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The End of Psychics?
By bk | September 2, 2007 21:14
I was reading this post over at Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes - and have a bit of a description of how to do a ‘cold’ reading
Indeed what I did do was tell them exactly how I would have done a completely convincing hot reading. I told them that the school had given me a class list and a major. I asked them how many of them were on Facebook, all their hands went up, and their eyes opened wide. They were all vulnerable
This made me think - will blogging, social networking, and Google essentially eliminate the ‘mediums’ and ‘readers’? As people have more and more information about themselves available for many people to see, will they stop being surprised when the stage magician can tell them they recently broke up with a significant other - I can just see it “OMG - You totally read my mySpace, how did you get the link - you must be psychic, OMG!” Or maybe just surprised in a different way - “I only put that on Facebook - friends only - there is no way anyone could find that!”
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Thanks very much for the link!
You know, I wonder about that too, and I think that it will only have the proper effect if we encourage people to think critically about social networking and what they share about themselves. People also need to know what information about them can be found online or is stored by data warehousing services like LexisNexis, credit scores, etc. And while most people have a vague idea of what they have put about themselves within the reach of anyone, they might not know how much other info is available to someone with the coin to buy it.
I will venture from the expressions on their faces that most of them had not considered that they might be the targets of a swindle because it would never occur to swindle someone that way. What I have seen from psychics, mediums, and “sensitives” is a complete willingness to use the Internet as a tool. For example, I was watching a show about a haunted hotel, and some bozo was going through the house saying, “Something happened on these stairs–someone fell!” Then they went directly to a certain room and said that someone had died in here. It was filmed in 2000 or so, if I remember correctly, and what I found as sort of suspicious was the claim that was made on camera that there was no way that this psychic could have known about the history of the hotel. Well, I took the name of the hotel down and googled it with the added term “1998.” And, Alleluia! A page online that predated the taping–the whole story. It was not only possible that once she knew where she was going to be filming that she could have researched it (hell, she could have called the hotel and not identified herself, even), but even a bozo like me could find it. You don’t need to do a search to see through the show, but the ease with which someone can perpetrate a fraud on someone who is willing to believe is staggering. We need to remind people in non-irritating ways that they need to be cognizant of what’s out there.
HJ
Posted by: Bing McGhandi on September 2nd, 2007 at 23:05