Thursday, October 08, 2015
The Laws of the Internet
I think we're all familiar with Godwin's Law, the most famous of the Internet laws, which says that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." I have fallen victim to Godwin's Law myself, as I reported in this post from earlier this year. Here are a few other Internet laws that have been documented ... you can read a longer list and some notes on the provenance of the laws in this 2009 article by Tom Chivers.
Pommer’s Law: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”*
Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law): “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.”
DeMyer's Second Law: “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”
The Law of Exclamation: "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."
Skitt’s Law: There are actually two versions of this law:
a. "Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself;" and,
b. "The likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."
Now might perhaps be a good time to remind you of Bilbo's First Law: "Never let anyone else do your thinking for you."
Have you run across any other accurate Internet laws? Leave a comment so the rest of us can enrich our online experience.
Have a good day. Come back tomorrow, when we'll name October's Right Cheek Ass Clown.
More thoughts then.
Bilbo
* This one is my favorite.
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5 comments:
Law 34: If it exists, there must be porn of it.
Kathy's Law - Clicking on those links at the bottom of the page will result in too much time wasted for little value.
Not specifically an Internet law, but one with great relevance for those of us who must correct every typo we see: Muphry's Law - "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy's law.
Elvis's Empirical Law - The internet is more like an unimproved county road than a superhighway.
These are great! I especially like Pommer's Law.
Allen's Law: Never let a lack of facts get in the way of an opinion.
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