The first of every month should be April Fool’s
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008All day I’ve heard people complaining about the institution of April Fool’s day. Now that primary sources of information are online, and “information transactions” are so brief, they say, it is important to make sure all transactions include only accurate information. People might see just a bit of a fake story, and believe it is real, leading to damaging consequences. Not to mention the long list of historical disasters stemming from [offline] April Fool’s day “jokes”, and now it could get even worse.
These people are dumb.
Now, more than ever, we need April Fool’s Day, to remind us about the pernicious nature of quick information transactions from the anonymous and impersonal Interwebs. It sparks that rarely used judgement filter of the brain that sits between optical and linguistic translation and memory storage that makes us weigh and consider new information in the context of its source and an assessed reliability. It appears that for most people, April 1st is the only day of the year that these cognitive processes are active. And for many (that means you, Charles L), even on this day they lie dormant.
April Fool’s Day reminds us that anything could be a lie, which is good because most things are.
[Editor’s note: this was retroactively-historically posted on April 1 with Google Custom Time]