Does The Author's Identity Matter?

Before I begin, let me just say, I am frightened of a country where even one single person would support Sarah Palin as the next VP of America. What a world. What a world. I should also note that on November 4th, I will proudly vote for the Obama/Biden ticket because I believe they will heal this country’s financial and moral problems. Now, on to my conspiracy theory…

Earlier this week, I was sent a link to the margaret and helen blog. There are several rants about Sarah Palin on the blog which was purportedly written by an 82 year old grandma. The blog has spread like wildfire, drawing traffic in the tens of thousands. References to this blog always mention it was written by an 82 year old woman, it is the big selling point of the blog. There are just seven posts on the blog prior to the Sarah Palin posts and most are quick, one or two sentence posts. Each of them seem very phony and staged to me. Someone wants you to believe this blog was set up for a grandma by her grandson so she can exchange letters to her friend of 60 years. It is a fake! There is a reference to the friends using fax machines in the 1970s to sent letters. There were not consumer level fax machines until the mid to late 80s.
From a comment on the first post:

Hello?â?¦Helen??
Testing,1,2,â?¦check, check.
Helen, Dear, itâ??s me, Margaret!!
Look at us nowâ?¦surfing this here innernetâ?¦we are two â??happenâ??inâ? broads arenâ??t we? Is this thing on??
My nephew is telling me what to do here. I going to press send now.
Helen, I will call you to see if you received my Blog entryâ?¦oh, my nephew says I donâ??t have to call you.
I donâ??t really understand but will in time Iâ??m sure. Helen, this reminds me of the fax machines you bought us back in the 70â??s when I first moved to Maine, Remember? You said we could â??faxâ? letters to each other instead of having huge phone bills. You had to call me anyway to tell me to take my letter out of the envelope BEFORE I faxed it! My how we laughed about thatâ?¦.okay, here goes the test Blog entryâ?¦more later, Dear.
~Margaret

Here’s a brief snapshot of the history of fax machines in the 1970s:
1972 The first users of facsimile were newspapers to transmit and receive photos from around the world. The next user of facsimile were the weather services around the world.
1985 GammaLink produces the first computer fax board.
1987 Canon introduces the first plain-paper fax machine.

From Faxpipe.com
“For many years fax machines were expensive, large and difficult to operate. Their use was primarily limited to large business and government. By the 1980â??s however, fax machines were being designed that were smaller, faster and easier to use. They could just be hooked up to existing telephone lines.”

Please read all 7 of the previous posts and judge for yourself whether you think the content sounds honest or not, or if it just sounds too cute to be real. And if you think it’s difficult to fake the creation date of posts and comments on a wordpress blog, check out the test blog I set up in 5 minutes.

Helen Philpot’s blog seems like a work of fiction. I think someone is taking advantage of the world’s love of feisty grandmas to promote their own political views. Why would someone do that? Honestly, I don’t know… 15 minutes of fame? A secret viral marketing campaign? I just know that if the author of the blog is not who they say they are, I have some problems with that. I do believe the messenger matters, and I think it has a very big influence on how we interpret writings.

I’d like you to consider the fact that this blog has received tens of thousands of hits in just one week. And I’d then like to ask you, if this blog were written by a 32 year old democratic white male, or a 20 year old college student, would it have spread across the internet like it did? In many of the references I’ve seen, people forwarding the links always mention that the blog was written by an 82 year old and it seems nearly all of the responders, and the people who forward the link on, mention the fact it was written by an 82 year old woman, and usually have some cute comment like “go grandma!” etc. When I raised questions of authenticity to my friend, I was accused of being ageist, but I have to ask, would she even have sent me the link in the first place if the author wasn’t an 82 year old grandma? Is this just a case of the blog’s true author taking advantage of reverse ageism?

I’m really bothered by this whole thing, there is something fishy going on and I don’t like it. I did some snooping to clear by conscience and the deeper I dug, the more convinced I was that this Helen person is not who she/he says she/he is.

This blog was mainly promoted through the comments section of the page where the video of the palin/biden skit is available on the snl website. I went to the snl page and discovered repete comments being posted by the same three “people” trying to get people to go to the helen and margaret blog. the commenters: HelloTX, toleranceplease, and stingray47 have little or no user information in their profile.

There are 21 posts from HelloTx, 4 from stingray47, and 3 from tolerance please. That’s a total of 28 comments on the same video in 5 days. It stinks of shameless self promotion. I’ve collected their comments from the last 5 days. You can view them here. I found another person promoting the blog on the Obama community blogs. I believe anyone who donates on the website can sign up for a blog so this person probably isn’t directly affiliated with the campaign. This person was also brand new to this blog and had very little information available on their profile. There was one one previous post to their post on the margaret and helen blog. And this might just be a coincidence but there is a user on MySpace named HelloTX, the photo shows a young girl in her late teens or early 20s. She jokingly claims to be 87.

On the Blogger’s Choice Awards website, a user “ethel” has voted the blog for the “best political blog” category. Ethel also has no information on her profile and has never voted for any other websites.

I don’t know why this person would decide to start a blog pretending to be someone they aren’t, but now that the wildfire has started, what do we as readers gain or lose by being deceived? Does the author matter? Does it matter to you? Personally, I wish for one day I could live in a world where I didn’t have to question authenticity.

On a happier note, In all my searching for the truth, I ran across this website: Women Speak Out On Palin which has video statements from women of all ages from around the country on why they think Palin is a poor choice for Vice President. I think it’s a great site and luckily through the magic of video, you can see and hear them so you know they aren’t masquerading as something they are not.