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R E C E N T L Y Microsoft.orgy Let's Get This Straight A tangled Web for virgins site The Web's sacrificial virgins Net freedom ring - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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We don't get fooled again
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | Ourfirsttime.com, the Web site that claimed it would host a public show of a couple of 18-year-olds losing their virginity to each other as a sex-educational event, smelled like a hoax from the moment the Web address started circulating on mailing lists. From the model-like physiques on display in the site's photos of "Mike" and "Diane" to the porn-site-style keywords contained in the site's HTML code, too much about Ourfirsttime.com screamed "this is not what it seems to be" for any good journalist to take the project at face value. Given this stench of fraud, what's amazing about how the story played out in the media is not how quickly the international Web press debunked the site but how slow the traditional media were to catch on. While Web outfits like Salon, the Dutch zine Daily Planet, Wired News and MSNBC were busy ferreting out the scam's details from Internet registration records, old postings on Usenet and a variety of old Web pages, newspapers and TV stations across the country were selling the story straight. The San Francisco Examiner even ran it on its front page. How do you turn a bunch of ostensibly cynical and worldly-wise editors and producers into gullible morons? All it takes is the right formula: The site's heady promise of nubile sex catches their attention, while its carefully calculated claim to an "educational" motive inoculates them against guilt -- and its cries of right-wing censorship satisfies their "where's the news?" reflex. Ken Tipton, the actor and former video-store owner who seems to have masterminded the hoax, is no idiot. Like the more intrepid media pranksters who have preceded him, he understood how to tap into the media food chain at just the right spot, and with just the right bait, to achieve maximum exposure with minimal scrutiny. Once Reuters ran the Ourfirsttime.com story with only a passing discussion of the site's authenticity, the meme spread through the informational bloodstream. When a wire story arrives in a newsroom, it's assumed to be solid: Wire copy typically is run without the kind of fact-checking and editorial scrutiny a media outlet tries to apply to its internally generated stories. When a wire service sends over a hot human-interest item about teenage sex on the Internet, many editors will be unable to resist it -- and unenthusiastic about questioning it. Even though Reuters scrambled over the next few days to catch up with the rising chorus of doubt, the newspapers and broadcast news and talk shows that initially seized on the story were a lot less interested in going with the follow-ups that debunked it -- and that thereby made them look dumb for falling for it in the first place. As a result, even though Ourfirsttime.com is now thoroughly discredited, I'd bet that the majority of American news consumers who have heard of it remain unaware that it's a hoax. After having been hacked over the weekend, the site has been on- and off-line periodically; at times, it has been redirected by its erstwhile service provider -- IEG, an adult network -- to a traditional porn site called ClubLove. In the current version of the site, some of the photos have been altered to look a degree less cheesy, and the text now claims that it is an "Engineered Education Event" -- "a fictional story that is neither pornographic nor obscene." In fact, the script pages that are now up on the site make clear, through some delightfully wooden writing, that Tipton -- in the role of site creator "Oscar Wells" -- views himself as a latter-day Orson Welles: Sixty years ago, Orson Welles chose to shock the nation with an experiment that illustrated the power of the new communication medium called the "radio", when he broadcast a fictionalized Martian invasion of New Jersey. Over the last eighteen days, we chose to educate the world with an experiment that illustrated the power of the new communication medium called the "Internet". You chose to follow our story, not only on the Internet, but also in the coverage provided by the print and television media. What you believed with what information you had, was a choice you made. If there is one point to make, it's that we all have different perspectives that cover a multitude of topics, from religion, to sex, to life in general.... Considering that "Oscar Wells" insisted to numerous reporters that the tale of "Mike and Diane" was all true, the sudden application of the "fiction" label is a bit late to save the enterprise's credibility. The motive is clear; had the site said it was "fictional" from the start, how much attention do you think it would have garnered? Yet its creators still seem willing and able to continue to milk it for publicity -- even after publicly admitting that they'd essentially lied about it from the start. The determination with which the Web press goes about the business of exposing Web hoaxes serves the public good. But unless the off-line media becomes equally skeptical, Ourfirsttime.com won't be the last time a bogus Web site gets free promotion from the press. New technologies get announced every day. Sometimes they're greeted with front-page hoopla, and sometimes they wind up buried deep on an inside news page. Last week, the same software innovation received both treatments simultaneously -- one at the hands of the New York Times and the other in the Wall Street Journal. Sun's new Jini technology is either, modestly, "a program that makes it easier to connect and share devices such as printers and disk drives on a computer network" (according to the Journal) -- or, grandiosely, a product that "harness[es] the power of potentially millions of computers, ranging from giant mainframes to tiny palm-sized devices" (according to the Times story). How can this be? Who's right? Actually, in a sense, both papers are. The Journal chose the short-term perspective on Jini, which is just emerging from Sun's research labs and unlikely to turn up in any kind of widespread use before 1999 or 2000. In the short run, Jini -- a scheme growing out of Sun's Java language -- seems most likely to smooth the process of installing new peripheral devices like printers and disks on computer networks. Darn useful, but hardly revolutionary. The Times' John Markoff took the longer perspective, unearthing Jini's computer-science roots in the concept of "distributed computing" and choosing to highlight the eventual possibility that Jini -- or something like it -- could replace today's computer architecture. In the decentralized Jini-powered future, computing devices able to trade drivers and other pieces of operating code become more "social" -- and less tied to the old-fashioned, autonomous operating system. That prospect cheers Sun executives, whose ad slogan is "The Network is the Computer," and is intended to cast fear into the heart of Microsoft. But all of this is years away. It's a long road from facilitating printer installations to "converting the home into a supercomputer" (as the Times' front-page headline put it). In the meantime, Microsoft isn't about to melt. And the disappointing track record to date of Sun's "Network Computer" initiative, which resembles the idea behind Jini, suggests that this innovation may not be eagerly embraced. The Times story was a good read, complete with a blockbuster quote from computer-science guru Dave Farber ("We now have all the ingredients to build a distributed computing fabric which approaches science fiction"). But front-page promotion of a technology that's months, if not years, away from general distribution? That smacks of a sort of hype the Times normally shuns. Maybe it was a slow news day. Still, at least the paper of record didn't fall for Ourfirsttime.com. E-mail Scott Rosenberg.
A tangled Web for virgins site New details cast doubt on the "Our First Time" story
The Web's sacrificial virgins Is "Our First Time" serious
sex-education or cheesy
scam?
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