Twenty First Century Knowledge Flux: The Impact of Internet Dating
as a Research Technique to Determine the Veracity of the Knowledge Claims
Regarding the Provenance of Words, Phrases and Concepts
Over the past few days
I used freely available internet search engine technology to bust two myths
that are credulously disseminated in numerous scholarly articles and books.
Both myths were universally believed to be veracious academic ‘knowledge’. In
effect, I used the internet simply to check whether the respective phrases
“moral panic” and “self fulfilling prophecy” really were coined by the esteemed
sociologists who are credited with coining them. They were not. You can read
the two short essays that prove this beyond doubt (see Sutton 2013a and 2013b).
As a result of this
research and its published results are on the Best Thinking web site, the phrase ‘internet
dating’ now has two meanings, as does its equivalent ‘online dating’ (1) to use
the internet to connect romantically with others - either solely online or else
with an aim to meet potential partners face-to-face or else (2) to use the
internet to check the veracity of claims made regarding the published
provenance of words, phrases and concepts by researching whether others have in
fact published earlier. As can be seen by these two inherent meanings of
‘internet dating’, the phrase is the concept. In this particular case the
concept is either social dating or else dating the age of published words and
phrases.
If the phrase is the
concept, at least the most basic concept, as it is in the case of ‘moral panic’
and ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ then new discoveries that phrases such as these
have an earlier provenance than purported by existing knowledge claims (see
Sutton 2013a; 2013b) will undoubtedly open up new avenues of research into the
work of previously neglected authors, events and themes. In the case of moral
panics, for example, the use of this phrase in 1831 to describe potential
problem escalation in the garrisoning of towns and cities during cholera epidemics
reveals a whole new area for scholars to examine. Given the predicted certainly
for a future flu pandemic this may be an extremely important discovery that
will enable us to learn from the past – or at least to reflect upon what we
have learned from it form a different perspective.
As more historical
documents are scanned and uploaded, the latest knowledge regarding the
provenance of words, phrases, concepts and the variety of concepts associated
with particular words and phrases will be extremely unstable and short-lived.
Interestingly,
internet dating as a veracity checking research method reveals that the phrase
“internet dating” was first coined at least as long ago as 1994 on page 51 of
Mindi Rudan’s book “Men the Handbook”, where it was used to explain the concept
of using networked computers to arrange to meet potential love partners.
Similarly, the internet dating method reveals that the term ‘online dating’ may
have been first published in 1995 by David Fox in the title of his book Love Bytes:
The Online Dating Handbook. However, this finding is
limited to books and documents that have been uploaded onto the Internet and it
may yet prove to be the case that these terms were in fact coined and/or
published earlier and perhaps by different people. Only time will tell.
