Dark Phoenix

T.K. McNeil

It is a sad fact of history that many ideas, both good and bad, simply run out their due time and are resigned to obscurity. Though it also a fact of history, if one looks hard and squints, that it does not run in a strictly linear course and ideas thought to have long ago had their day can see that day dawn once more. The 'Internet Age' (to the shock of many) is no great exception.


At the time of initial publication the Internet, or at least the 'world-wide-web' iteration designed by Tim Berners-Lee, was known to harbour some less than credible information. Mercifully, at this point in time there were rather few people on the 'web' and even fewer 'websites', the lion's share of the content stored there consisting of corporate web-pages for well-known companies and, true to the system's roots as a closed academic network, recognized and peer-reviewed journals and papers. As well as a few, select individuals, of the distinctly computer-savvy sort, airing their grievances on online diaries. A precursor to modern-day 'blogs' that dates back to the late-1980s (no one read them then either).


What a difference two decades can make! In the present Epoch, only a single generation removed form the, rather humble, beginnings of the 'web', the fledging communications network has come to be the dominant communication mode of the new millennium. A situation simply primed form from the resurgence of uninformed, dubious and just plain daft notions into the the public discourse. To paraphrase Silicon Valley instigator and 'virtual reality' impresario Jaron Lanier, everything looks real when it is online.


This phenomena is to do with medium uniformity. All online sources now dram from a fairly limited pool of styalisitc and design templates. A situation making it so that a web-site for a peer-reviewed scientific journal and a conspiracy theory web-site (Alexander Jones, I am looking in your general direction), are next to indistinguishable. A similar situation to the late 18th to early 20th centuries in Europe, when every Thomas, Richard or Harriet with a room and a second-hand printing-press was regarded as a legitimate news source. So, rather than the medium being the message, as some well-meaning folk would have it, the medium is come to obscure the message. Causing it to appear a good deal more credible that it may actually be.




Enter Flat-Earthers, Racial Purity proponents, Anti-Vaxers and Indigo Children. The Victorians also believed in many such notions. Though they lacked the scientific basis and methodological rigour to adequately test them. What, pray tell, is our excuse?