I was wondering today if anyone has set up a Fakenet, that is, a closed set of sites that inter-link and create the illusion of legitimacy. If you think about it, the way we deem some site or page to be real or legit is similar to Google's Pagerank. We check out the sites that link to it, and we google for it or its owner, etc.
The most immediate use of a fakenet that comes to mind is to build a new style of fiction. That is, if you convince people that a certain blog or personal web site was real (by embedding sufficiently large numbers of links to convincing but fictional sources), you could construct an entire fictional narrative and character but people would sympathize much more strongly because of the perceived reality of the characters's existence.
I was thinking on my commute into work this morning: For a given population or group of people, there must be a curve showing how much more likely they are to purchase a product versus the amount of advertising they see promoting the product. (One might even place how much objective information/research they've discovered about the product on a secondary horizontal axis.)
The overall slope of this curve then represents the "marketing susceptibility" of that population. I posit that marketing susceptibility is inversely proportional to the average rationality (or "informed actor"-ness) of the population.
Furthermore, I think that if this study was performed on households, the change in marketing susceptibility as a function of age shows the level of education of the population; well-educated populations should tend to have a flattening of the marketing susceptibility curve with increasing age.
The Apostrophe Protection Society is an example of a non-partisan, public-interest group people should join to promote healthier society's.
I've been getting about 150-250 blog spams per day now, and it's just too much a hassle and waste of time. Not that many people comment anyway, so I'm turning comments off. If you wish to comment on an entry, email me at pzw1 at cornell dot edu.
I hate spammers.
What can I say? A reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog wrote in to say:
My gut feeling upon the realization that Kerry had lost? A deep, engulfing cynicism. People used to say that Bill Clinton's sexual abandon in the White House had made people cynical about politics and those who held office. And, older generations cite Richard Nixon as their reason for disillusionment. I'm to young for the latter and disagree with the former.
I feel that cynicism now, however, knowing, that leading a nation to war so arrogantly and bungling it so devastatingly can lead to reelection. Propagating hate--in the form of the Federal Marriage Amendment (while politically letting it slip that you are for civil unions) will win you office anew. Presiding over one of the most divisive administrations ever, will win you four more years. All of these things have made me lose faith in America's political process. And I feel very tired, and not just because I stayed up until 4 a.m., deludedly clinging to the hope of an upset in Ohio.
What can I say? Ditto.