The Earth is Flat

Upon its widespread cultural adoption, the internet was welcomed wholeheartedly by science nerds, conspiracy theorists and outright nut jobs. Although successful collaboration between these three groups is rare, there is one site on the internet where they have banded together in order to stand upon their global soapbox and declare that the Earth, despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is flat.

This group take form under the name 'The Flat Earth Society.' The crux of the Society’s online presence is a forum with 8611 registered members and over one million posts, most of which argue the idea that the earth is not spherical but rather a disk hurtling through space. Before your head (and my comments section) explodes from the several thousand questions that the previous sentence no doubt engenders, please remember that much like Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees, I do not represent the society in question but have merely spent time as an embedded and rather fascinated observer of their behaviour. Unlike Jane Goodall, however, I will probably not be endowed with an Order of the British Empire for my efforts, but feel free to campaign on my behalf (official hashtag #d33myOBEnow).

In any case, I am not writing to disprove the Flat Earth’s Society’s ‘proofs’, which are surprisingly numerous and detailed. What I am interested in, however, is the psychology behind such a site, and to explore the interaction, motivations and inner-workings of this unique internet community.

The Flat Earth discussion board is mostly filled with threads which are started by frustrated newbies who fruitlessly try and convince the Flat Earth believers that the Earth is indeed round. It seems as though people come across the site, become outraged, set up an account and let fly at the Flat Earther believers ("FE's", in the forum slang), little realising or perhaps caring that the long time FE's have read it all before. This can be evidenced by the rather lengthy FAQ that adorns the top of the message board and implores new members to read before posting. It appears that few do, however, if the number of threads that appear on the main board systematically attacking Flat Earth theory are anything to go by.

How, you may well ask, do I know so much about the behaviour of precocious new members taking it upon themselves to disprove Flat Earth Theory? Enough time has now passed for me to admit that, in the folly of my youth, I was one such precocious new member. I remember coming across the Flat Earth Society at some point during my teenage years, although I have no idea how I found it. In any case, like most of those who come across the site, I was amused and horrified at the same time, and decided to sign up for an account. I signed up under the username of ‘paradiselost’ (one-part ironically religious, five-parts unironically pretentious) and set about claiming my spot on the throne as Flat Earth disprover and champion of Round Earth believers everywhere.

As I have since learnt, in the game of thrones you either win or die, and I most definitely suffered a humiliating online death. After making arguments regarding the curvature of the Earth and the concept of long-distance international flight along great-circle routes, I was definitively shouted down (if you’re curious, in Flat Earth theory ‘atmospheric conditions’ account for the phenomenon of ship masts etc. disappearing ‘over the horizon’ and international airline pilots are all members of a global conspiracy). If you’re really interested/creepy you can conduct a search and find some of my old posts on the forums. Suffice to say that you’re not missing much except for my frequent use of the word ‘ergo’ (did I mention I was pretentious?).

There are a couple of views one can take of the Flat Earth Society. The first is that the site is indeed populated by people who truly believe the Earth is flat and are sticking their heads in the sand in order to ignore the rather numerous scientific facts that appear to state otherwise. With the remainder of their spare time these people concoct fantastic scientific theories and actively try to bring down an international conspiracy. This view, while fun to contemplate briefly, is in my opinion, ultimately not very interesting. After all, that just means the Flat Earth Society is simply a large collaboration of people who have found solace in each other and their collective belief. Humans have been doing that for millennia.

The second view, to my mind far more interesting, and probably closer to the truth, is that the site is populated by rather intelligent people (let’s call them ‘nerds’) who know perfectly well that the Earth is round but instead enjoy baiting and then shooting down the numerous Round Earth believers ("RE's") who come across the site and take it upon themselves to prove the Flat Earth believers wrong. This argument is evidenced quite eloquently by one supposedly Flat Earth believing member who declared: ‘I’m mostly here for the lolz’.

The remarkable longevity of the Flat Earth Society lies not in its scientific ‘proofs’ but rather in the very nature of human behaviour itself: The FE’s quickly discovered that there will always be some Round Earth believing sucker who becomes enchanted by their own sense of grandeur when they imagine themselves single-handedly destroying the Flat Earth movement once and for all. The Flat Earth Society becomes a perpetual motion machine of entertainment for those people who enjoy argument for the sake of it. It’s not surprising that this personality type fits in quite well with the sort of people who join any sort of internet forum in the first place.

