So maybe just a tad below my assumption.<\/p>\n<p>I found a fascinating type of vandalism I hadn&#8217;t heard of before. There&#8217;s a line in Clooney&#8217;s wikiepdia entry that says &#8216;He secretly financed a thriller called Endgame Study.&#8221; Clooney had no idea what that was. I did some research and found it was an obscure low-budget thriller. Apparently, the producers wanted some exposure and a link to a Hollywood star, so they (or someone on the film) just inserted the movie into Clooney&#8217;s entry. And they used the word &#8216;secretly,&#8217; which was brilliant.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is no scientific test, but it is amusing. What if you were a famous celebrity? How accurate is the Internet&#8217;s information about you? What if you could sit said celebrity down in front of a laptop and go through &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/testing-the-veracity-of-the-in\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[268],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}