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September 30, 2004
Librarians could have stopped the Yes Men
Wednesday night I watched a free screening of the documentary The Yes Men, in which two activists pose as World Trade Organization members, hijacking the identity of the organization in an effort to paint a more brutally honest portrait of who the WTO is and what it really stands for.
It all started when they created the http://www.gatt.org as a political satire parody of the real World Trade Organization site. In comparing the two sites, you'll note that the differences are in the clever nuances.
The two clever gents in the documentary were able to masquerade as WTO representatives through five separate activism-motivated pranks, all in different parts of the world, because hapless surfers were landing on their site couldn't tell that it wasn't the real thing. Barry Coates from the World Development Movement (keepers of quality facts and statistics on globalization), who happens to know many WTO reps but didn't recognize one of the pranksters as a WTO person, simply accepted the prankster as a genuine article. Coates didn't really put it all together until the pranksters paid him a visit at his office later on. And it only gets better from there.
No one cross-referenced the incidents, even though there was plenty of TV footage and newspaper press to work with. The pranksters used different made up names at each conference they attended. No one questioned their antics, which were pretty ostensibly crazy. It was hilarious and frightening all at once. And I'm glad they did it.
However, hilarity aside, this is a perfect example of people just believing what they see on the internet, and not having the discerning eye and critical mind they should be when evaluating online information. Not only could a librarian have stopped these guys (go go gadget information literacy!), but they can teach other people how to do it, too, instead of being unquestioning sheep to the top 10 results in any web search. But without those sheep, these radical and necessary pranks, as well as the documentary, could not have been possible.
September 30, 2004 12:53 AM