When this behaviour is confined to relatively sparsely populated sites on the internet, there is little cause for harm, except a few bruised egos. But extrapolate this kind of bickering to the real world, and you begin to appreciate the true folly of the majority of human interaction, particularly on a political or ideological scale. Intractable conflicts, such as the search for peace and justice in the Middle East, closely mirror the cyclical nature of argument found on the Flat Earth forums, in which neither side is willing to admit defeat or give an inch to the opposing side.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. If you venture past the boards dedicated to Flat Earth theory you will discover a myriad of other boards, including the general chat board, where people who were heatedly arguing and calling each other childish names in another thread are discussing the merits of marriage, consoling a member whose pet got run over, or contemplating the pros and cons of alcohol. The Flat Earth forum is as insular as many others on the internet – replete with ‘in’ jokes, popular and not popular posters, and friendship. In short, the Flat Earth is typical of many communities, both online and offline, around the world.

The power of the internet is that it can bring people with a common interest (no matter how ridiculous) together from around the globe (or disk). While the Flat Earth Society often exposes the more ridiculous side of humanity it is comforting to discover that, beyond all the conspiracy theories and shady scientific claims, these people still can connect to one another on a deeper, more individual level. Furthemore, they can do so in a relatively safe environment and not risk having their headquarters burned down by a Round Earth fundamentalist. 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I no longer post on the Flat Earth Society forums. Ergo, I am no longer pretentious.

MSN Messenger

Long before it became fashionable for opinion columnists and old people to frequently wonder if the current generation was going to hell in a handbasket due to their over-reliance on social media (seen in every major newspaper editorial section from roughly 2006 onwards), a group of savvy teenagers were already part of a social networking phenomenon – MSN Messenger. I was having a drink with a group of friends the other night and we were reminiscing about the hours spent online chatting idly to friends. In a fit of inspiration a couple of us logged in to our old accounts, only to find that the rich online community of our time had become a ghost town, populated only by sassy spam-bots and tumbleweed drifting by.

In George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti (surely the most important movie Lucas would make that decade) he portrays the American youth-culture of the early 1960s: t-shirt wearing, rocknroll listening, hair-slicked adolescents with nothing better to do after school than hop in their hotted-up cars and cruise the streets of California looking for something – anything – to do. While lacking hot-rods and the upbeat, good-time rock of Buddy Holly or the Beach Boys, my generation experienced something similar. Coming home from school, we’d rush for our computers and log on to MSN Messenger, our online mass-communication network of choice. I’m guessing anyone born from 1985-1995 probably was a heavy user of MSN from around 2000-2007, the period in which most of that generation were teenagers and ‘Facebook’ was a word that described what school bullies did to over-enthusiastic nerds.

I was born in 1990 and a heavy user of the program from roughly 2002 – 2007, logging in most days for an hour or more. I don’t remember much about signing up but I do vaguely recall seeing my sister using the service and getting her to help me set up a Hotmail account so I could join in the fun. The various Hotmail addresses that we all dreamed up were quite special in their own right; mine was black_betty411@hotmail.com. I remember thinking I was desperately cool to have such an obscure, old rock song as my username until Spiderbait came out about a year later and flooded the charts with their good, but ultimately inferior, cover version.

As with most activities undertaken by teenagers, many adults couldn’t see the point. ‘You’ve spent all day seeing these people at school, what do you talk about?’ To be honest, I couldn’t answer then and I can’t answer now. All sorts of things that occupy fifteen year old minds, I suppose; school gossip, television, music, movies. The sheer amount of time spent online meant that most of the chat was bound to be filler – and a lot of time was spent on conversations that ultimately went nowhere (for maximum effect, read the following while constantly playing the MSN message alert sound, found here):

d33my says: hey

d33my’s friend says: hey

d33my says: whats going on?

d33my’s friend says: nm

*ten minute pause*

d33my’s friend says: u?

*d33my’s friend is offline.*

At least, that’s how I remember it. Maybe I was more unpopular than I thought. Of course, there were regular contacts (usually your best friend/s) that you had long, in-depth conversations with. As various Messenger updates were released, the ability to play games was added, along with the ability to send hand drawn picture messages, which satiated teenage boys’ ingrained desire to draw and distribute filthy sex-oriented images. Did girls do this too?

