Truther Proofer
A comment of Aristotle's that it's pointless to praise inanimate objects, better by far to praise persons, when applied to the Internet, had me looking for whom to praise when learning things I would not have known without Internet. If the Internet is not the defining moment of my generation, to give credit where credit is due, my generation's defining moment would not likely be realized without it.
One of the defining circumstances of the Internet is its anonymity. Attribution can be uncertain. Who said what first, either for praise, or to blame? Random search guided only by interest tends to lead to unexpected conclusions. Past a certain point in the search you are on your own.
It was a point of honor to be a skeptic, before the Internet. Knowledge ever shines a spotlight of truth on superstition, exposing it. The fast and easy access to knowledge should quickly put to rest all doubts. The problem is, the Internet is the largest knowledge database ever. It's easy to go astray.
A few years ago I witnessed a peculiar aerial phenomenon, while driving, in daylight, on a busy freeway. I had noted earlier, recent news buzz, about a civilian rocket launch on the West Coast. Could that be what I saw? When I got home I searched a popular search engine for reference to support my theory of what I saw being the subject of news reports.
Writing an effective search query string is a talent. If the terms are too restrictive the results are nil or, at best, in the single digits. If too broad, a lot of noisy data intrude. A compromise between the two creates a hybrid that raises more questions than it answers. Aristotle maintains that the properly asked question has one, and only one, right answer.
Included among my compromise query results were widely diverging opinions including, embarrassingly, reports of UFO sightings. The anomaly in my search was a mismatched set of dates for what I saw, and when. A civilian missile test indeed happened -but not on the day of my observation. My hypothesis was blown out of the sky.
Common sense would advise dropping the argument, which I did. My attention was drawn, instead, by certain search results having predicates in common with my intended search. I had not anticipated that. It was interesting, anyway. Maybe what I saw wasn't the missile test told in the news, but something else. That's when I went astray, ran off the road, so to speak.
It gave me a notion that, given the quantity of unexpected results related by common features to mine, that I was not the only one wondering the same thing. Some of the dates were too far apart, while the descriptions matched, otherwise. This led to my new contention, that witnesses may tell their points of view so effectively as to provide a solution to a problem, if not exactly answer the question.
Presently, "truth" has certain special connotations. Truth, today, is a given. How it is known is optional. It just is. It operates by assent, or consent, by a type of informal argument, which, if we follow the argument, leads by a slippery slope to unlimited conclusions. Within the bounds of reason, this kind of informal jumping to conclusions is exhilarating fun, and not likely to do any literal harm.
It is what used to be called non-fiction. Whole tracts of the Internet consist of truth-like anecdotal assertions of this kind. Any adult with a median IQ can figure out at some point in the narrative that it is a red herring. What makes these candid expressions challenging (and fun) is identifying the logical inconsistency in the tale. I keep copies of those claims to the truth I can't immediately discredit in a special folder.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403