The Internet (with a capital "I") has indeed changed how we as a society view what is "real." With Facebook profiles meticulously edited and crafted to portray our ideal selves and Joe Schmo breaking the news about the unrest in Egypt through Twitter, we, as readers and information consumers, are forced to sort out fact and fiction in the wifi waves. We trust the internet for everything from the simple quotidian-- restaurant reviews, weather forecast, and directions-- to the complex-- bank payments, job applications, and credit card purchases. It is during these moments right before pressing the "submit" button, in the slight hesitation, the slow-mo click, that we truly prove how great our faith in the Internet has become.
Twenty years ago, it would have been difficult for the majority of people to accept that when you clicked "transfer" on the LCD engineered screen, funds would physically (but not tangibly) move from one bank account to the other. Compare this to the prank e-mails where people believed the fugitive Prince of Arabia was depositing his money into their own account online to kept safe for a time before he could secure his own account in Switzerland, after providing him with their credit card info and social security number. After our common senses have evolved to encompass Internet smarts, the "real" bank transfer is not hard to distinguish from the phony. After years of failed papers and presentations containing absurdly incorrect information collected from Wikipedia, students know to double-check their online sources. And after chatting with the supposedly handsome 25-year old in the dating chat room, many men and women learned that you cannot believe everything you AIM.
However, what do we think when a restaurant/store/charity organization/politician/musician does not have a website, Facebook fan page, Wikipedia entry, email address or online trail? We doubt the authenticity of said location/person. They don't even give us the chance to check out it's realness from our computer screens, and it becomes less trustworthy.
It almost even makes us doubt its existence point blank, especially in a city like Scottsdale where media like Yelp, The Arizona Republic, and local bloggers cover just about every nook and cranny and person of interest with reviews, commentary, and a nice little star on a the Google map. However, just because coverage of a person or place is almost non-existent in an online search does not mean that this person or place does not deserve recognition, or is any less authentic than a person or place with its own www page.
In the next several articles, I will be uncovering more why and how we are becoming one large social media society. I will also uncover some of these little-known locales, as ironic as it may be, giving them the online recognition they deserve.
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