As per the request of one of the DanceNet readers, here are copies of the past ramblings of the DanceNet Webmaster.
If you've just got onto E-mail in recents times and was all excited about this new communications medium, all the new people you could reach, and all the information now available at your hands, you probably weren't thinking too carefully about level of truthfulness in the random stuff you got in your mailbox.
I remember those days when I started my first job and was forwarding all the dire warnings about this or that and the other thing, only to get yelled at by my system administrator to not send stupid hoaxes or chain letters through email.
It's always a sign of newbies when you see the next round of email hoaxes. These things usually happened around June or September when college kids got into their first post-college jobs and got onto the Internet. Of course, everyone uses the Internet these days so there's no peak period for spreading hoax emails anymore.
There's also a different level of hoax spreading, though. The newbies will just be shocked at the new "relevations" of evil or indiscretion and they'll want to forward that information to their friends. And they'll forward it to their friends, and them to their friends, and so on, and so on. Well, you know the commercial. Remember the big call for a boycott against Exxon? The second time around? How about the third time?
There are others who want to believe those hoaxes, even if it's obvious that they're not true. Oh, the words might have been written down somewhere, but they probably weren't written by the authors to whom they were attributed. This is important. Some people's opinions have weight to them, sometimes because of their business and sometimes because of their reliability and credibility. An opinion by someone in the spotlight will have more influence than one written by the busboy at the diner down the street.
It is to those who believe these hoaxes that I say this: If I look up the word "gullible" in the dictionary, will I see your picture? For example, there's the alleged opinion by comedian Jay Leno. Anyone who's ever heard Jay Leno? Come on...you've heard his stuff before. He doesn't incite hatred or anger; he ridicules stupidity! He makes you laugh and realize how stupid a situation is. He doesn't express opinions; he makes you come up with your own.
It's really easy to come up with an opinion, or a email hoax or scam, on the Internet. It's veracity is a totall different question.
However, there is a line to be drawn between speaking out for the public good and using a public forum to be rude.
Someone gave me an example of a blogger who wrote about his dance outings. I've never met this person and never saw the blogs (though I know *of* him) and I was amazed to hear a story about how he'll write about things such as dancing with a (small) number of women that night and that only one of them was any good.
While no names were mentioned, you have to wonder what goes through the mind of any of the women who might have danced with him that night. It's even funnier when I find out this person is considered a beginner. By beginner, I mean the time being in the dance scene. I've always thought that beginners haven't earned the right to be snotty about their dance partners because they're suppose to still remember what it was like to be a total beginner in a new dance and to be ignored on the dance floor.