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Forrester researcher, Jeremiah Owyang, posted a tweet about the recent flurry of rumors of the death of actor, Jeff Goldblum. The star of The Fly, Law & Order, and Jurassic Park was reported on Twitter to have fallen to his death in New Zealand. As you’ll see in this video from the Colbert Report he is alive and well. Since, however, Goldblum has become the poster child for what Owyang calls the “#GoldblumEffect” of the creation of false news or, in this case, celebrity news via Twitter.
With its recent success in moving millions of Iranians to protest a what seems a rigged election, the 140-character blogging application has enjoyed some credit as a journalistic tool. However, as the rumor of Mr. Goldblum’s death points out, it’s a thin line that Twitter walks. There is a power that comes with “word of mouth.” On the one hand it can be a power for justice and on the other a corruption of reality. The crowd-sourcing effect of Goldblum’s “death” shows how easy false information can turn into truth. To my mind, Twitter’s #GlodblumEffect could be a possible entry in an updated version of Charles Makay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Web 2.0 apps like Twitter are extremely vulnerable; that much is clear to me. They depend a great deal on “good will” and, sadly, there’s not an endless supply of that in the world. For the time being, Twitter remains both a friend and foe of truth. So pay attention, people.
26/07/2009 at 5:22 am Permalink
You know being an old hand I am always skeptical on recent developments over the internet, it seems we are saturated with social networks of one form or another with twitter being one of the most recently famous.
I think that if critical mass is achieved then any network is useful but to be honest I find twitter a little impersonal in contrast to face book. So friend or foe, I guess is in the eyes of the perceived.