Urban legends

Buddy Holly shot the pilot, causing the crash so he could go down as a bigger loss to music than Tupac (crossthread).

 

FWIW, the Hutchence thing was actually spread by his girlfriend all over the place after his death.

 

Question:

Thanks to the internet and immediacy and social media, Is This Generation More Gullible Than Those Preceding It?

 

I don't really know how you'd measure such a thing beyond it being completely by feel. Also, on the flip side, shouldn't it be less gullible since it can look everything up within seconds?

 

"Nobody told me Titanic was real? How am I just finding this out?"

www.timesunion.com/local/article/The-Titanic-was-real-I-m-never-going-on-a-3485503.php

 

I saw that. I'm not really sure that's a situation of being gullible. I'd see that more as them being dumb.

 

Nah, I've got a pretty good grip.

 

Dumb? Ignorant?

In either case, the internet didn't provide the instantaneous look-up we'd like to think makes people less gullible.

 

But why would they look it up if they never even thought that Titanic was real?

I watched "What's Your Number?" with Anna Faris this week.

I didn't head to the Internet afterward to see if a woman in Brooklyn really tried to get married to an ex-boyfriend so she could stop her list of people she slept with at 20.

 

Yeah, like Dick, I'm still not seeing how this particular situation depicts them as being particularly gullible. Ignorant? Absolutely.

Also, for all we know, if the Internet was around decades ago, ignorant teenagers would have been saying similar things about historical events.

 

The ignorant don't know what they don't know.

Having the internet to look things up on is great - if you know you need to look something up.

I'm refuting Dr. Eunuch's point that the internet makes people less gullible.

 

I've mentioned this before but my wife and her friends did not realize Titanic was real when they saw the movie in South Africa (this was a country that didn't get TV until 1976). They had never heard of the ship there and thought the movie was a grand love story, as they all gathered in the bathroom at intermission to talk about whether Jack and Rose would really end up together. They return to their seats, the iceberg hits, death, sinking, someone after the movie tells them it was all real and the girls eventually had to pull over on the side of the road to bawl.

Now, to not know about it at this point seems completely unbelievable but for the Cape Town 5 I could sort of understand it. They weren't taught it, they didn't have the Internet at the time. If there was a movie about a South African mine disaster from the early 1900s - with a touching love story, of course - would we have any idea if it was based on a true story?

Speaking of which, an entertaining book for movie fans:

http://www.amazon.com/Based-True-Story-Fantasy-Favorite/dp/1556525591