Reply-to: "Eric Meyer" 
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At 13:11 on 22 Jul 98, Jon Morgan  wrote in part:

> Will this hurt the credibility of other websites on the Internet
> which wish to present a worldwide "first"? 

Let's not make a broader-implications trend out of everything. 
Scams are scams. Bad reporting is bad reporting. It helps in both 
cases that the topic involves society's current Great Big 
Misunderstood Thing, the Internet. But that's about it. Two decades 
ago it would have been something having to do with disco. If 
you're old enough, you probably remember wveryone had some sort of 
disco scam running, and every news story that mentioned disco was 
shallowly reported as a sign-of-the-times piece.

If you really want to draw a broader-implications lesson out of this, 
the one to draw is that we should stop treating "Internet" as a 
class. Without belaboring the rationale, we have turned that word 
into a stereotype every bit as much as we did with "Vietnam veteran," 
"disco," "CB," "yuppie," "preppy," "working mother," "single parent," 
"Gen X," "boomer" and a whole host of others, including all the 
pejorative and non-pejorative terms you can imagine for ethnicity, 
disability, age, sexual preference and the like.

Stop seeing things a "Internet" things and start seeing them only as 
things. We'll be less likely to be scammed, less likely to commit bad 
reporting and ultimately a lot more able to see the truth.


              ERIC K. MEYER - meyer@newslink.org
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