It’s a big internet. Really big. Big enough to have room for pretty much anything and everything that wants to be here, and that means the good, the bad and the ugly all have their place.  It’s a feature, as well as a flaw. For those of us who spend a decent amount of time here, it presents a dilemma.

Yesterday, Ken at  Popehat wrote about the Ashton Lundeby lie, the one where a fairy tale was manufactured about how a kids was supposedly secretly detained under the USA Patriot Act, and used to demonstrate how sinister the government is. Except it didn’t happen.  Conspiracy theorists seize upon stories like this to prove the evils of the government. Their opponents seize upon the perpetuation of the lie as proof that there’s  nothing sinister about the USA Patriot Act.

Youtube is  replete with videos of isolated incidents of police misconduct, but the  government is busy trying to force Google to take them down, if they can’t  arrest the miscreants before they put them up. While studiously seek to be  above reproach in the accuracy of their posts, others couldn’t care less about truth when it comes to promoting their cause. Causes are big on the internet.

Dan Solove explained the impact of the internet on Individuals’ reputations in his book, The Future of Reputation. Since then, an  industry arose to “fix” people’s online reputations. For a fee, they claim to be able to make the lies disappear. Or a fiction grow. 

The most effective tool is for lawyers to establish their online reputations before they are attacked, Dozier said. His law firm, for instance, pre-emptively bought 3,000 domain names to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. It also operates 100 Web sites and a dozen or so blogs, and participates in social networking sites. “All those give indexed results that are positive,” he said.

It’s ironic that Dozier is offered as a protector of reputation, when his own reputation, called “infamously thuggist,” has been called into question. With 100 websites and a dozen blogs, one would think he could manufacture any reputation he wants.

As new lawyers seek to enter the internet with running start, they hire businesses like  Yodle and  Findlaw to create their presence.  Failed lawyers recreate themselves as gurus to teach new lawyers how to create fake internet personas to turn them into experts in six months, while others proclaim the glories of marketing as the magic bullet to success.  Some  bolster the crap while others fight it.

The examples never stop, but I will.

The “solution” offered by many strikes me as facile, “the cream will always rise to the top.”  I sweet maxim, but hardly a guarantee.  There’s far more chafe than wheat, far more lies than truth, far more crap than substance.  Those of us who have spent a great deal of time on the internet believe we can distinguish the difference. I still find myself learning, often to my chagrin and embarrassment, that something I thought was accurate wasn’t, that someone I thought was legit isn’t. 

I would like to think I’m fairly skeptical and knowledgeable about how the internet, and more particularly, the blawgosphere, works, and yet I keep finding mistakes on my part.  If someone with my familiarity can’t manage to get it right, what is the likelihood that someone new to all this is going to be able to separate reality from fiction?

Aside from my persona as curmudgeon of the blawgosphere, having the willingness to write unpleasant things that others never would because it would interfere with their interest in being loved and adored, it’s been my purpose to be an  honest broker in the blawgosphere. The pitfall is being applauded when I’m critical of something they hate, yet castigated when I’m critical of something they love. We’re all geniuses or imbeciles, according to whether you meet with the approval of each individual with a keyboard.

It’s a big internet.  The place I occupy is minuscule, and in the scheme of an animal so huge, so varied, with so many heads and tentacles, I’m puny.  As a vehicle of commerce, its merit is proven and undeniable.  As a vehicle of thought and information, the jury is out. 

The more I read, the more I try to come up with an answer to how we can distinguish the good from the bad, the truthful from the false, the manipulations that alter reality and create a fiction that is presented so well that it’s more real than IRL.  I’ve come up empty.  I want to be sanguine about it, like many others in the blawgosphere whom I respect, but I just can’t muster the smile.

That it behooves us, lawyers, humans, to be honest, accurate, informative and bold on the internet strikes me as something too obvious for words.  And yet, I’ve come to realize this is a distinctly minority view.  No matter how much room there is on the internet, or how full it becomes, its value is only as great as the merit of its content.  If the content is crap, than it’s a monstrously huge pile of crap.

Postscript: Whenever I post something meta like this, someone speculates about my motivations. My motives aren’t particularly hard to figure out, at least this time. I awoke this morning to more than a thousand new emails. The majority were spam comments. Then there were the press releases, some from worthy causes, some from nutjob websites, some so unbelievably trivial as to make my head explode (The law firm of Schmuck, Douche and Dickwad announced that they’ve just rented 37 square feet in a tenement in Brooklyn!). There were the invitations to join “the most respected group” of lawyers on a website that’s been live for three hours, the requests to write guest posts for FREE!!!  Of course, I got the “Beloved” emails from Nigeria, and the girls of Kazakhstan who saw my bio on the internet and want to be “deep friends” with me.

I had a dozen emails about sales being run by businesses I’ve never heard of, who inform me that I opted into their advertising, and another dozen from businesses I’ve heard of and from whom I’ve unsubscribed.  There were the link exchange emails, the emails from people who read things I’ve written and want to tell me they love/hate what I wrote.  And a few friends who offered some links to interesting things they found on the internet that might interest me.

But what got to me this morning was an email from someone who found me on the internet, who had a very serious problem which he explained to me in inappropriate detail, and then proceeded to tell me how he’s tried desperately to figure out what to do, reading websites, blawgs, articles, everything he could find on the internet, only to realize that he’s now more confused, more lost than ever. “What should I do,” he asked.

In all the self-promotion, puffery, agendas, lies, scams, schemes and crap, very few seem to remember that there are real people who think they can find answers on the internet, and instead find the garbage lawyers float in its place.  We’re filling their heads with nonsense. We’re killing them with empty words. We swore to help them, and instead we’re killing them.  If we can’t manage to do better, then we don’t deserve the internet.  We’ve squandered this gift on crap, and it occurred to me that no matter what I do, what I say, it’s likely that it will continue and few of you will give a damn as long as you think there’s something in it for you.