Truth and the Internet

Everyone who travels by air likes to whine about the experience.  It's mostly about the TSA, but sometimes it's about the behavior of other passengers.  I wrote about that myself a couple of months ago.  Recently there was a Twitter-based account of the interaction between a fellow who works as a producer on an ABC network television show and a fellow passenger (Diane from 7A).  The story was later apparently outed as entirely fictional by its author.  Perspectives on that ranged from amusement to annoyance to musings on the assumptions people make about the veracity of what they read online.

This brought to mind the many conversations I have had with friends and relatives about our reading habits.  Not about reading online, or newspapers or magazines - but about our selection of books.  My reading of books is exclusively nonfiction, mostly history, and especially US political history.  I favor biographies, and especially those of important figures in American history, and even more particularly American presidents.  I find history fascinating.  However, I have learned that even the most scholarly works of historiography involve a prism.  I am looking at something through the eyes of another human being.  I am on my third biography of Lincoln, and three biographers see him in ways that are significantly different from each other.  Getting such varied perspectives affords me insight into the art of interpreting the historical record.

I find history much more interesting than fiction.  My sense is that, if I were reading a novel, and found myself becoming engrossed in the events of someone's life, I would stop every so often and think, oh, this didn't really happen (except in someone's imagination).  The implication inherent in that thought is that, because it didn't really happen, it doesn't matter.

So the story of "Diane from 7A" got me wondering about the way people look at such things.  Does it matter if the account of the interaction between two passengers on a plane as related via Twitter really happened? If you found it funny, is it any less funny if it didn't really happen?  My experience with funny stories people tell each other in conversation is that if something is truly amusing, they may want to know whether that really happened or was just made up, but not because it is any less funny if it's fictional.  No, it seems the reason they ask is so they will know whether the person telling the story has a great sense of humor.  After all, which is the person you want to be around: the person who has a few true funny stories (because, after all, most of us don't have funny things happen around us very often), or the person who takes ordinary experiences and weaves tales around them for everyone else's amusement?

When I read something from a conventional news outlet, whether in print or online, I expect it to be factual.  The reporters and editors have a responsibility to their readers to get the facts right and to report them as objectively as possible. But just about everyone else is, in my view, entitled to some literary license, or at least to an individualistic interpretation that may be strongly colored by an array of biases.

Tom Hulce as Mozart in the film Amadeus

When I was in college, I took three music courses.  Two of them were on specific periods (Classical and Romantic) and were taught by the same professor.  The term paper assignment was to select a composer and write about his life and works.  For the Classical period, I chose Mozart.  This was before the Internet, so I went to the big Free Library in downtown Philadelphia and read all of the biographies of Mozart I could find.  Some years later the film "Amadeus" appeared in theaters.  The story was related, at least in part, from the perspective of rival composer Antonio Salieri.  Even so, I found the portrayal of the title character jarring.  I reflected upon my readings from the decade before, when I wrote my term paper.  I looked at the film's protagonist and couldn't help thinking, "That's not the Mozart I knew."  But this was a movie, not a documentary produced for the BBC, and not a history-for-television-audiences such as Ken Burns might have produced.  The fellow who wrote the screenplay and the film's director are surely entitled to all kinds of license.  I thought they portrayed Mozart as a silly ass, and I didn't like that, but then I didn't really know Mozart.  I knew him only as his biographers depicted him, and traditionally biographies have been written by admirers.

As a lad, when I went to a public library and saw books neatly characterized as fiction or nonfiction, I thought life was just that simple.  Either it really happened, just as described, or it's the product of someone's imagination.  But life is not just that simple, and the Internet is certainly not.  My assumption nowadays is that everything I read online comes from someone who has considered himself at liberty to take license in telling a story.  Yes, I still expect "straight news" journalists to try to be factual and objective.  But they are human, and all humans have a point of view.  So I look for a variety of points of view and compare them, not assuming that any one is more reliable than others.

Sometimes when I look at things I am pretty sure they are fictional.  Some photos, for example, defy credulity, and - despite being something of a technophobe (or at least a techno-naïf) - I recognize that they've been altered.  It isn't always quite as obvious as the image to the right, but for anyone but a true babe in the woods, it should be plain to see that it's the product of an inventive mind.

"Debunking" websites like Snopes.com are a wonderful resource.  I use them all the time, taking advantage of the time and effort they put into investigating Internet-based stories and letting the rest of us know whether they have found truth or fiction.  On social media, people are always posting things that are then promptly outed as "hoaxes" by their friends who have done a little checking.  This sort of skepticism is a good thing, I suppose.  And it seems to have become the rule, rather than the exception, at least in my social media circles.  A recent posting about the death of a minor celebrity was immediately followed by a series of skeptical postings noting that all the links that turned up in a Google search seemed to stem from one source, which then was the subject of a discussion of its reliability (as might well be appropriate for an Internet source that mainly reports on celebrities).

Some of the stories I see are inspiring.  Some are funny.  Mostly I don't care whether they are truth or fiction, because their effect on my mood at the moment is independent of their grounding in reality.  It just doesn't matter whether Diane ever really sat in seat 7A.

It does matter to me whether there was anything Abraham Lincoln might have done to prevent the Civil War.  And it matters to me what he really believed, at the core of his being, about African slavery, and why he thought certain infringements upon civil liberties were justifiable in time of war.  And I guess maybe that's why I have such a strong preference for nonfiction: I want to spend my time reading about things that really matter.