There Is No Cat

A sense of inflated authority

Da Funkidator, which I created in a fit of pique one night a while back, is a joke. I’ve said as much here before. But I have to say, it’s fascinating to me how posting such a tool results in people ascribing an inflated sense of authority to it. I’m not sure what it is about the web that does this, but I’ve experienced it before. A few years ago, I was part of a campaign to get the BBC World Service to change its mind about something very stupid that it was about to do (and has since done, to its everlasting shame). The campaign itself was run by a half-dozen people, give or take a few, on a day-to-day basis. Pretty much all of us were just regular folks with no particular authority to speak on the topic (although we had a couple of advisors who did). But by putting forward a reasonably well-designed site (that breaks in IE 6/Win at the moment, yes, I know) with a few articles that set forth our positions, we were able to generate a tremendous amount of press coverage, almost all of it favorable to us. Reporters loved us and loved the site. The web site made us credible, and reporters vested us with an authority that we would not have had without the site. Even though we lost our campaign, it was a fascinating experiment in how the web can play a critical role in generating an appearance of credibility and authority. Da Funkidator seems to generate the same kind of shock and awe, oddly enough. Who knew?

Posted at 1:57 AM