fraud on the internet

[Peter Giordano]

I know I'll get flamed by some but I thought that this article could be
food for thought on pynchon-l


What Kurt Vonnegut never said is now the talk of theInternet
Copyright
1997 Nando.net
Copyright  1997
 N.Y. Times News Service(August 6, 1997 05:09 a.m. EDT) -- So it went that
Kurt Vonnegut's wife received an e-mail late last week that purported
toreprint a commencement speech he gave this year at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. It was short and funny, and it began: "Ladies and
gentlemen of the class of  1997: Wear sunscreen."

"She was so pleased," Vonnegut said in an interview Tuesday. "She sent it
on to a whole lot of people, including my kids --how clever I am."If
Vonnegut's own wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, did not doubt that he
was the address's author, it is no surprise thatan unknown multitude of
others -- perhaps hundreds of thousands of people wired into the Internet
-- also did not.

At least since Friday, the speech has bounced around the world through
e-mail. In the process, yet another prominent cyberhoax -- or maybe simply
a cyberinnocent mistake -- was born.The speech was never really a speech at
all. It was a newspaper column written by Mary Schmich, a columnist for
TheChicago Tribune, who said she wrote it "while high on coffee and M&Ms"
on May 31. The next day it was printed in her newspaper under her byline
without reference to Vonnegut or MIT. Five days later, the United Nations
Secretary General,Kofi Annan, delivered his own commencement speech at MIT,
where Vonnegut has never been the commencement speaker.

The question Vonnegut and Schmich are now asking is, what exactly happened
between June 1 and now?For Vonnegut, who had no trouble envisioning the
future in his novels, the episode seems to have cemented his alreadycranky
belief that the Internet is not a part of the future worth trusting."How
can I know whether I'm being kidded or not, or lied to?" he asked, from his
home on eastern Long Island, N.Y.,where he somewhat defiantly does not surf
the Net or get e-mail. "I don't know what the point is except is how
gullible people are on the Internet."

Schmich, who received about 250 e-mails from around the world Tuesday, had
a similar response."I've
heard from a couple of cyberlovers out there excoriating me for damaging
the Internet," she said. "But this is just one of those stories that
reminds you of the lawlessness of cyberspace.""Until this moment, I thought
it was just one of the curiosities of cyberspace," she added. "But having
been roped into it in avery personal way, it suddenly seems less merely
interesting and more dangerous."She said
she felt the column struck something "true," and the sentiments seemed
stamped with gold when Vonnegut's namegot attached to it, supposedly in a
speech at an institution no less vaunted than MIT. There was something
about it that madepeople with e-mail pass it along."I have to say that I
tend to get rid of those kinds of things really fast," said Barbara Reiss,
a 32-year-old psychotherapist inManhattan, who received it Thursday. "In
this particular case, I thought it was poignant enough to forward it to, I
don't know,a whole lot of friends whom I believed would appreciate it."By
IAN FISHER, The New York Times