Actual deceit; concealing something or making a false representation with an evil intent to cause injury to another
Something I heard on the radio yesterday has lingered in my mind.
A call-in discussion about printers prompted a college professor to call in and say that she requires her students to have printers in their dorm rooms — as opposed to using a printer at the school’s computing center or at a copy shop.
A printer (and more significantly its expensive and over-packaged cartridges) was described by an on-air guest as an unnecessary expense for college students, but the college prof. called to disagree. She said that her students’ quality of writing and scholarship improved dramatically when they proof-read and edited documents by taking pen to paper versus editing on screen. You only think you are editing on a screen, she said, and you are not really writing as well as you think you are.
I think about these things a lot, that these cheap plastic keyboards and the digital output they produce are insignificant tools of the craft that establish little connection between the mind and the product.
Another radio commentator last year dismissed Internet blogger death-threats against him as “hyperventilating at the keys”, a phrase that could have been applied to the earliest BBS malcontents as easily as today’s drive-by insulters who routinely litter comment boards with disembodied anger.
Is it fraud, though? Does lack of depth in public discourse rise to the level of fraud? Does the culture of digital-only content — an environment whose anger is typically vanquished by in-person debates on the same subjects — does this digital-only culture constitute intellectual fraud? What about bogus research scooped up as fact by thousands? Is it fraud to seed public web sites with seemingly harmless nonsense and watch as that nonsense travels?
