Conspiracy Theories at DePaul U.

Last night I was my husband's guest at a kickoff event for the alums of his old college who are working on an all-class reunion to be held next fall. He is a co-chair of the event and gave a nice introductory speech for the DePaul administrative somebody who headlined the event. I ended up mostly by myself during the preparations for the speeches, the speeches, and the subsequent post-speech college chitchat BUT I was sitting at a table where a handful of assorted alums wandered up with their glasses of wine and plates of munchables and ended up having one of the most interesting conversations I've had in many a moon.

Things got started when one man mentioned that he worked for the National Opinion Research Center at the U of Chicago which surveys citizens on many topics and reports the results to the U.S. government. On the other side of the table was a DePaul student about to graduate with a degree in International Relations. She talked about how her teachers had asked students to choose a country outside the U.S. to study the relationship of its media to the country's government and politics. I mentioned that I had just learned (from TED, see previous post) that popular search engines were filtering news to individuals based on past search history.

The guy from NORC then said that the surveys they do for the U.S. govt often end up in the news with unrecognizable conclusions after the govt "massages" the survey results. The American student has family in Paris and has gone there often in recent years for visits. She began saying that when you get outside the U.S. and hear news from another viewpoint, it is quite amazing to notice the difference. The NORC guy claimed that if Americans knew only a fraction of what he's heard, we'd all freak out. One item he talked about was about the weakness of the American dollar - how other countries did not want to accept it anymore - wanted gold instead. But the U.S. doesn't have much gold. He predicted doom ahead for the U.S., so I asked him if he was buying up gold coins (like my dad). He said it wouldn't help since the govt would be confiscating such coins if we went to a gold standard (!). He also asked the student how many were like her in that she was questioning government pronouncements. He said he has two daughters who are also college students and, from what he could observe, students are no longer revolutionaries.

The student said we should look at France24 and the NORC guy said to try RT.com (see the disputed Wikipedia article, too) in order to see a non-American viewpoint. As other people began leaving, the conversation wound down to most people saying they didn't believe anything anymore: bin Laden wasn't dead, etc. Next we'll all be like the old guy I saw last weekend on Michigan Avenue with a megaphone and a sandwich board saying that the recent tsunamis were the result of underground detonation of nuclear bombs - with Japan the latest victim. Whew.