There was something particularly special about seeing the little status box pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen (accompanied by the equally satisfying sound effect) which told you your crush was online. After a while you’d develop a special sort of peripheral vision in which you could determine who had signed in just by the first couple of characters of their username, particularly if it involved various emoticons. Of course this was fraught with danger when your mates got wind of who your crush was and changed their username to something incredibly similar, leading you to look like a dick by starting a conversation with someone without checking their email address and finding yourself flirting with the same person who had given you a wedgie two hours ago.

In fact, there were many similar pranks/activities to spice up your MSN experience when simply chatting with people got boring. Remember being added to (or starting) huge group conversations with someone’s entire contact list? It became a sort of online Survivor to see who would outlast everyone and be left alone with Андрій from Ukraine who vaguely knew your friend’s brother’s girlfriend. Or how about sending Nudges to someone every ten seconds (or however often MSN allowed it – I can imagine a Beta version of Messenger without the nudge time limit which would have caused everyone to violently smash their computers to bits within seconds) and having them nudge you back? This would usually go on until either both people got sick of it (rarely) or one party blocked the other (often).

MSN was also beneficial in many ways you might not initially imagine. I know for a fact my typing speed was aided specifically from constant MSN usage – no-one’s going to wait for someone to take a full minute to type ‘how are you’ so you’d better learn fast or stick to handwriting letters. Of course many people learned bad typing habits (I do not touch type in a traditional manner; rather my hands hover over the keyboard like mutant hummingbirds and peck wildly at letters until the correct combination is reached) that can probably never be unlearned.

As far as I remember hardly anybody used the space for a profile picture with a picture of themselves. Instead, they were filled with funny pictures, album covers, skimpy bikini models or super-hunks. There was also the fun of coming up with a unique screen name, which could be changed quickly and often. Song lyrics, inspirational quotes or swear words were favourites amongst my contact list, and a lot could be discerned about someone without even starting a conversation with them but rather examining their username. Nearly anybody who had a flower or love-heart in their name was a girl, someone who used obscure song-lyrics was a wannabe musician and anyone who used an actual name like ‘Steve’ was probably a cop. I remember using Google to find an ‘MSN name generator’ which would come up with cool lyrics or quotes and have appropriate emoticons to match. I tried Googling the same thing as I was writing this and my anti-virus software identified the number one result as a security threat. Such is MSN’s fall from grace.

And what a fall it has been. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why MSN is no longer as popular, but the advent of sites like MySpace (which deserves another post entirely) and Facebook coupled with the prevalence of mobile phones (and cheap texting) had a lot to do with it. Of course, I’m basing my assumption of MSN being ‘not popular anymore’ amongst my own friends, and to a wider extent, generation. I’m not sure if younger or older people still use MSN regularly, and I’m sure there’s some obscure country in the world where it’s still used by the teenagers as the communication model of choice. In fact, as recently as 2009 Microsoft announced that the service still had a rather impressive 330 million active users. Similarly, I’m not arguing that MSN was the first or only or even biggest online instant chat service, but from my experience it was the one that most people I know used.

There’s every chance that the success of sites like Facebook and Twitter owe much more to MSN than we give credit for. It established in an entire generation a familiarity with online connection and the concept of an online network of friends. More than that, the countless hours spent on MSN established a strong desire to have such a connection, and paved the way for our current penchant for online social networking. If you’ve never done it, I imagine it’s actually quite novel to have an online text-only instant conversation with someone but thanks to MSN, for most people of my generation we’ve scarcely known different.

It’s strange to write a retrospective style piece of a phenomenon which was still wildly popular less than a decade ago. For one thing, it makes me feel cultured and wise, and I can imagine gathering the grandkids around the digital fire and having them entranced at my stories of MSN in much the same way I remember thinking how novel it would have been to send a telegraph to someone. Furthermore, it once again highlights the breakneck speed at which online culture develops. I was surprised to discover that I only signed up for Facebook at the start of 2009 (it feels like much, much longer) - if I take my estimation of using MSN for about five years, then I currently still have more years’ experience on MSN than I do on Facebook – something which seems utterly peculiar. Perhaps in another five or six years’ time when we've migrated over to the next big social networking phenomenon we’ll be reminiscing about the good old days of Facebook. But it's comforting to know that there's a group of young adults out there who, deep down, would all be pretty happy if we rejected social networking progress and made a large scale retro-migration back to MSN.

The Digital DeLorean

I came across an interesting thought experiment on a forum the other day: if you travelled back in time to the 1920s, which movie would you show them? Some people opted for cinematic classics (a film from Hitchcock, Coppola or Tarantino perhaps) while others voted for films which would warn of impending doom with horrible consequences for humanity (Schindler’s List, Dr Strangelove, Jack and Jill). The discussion got me thinking: if you could travel back in time to the 1920s and show the people from that era one website in order to showcase the internet, which would you pick?

