"LIFE ETC."

The Age of Misinformation?
We've always been taught that knowledge will be the key to power in the future. The main cause of people thinking this way is that each day brings new opportunities to reach and to share knowledge. The Internet is the newest and greatest door opening to the things we don't know, and to the people who don't know the things we do.
But there's a big question: How can knowledge mean power when you can't prove you own it? How can a work of art or a production of the mind bring power to its creator when he/she can't put a signature under it? Millions of songs travel through the Net for free every day. Texts written by professional writers go around the world via e-mail messages and are read by millions of people without the writer receiving a cent. This often causes an artistic creation to lose its connection to its creator.
Maybe the most tragic recent example in Turkey was a rumor about the lyrics of a song. It started when someone sent an e-mail to his/her friends which contained the lyrics of the song “Korkarak Yaşıyorsan” written by Şebnem Ferah.
In this e-mail, it was claimed that Şebnem Ferah hadn't created the lyrics, but had copied them from the letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. This e-mail went through a chain, and thousands of web users read it and accepted its accuracy. But the lyrics actually had no real connection with Nietzsche.
It's so hard to prove that such a rumor is wrong when everyone has the capacity to broadcast worldwide. Rumors are not limited to the hear-and-tell speed of the neighbors anymore. With very little effort, you can start a rumor about anyone on the Net.
With every passing day, the legal and moral responsibilities of being a writer or a publisher are being replaced by what anyone can do with a computer, an Internet connection and a personal webpage (or membership in a forum site). To be realistic, it's hard to imagine that this progress can be stopped. Besides, it wouldn't be wise for anyone not to make use of these brand-new opportunities for self-expression.
Thus, the only possible way to prevent mistakes like the one mentioned above is for users to approach this new realm with caution. They need to be aware that the Net doesn't filter the information published there, and generally doesn't draw any line between true and false. It may seem like the easiest way to reach information, but I guess it's still too early to completely replace our books with “.html” or “.doc” documents.e

orhan@ug.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr