Conspiracy and Paranoia -- Online

Damn, has anybody ever been misled by one of these internet conspiracies?
It's a little like getting swindled by the "shell" game (you know, with the three shells and the small ball) -- you don't know for sure where the ball could be because of elements you can't control. (Incidentally, I once fell victim to the 'shell' game in Venice, Italy, after being tricked like a green fool by two co-conspirators who I wanted to kill after storming off in a rage).

I'm not talking about an email chain-letter forecasting gloom and doom on those poor souls who don't get their fingers off their finger-butts and forward it on to 600 of their friends.

No, I mean when you try to research a legitimate question on the internet, and 60 percent of the first hits on Google are duplicates of the same misleading and unverifiable information about the subject.

Let me explain.

Today, I had too much time on my hands at work (my boss is in CA doing ------ and -------). Somehow I stumbled upon the question of whether or not microwaves are "safe." Originally, I'd confined this question to the effect of microwave heating on plastic containers. Before I knew it, I was pulling up multiple links about the detrimental (I mean detrimental -- cancerous, brain-disrupting) effects of microwave heating on the food that's heated.

Now, I have a mildly hypochondrial/paranoid personality -- I admit -- so the next thing I knew I was gripped to my chair like a leaden crab desperately scanning the cyberwaves for more info and viewpoints to clarify the topic (since I use the microwave all the time -- at least once a day, at my worst -- I began to wonder, well, would I be affected? No, not me, you don't mean me, do YA?).

What I began to notice was that this same series of arguments -- in virtually the same wording -- outlining the catastrophic consequences of ingesting microwaved food (cellular mutations, unknown substances entering the bloodstream) popped up again and again through different links. It seemed a little fishy, especially since some of the arguments weren't so solid on closer look (one, in fact, was the powerful truism that "mother's instincts" tell us something ain't right about the machines).

Well, I thankfully hit on a kind of blog discussion board where these very ideas had been discussed among many. Through a link there, I read a kind-of counterpoint article, where a series of scientists stated that the research mentioned in the original (conspiratorial) piece had not been substantiated, and in fact one those authors was reported to have disappeared because he was a target of the 'appliance industry' (I'm not making this up)!

Basically -- to make a long story short[er] (especially given all these parenthetical interruptions) -- the troubling info disseminated in the links I had first discovered, was seen -- rightly -- more as conjecture and poor science than fact. Now, this doesn't necessarily prove the claims of the original piece are false, but it's like a person in the woods at night making ghost noises, and you don't know if it's a real spirit or not.

My main point is that it's so easy to get lost in and naively trust the swelling mass of information that appears on the internet. It's easy to get swept away (it's not the first time this has happened to me) without a means of evaluation.

Yes, if I'd used my brain in a more incisive, analytic manner, I probably could have read between the lines, concluded the first claims were weak, and dismissed them (and avoided the pain of a paranoid sweat as 'business as usual' continued around me in the office). But I know nothing about microwaves, electromagnetic science, or blood chemistry, and -- what's more important -- the links all appeared at the top of Google! Doesn't that mean they can be trusted, if everybody else 'z clickin' on 'em? If it's on the internet, ain't it legitimate?

It's easy to fall into this trap.

O networked computer communication web, what new misty visas and clouded byways have you in store for your ignorant brood?

Has anything like that happened to you before?

Try it out for yourself -- search "microwave" and "health hazards," something along those lines.