Google

My initial thought was Google, because it is the most visited website in the world, and the most effective search engine to boot. Of course, in the arbitrary rules that I have set up, you can only visit one website and its particular set of features – and so while Google would be amazing in order to demonstrate to our 1920s comrades the vast scope of the internet, once you’ve conducted an internet search and shown them the pages and pages of ‘results’ there is little else you can do. Showing Google to someone from ninety years ago is akin to showing someone from two hundred years ago a Boeing 747 but not letting them see it fly.

Facebook

It would be really interesting to see how long it took someone with no idea of the internet to get a grasp on the basic features of Facebook. I suppose many people get a glimpse of this when their parents’ sign up for an account – but at least the less-technologically literate folk of our era have the benefit of some prior knowledge of what the internet actually is and what it does. Show it to your average human from the 1920s, however, and see what they make of it. My prediction would be that they would either be updating their status and liking people’s posts after barely twenty minutes online or they’d curl into the foetal position on the floor, quietly sobbing. Such is the wonderfully divisive nature of Facebook.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia seems like a mature, sensible choice: it’s a wonderful demonstration of the democratic and malleable nature of the internet and it contains the best approximation of our collective knowledge as a species. You could set someone from the 1920s loose on Wikipedia and let them research the past and future to their hearts’ content (I’m allowing people to move around all the pages available in Wikipedia because, unlike a Google search, they’re all part of the same website). Of course it wouldn’t be long before they discovered the edit function and began ruining all our carefully compiled knowledge, which also raises the important philosophic question: if you go back in time and edit a Wikipedia page from the future, will you actually edit history?

YouTube

If your mission is not to bring education and the sum of human knowledge to the 1920s, but rather to show our ancestors the lighter side of the internet, then perhaps you would direct them to YouTube. No doubt a society that has only recently been exposed to the moving picture would get a huge kick out of YouTube. Yes, Wikipedia could show our forebears how an atomic bomb works or how to potentially avoid the conflict in the Middle East, but with YouTube we could demonstrate to someone how vicious Charlie can be when he goes on a biting rampage or what it looks like when Katy Perry ejects whipped cream from her breasts. I get the feeling that those videos might say more about our current society than any 10,000 word Wikipedia article could.

Pornhub

As a natural aside to the YouTube discussion, we’re kidding ourselves if we deny that at least one person would choose to spend their amazing time travel journey by showing the 1920s just how prevalent internet pornography is. However, considering the supposedly debaucherous nature of the 1920s, they would probably take to Pornhub like a duck to water. Assuming that there is a fairly stringent bandwidth limit on the time travel journey (it’s hard enough to find a decent internet plan today, let alone one that allows you to go back in time) one can only assume that anyone who bought internet porn to the 1920s would be in for a short visit.

Twitter

If you think that people from the 1920s would have trouble with Facebook, it would probably be a violation of human rights to show them Twitter.  Seventy per cent of people alive today struggle to understand it, just imagine how someone from the 1920s would react?

eBay

I wasn’t alive in the 1920s (are you shocked?) but I imagine it would have been pretty time-consuming to buy things: riding horses or taking primitive cars into the marketplace, selecting produce and then paying actual money for it. If you’re ripped off, your only recourse is either confronting the seller face to face (surely the number one cause in the 1920s of receiving a pitchfork wound to the abdomen) or trying to fob off the dodgy product to your neighbours. Depending on which country you travelled back in time to, I imagine eBay would be quite popular (maybe not Leninist Russia).

Nyan.cat

If you showed someone from the year 1922 nyan.cat and left them to it, by the time they reached 2012 again they would have ‘nyaned’ for 2.84012334 × 10⁹ seconds. They would then proceed to hunt you down and beat you to death with a shovel while singing the nyan song, which would provide you with a particularly unique epitaph for your gravestone.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this thought experiment is considering if the people from the 1920s could make any sense of the internet at all. I suspect that they would grasp the concept fairly quickly; after all they are only a generation removed from us and certainly not bumbling idiots. Having said that, the internet has had a remarkably quick development, considering it was only widely adopted in a cultural sense sometime in the early 1990s. It’s worth wondering, if the tables were shifted and we received a time traveller from 2090, would the internet of the late 21st century be at all comprehendible to us?