Did you hear the story about the $250 cookie recipe? In the most recent version, a woman agrees to pay "two fifty" to learn the secret ingredients of a delicious cookie she eats in a Neiman-Marcus cafe, only to discover she has actually been charged $250. To retaliate against the exclusive retailer, she shares the prized recipe with all her friends on the Internet and encourages other cookie lovers to do the same. A tale of true justice, right?
Or maybe you got the e-mail alert about organ thefts. A man on a business trip in Europe awakens one morning after a night of imbibing to find himself in a strange hotel room with severe lower back pain. Doctors at the local clinic determine that one of his kidneys has been surgically removed the night before, supposedly to be sold on the black market. A chilling lesson for all travelers, right?
Unfortunately, neither of these stories is true. They're simply urban legends, a type of folklore transmitted from person to person by oral or written communication, often with a moral to the story. With the proliferation of the Internet, these compelling narratives are now reaching millions of people, many of whom believe their veracity and pass them along as gospel truth.
Urban legends, hoaxes and other myths are good examples of why the advent of the World Wide Web has been both a blessing and a bane. With so much information so readily available, the challenge for most computer users is not only distinguishing fact from fiction, but determining what information may be detrimental or even potentially harmful. For many of us, navigating the techno-jungle can be like Harrison Ford's odyssey in Raiders of the Lost Arc – we never know when the next e-peril will pop up and can't be sure we'll recognize it when it does.
Advice From the Web Wizard
To get help with 'Net surfing savvy, we turned to Drew's own Webmaster, Ken Newquist, the person responsible for the University's Web site at www.drew.edu. Newquist cut his teeth on computers when he was five or six, and got hooked on the Web in the mid '90s when it was weaving its cyberspace spell. Now, he spends six to ten hours every day surfing the 'Net. Not only is he connected as part of his day job, but in his "spare time" he builds and tests Web pages, writes reviews for science fiction sites, and hosts a Web site devoted exclusively to debunking Internet hoaxes. Who better to answer our questions, we decided. Think of him as, well, the Dear Abby of the wired world – or the Wizard of the Web, if you prefer.
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