"Ladies and gentlemen,
this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed... Someone's crawling
out of the hollow top...The whole field's caught fire...It's coming this way.
About twenty yards to my right—" (retrieved February 24, 2012,
from http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1855120,00.html)
October
38, 1938: A group of men are
in a bar listening intently to radio “news briefs” of an alien invasion occurring
in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Could it actually be happening? No one was sure.
Someone in the bar suggested that if these reports were true, then the other radio stations besides the one that they were listening to
(CBS) must have been carrying the same story.
When the men changed the station, they heard nothing about Martian
tripods attacking Earthlings. They knew
that the story was a hoax, or at least, a work of fiction.
You may have already guessed that these men, including my
grandfather, were listening to Orson Welles and the Mercury Players’ radio show
based on H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel War of the Worlds. If you
know about this show, you probably have heard that it caused terrible panic among
people who did not realize that they were listening to only a drama. (Those stories of mass hysteria might not be as true as we once thought.)
The man who suggested changing the station understood
something very important: if a story is
true, chances are, you can find it in more than once place. If you have any doubt about the veracity of something you see or hear, see if you can find a
reputable source confirming it.
It is true of stories, and also of photographs. It applies to what we hear on the radio and
what we see on computer monitors.
Today, I noticed an internet
meme (something that gets shown and posted in a lot of web pages, blogs, and emails) on the
Timelines of several of my Facebook friends, especially those who are also
librarians.
If you cannot see the image, it is the comedian Stephen
Colbert holding a sign with the words “DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE DAY BEFORE YOUR
ASSIGNMENT IS DUE TO CONTACT YOUR LIBRARIAN.”
Fans of his Comedy Central series The Colbert Report might recognize the board for the “You’re on Notice” list, comprised of people and things that Colbert’s character disapproves of.
When I first saw this picture, I thought
that the words on the board were good advice, and while I was not sure of its context, I felt happy to have my profession's usefulness acknowledged.
I was curious to know if the scene
had appeared on The Colbert Report or
was an image that someone created using Photoshop or another program that can
be used to edit images. If I could find the origin of the picture, maybe I could see whether or not it was authentic.
I used Google Images (http://images.google.com/), a page strictly for
looking for images. I typed, “Do
not wait until the day before your assignment is due to contact your librarian,”
in the search box and clicked on the button with a magnifying glass. The first hit (result) was the picture I had wanted.
I clicked on it to see the page it came from: the
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University (IUPUI) Library
website (http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/subjectareas/pe/hper_p195).
This
website allows visitors to get online reference help from a librarian at IUPUI. I used this feature to chat with Kathleen A.
Hanna, who turned out to be the IUPUI librarian responsible for the image of Colbert and the sign. She explained that she had created the image
using the webpage http://www.shipbrook.net/onnotice/. As it turns out, anyone can use this page
(again, not affiliated with Colbert or his show) to create their own “You’re on
Notice” board.
This image, while not real, is
benign. It seems unlikely that the real Colbert would object much, although he or someone from his show could
send a cease-and-desist letter telling the website moderator to take down the
image. So far, according to Kathleen, no
one has. And if someone thinks that the
picture is really from the show and that Colbert must have performed a bit
about the importance of getting help from a librarian on time, where is the
harm?
The picture simply uses humor to
make a good point, but that does not mean that fake pictures haven’t been used
for not so harmless purposes.
Politicians can use them to humiliate their opponents and change the
outcomes of elections. Gossip magazines
and websites can use them to attract curious readers. If you do not mind some swear words and
suggestive humor, you can read the article The 15 Most Shameless Fake Articles Ever Passed off as Real. What do these false pictures tell us about
human nature?
If
an image or an article’s “facts” seem suspicious, investigate further. To
hear the original War of the World broadcast,
visit http://www.mercurytheatre.info/.
