Its not one of my favourite sites on the Internet, but Beforeitsnews.com is not without entertainment value. I recently learned the Earths core is seemingly spinning out of control because it has been breached by a black hole that may be about to unleash a literal hell on earth. The supposed singularity under our feet may not be stationary, the article warns: Others have suggested that the black hole might bounce back and forth beneath the mantle like the clapper of a bell. The article cites the work of the brilliant scientist Louise Riofrio, who is seen posing fetchingly in high heels and miniskirt in a photo accompanying the article.
The website for Before Its News has a bright yellow upload button for uploading material. You must give your email address and swear you are 13 years old before posting to this supposedly serious, people-powered aggregator site.
Anyone with a high-speed connection and opposable thumbs is now a writer, musician, photographer or mad scientist. With a wealth of freely generated content online, its a buyers market. So-called content mills like eHow.com pay dinky fees to contributors who churn out articles engineered to rise to the top of keyword searches. The low pay and high turnaround time often results in content that is of low quality or usefulness.
The press often condemns the Internet as a dangerous, freewheeling mess with no editorial filter. However, if youre in the mood to kill the messenger, theres no shortage of market-driven pseudoscience in the offline world, too. A recent article in the New York Times was headed, You Love your iPhone. Literally. The author cites MRI studies supposedly proving that certain areas of the brain light up exactly the same way to corporate brands as they do to addictive substances. The chemical driver of this process is the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, observes the author, a neuromarketing specialist by the name of Martin Lindstrom. He concludes that these biochemical signatures of addiction indicate people love their iPhonenot figuratively, but literally.
Nonsense, responded Russell Poldark of the University of Texas in a letter to the Times, signed by two dozen brain scientists from universities around the world. The area that Lindstrom points to as being associated with feelings of love and compassion (the insular cortex) is a brain region that is active in as many as one third of all brain imaging studies.
You may remember back in the 90s when there was a flood of news stories claiming how every other human ailment or personality quirk was caused by this or that gene. The human genome has turned out to be a lot more complex than initially thought, so the human brain is the latest target for deterministic faddism. You cant pick up a newspaper without hearing how some neural area or secretion has been identified as causing a particular individual behaviour or social trait. Neuromarketing is particularly suspect; its push-pull picture of the brain isnt that far removed from stories about Earth hosting a killer black hole.
News editors like narratives, not complex research findings that resist being boiled down to bathroom reading. And some scientists are OK with the medias catchy storylines as descriptors of their work if it results in more funding. As a result, truthiness trumps truth, and Idiocracy-like misinformation gets institutionalized in the mainstream press.
Consider a recent syndicated news story on language differences between apes and humans. The only reason the story appeared in print was because the release of the Hollywood film Battle for the Planet of the Apes supplied a hook. Philadelphia Inquirer contributor Faye Flam asked, If we tweaked a few chimp genes, could we endow them with the ability to speak, organize in groups and seize the Golden Gate Bridge? Not likely she answered, going through her Rolodex of experts. The article was reproduced in the The Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Sun, with this added howler in the headline: Similarities notwithstanding, we are not super chimpanzees; Experts say humans split from other primates about 100,000 years ago. Thats so entertainingly wrong it could have appeared in Before Its News, or even the online satirical paper The Onion.
www.geoffolson.com
