In the past 60 years, a man has landed on the moon, we've lived through planes flying into buildings and marine biologists discovering jellyfish that were immortal. It's because we live in a world of incredulity that when it comes to actual facts and events, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between real and make-believes.
After all, someone who was running for vice president of the U.S., claimed to basically be able to see the tops of peoples ushanka's gathering in St. Petersburg.
It's hard to imagine.
Speaking of Alaska, the town of Talkeetna, and its 900 residents, elected a (then kitten) named Stubbs to be the mayor. Seriously. A cat that eats its own fur is the mayor.
Are people's imaginations simply expanding to see what all they can get away with, or have people forgotten to have a healthy amount of skepticism?
Some organizations are banking on that lack of skepticism, The Onion being a prime example.
The American news satire website features farcical articles reporting on international, national and local news with millions of people are eating it up.
The trend of writing fake news only seems to be growing.
Animal Planet recently aired a faux documentary on mermaids.
The show, Mermaids: The Body Found, was a clever but obviously fake documentary (is that an oxymoron?) about mermaids. The network went so far as to have an accompanying marketing campaign, complete with a made-up government cover-up. Because everyone loves a good government cover-up.
Although it's encouraging that Google was swimming with people questioning whether mermaids were real after the broadcast, the point still remains that it needed to be confirmed.
Someone get Daryl Hannah on the line, she's the expert on all things mer.
Jenny McCarthy, the bodacious and blithering bunny, took up many airwaves to brag about how she cured her son of autism. She says that she altered her son's diet (gluten-, casein-, and taste-free), put him into something called chelation therapy (it's wildly discredited) and trusted in what her mother told her that, "everyone responds to love" and poof, her son was cured.
People are taking medical advice from a woman who was the host of a dating show on MTV.
It's not only the blondes that are to blame. Introducing John Fleming, a U.S. representative from Louisiana. He made the now all-to-common mistake of believing an Onion article.
The specific article stated that Planned Parenthood was about to open an $8 billiion dollar abortionplex in Topeka, Kansas.
The article's lede claimed the facility "will allow the organization to terminate unborn lives with an efficiency never before thought possible." If that opening line wasn't a tip-off, then the image that appears with the article shouldn't have been a fairly large clue. It shows a line-up of women traveling up an escalator in what looks like a shopping mall, and the massive McDonald-esque sign that is hung in before the doorway reads: Abortion: 8,864,902 terminated.
To compare, the proposed 2,000 mile oil pipeline that will stretch from the Pacific Coast to Venezuala's Caribbean coast would cost roughly $8 billion.
Still Fleiming took the article seriously and posted it to his Facebook.
2012 is right in the middle of the information age. Especially the sharing information age. If someone finds something interesting online, they can blog it, Facebook it, Tweet it, Youtube it, Tumblr-it, Reddit-it and the list goes on. But sometimes things are always as they seem.
One of the new sites that is gaining a lot of attention is Literally Unbelievable. The site finds people on Facebook who have fallen for and reposted the Onion's fake news, including the reaction from their friends.
It would behoove everyone to take a second look, use common sense (that still exists doesn't it?), and as mother's are famous for saying, "if it looks too good/stupid/implausible/ridiculous/dumb/nonsensical to be true, then it probably is."
Unless of course it isn't.
