Disasters, science and lunacy

Our modern world is making our lives better each day, and we need to be aware of what allows us to progress and what retards advances. The spreading of rumors across the world is a throwback from the Dark Ages, pre-science, and has no place in 2011, especially in modern media such as the Internet. The latest sensationalism is gossip that the alignment of the moon on Saturday, March 19, will cause massive earthquakes. The other is a widely circulated illustration on the Web, describing how nuclear radiation from Japan will spread to other countries.

China has more than 450 million netizens and the majority of them use the medium positively for work, study and social networking. But the freedom granted to them allows irresponsible individuals to spread rumors. Fortunately, the English language traffic is spared most excesses because the audiences have a longer experience in balancing and weighing a range of sources, and readily dismiss spam and idiots. For young Chinese in cities with the Internet as their new lifeline to contact home and friends, and for fashion and job searches, chatrooms that scaremonger and sensationalize are taken out of puerile context can have the wrong effects.

Social network is now being revealed as a key characteristic distinguishing us from other animal groups. Humans' willingness to cooperate, even with people they do not know, such as on the Internet, is a driver of progress. "Humans are not special because of their big brains," says Kim Hill, a social anthropologist at Arizona State University. "That's not the reason we can build rocket ships - no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information."