Commencement Internet Hoax (Vonnegut)

News Item 1 of 2 (sufflib@tiac.net)
Sun, 10 Aug 1997 13:49:24 -0400 

Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 13:49:24 -0400
Message-Id: <3.0.32.19970810135233.007c4100@tiac.net>
From: News Item 1 of 2 <sufflib@tiac.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <conntech>
Subject: Commencement Internet Hoax (Vonnegut)

What Vonnegut Never Said Is Now the Talk of the Net

So it went that Kurt Vonnegut's wife received an e-mail late last week that
purported to reprint a commencement speech he gave this year at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was short and funny, and it
began: "Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1997: Wear sunscreen."

"She was so pleased," Vonnegut said in an interview Tuesday. "She sent it
on to a whole lot of people, including my kids -- how clever I am."

If Vonnegut's own wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, did not doubt that
he was the address's author, it is no surprise that an unknown multitude of
others -- perhaps hundreds of thousands of people wired into the Internet
-- also did not.

At least since Friday, the speech has bounced around the world through
e-mail. In the process, yet another prominent cyberhoax -- or maybe simply
a cyberinnocent mistake -- was born.

The speech was never really a speech at all. It was a newspaper column
written by Mary Schmich, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, who said she
wrote it "while high on coffee and M&Ms" on May 31. The next day it was
printed in her newspaper under her byline without reference to Vonnegut or
MIT. Five days later, the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan,
delivered his own commencement speech at MIT, where Vonnegut has never been
the commencement speaker.

The question Vonnegut and Schmich are now asking is, what exactly happened
between June 1 and now?

For Vonnegut, who had no trouble envisioning the future in his novels, the
episode seems to have cemented his already cranky belief that the Internet
is not a part of the future worth trusting.

"How can I know whether I'm being kidded or not, or lied to?" he asked,
from his home on eastern Long Island, N.Y., where he somewhat defiantly
does not surf the Net or get e-mail. "I don't know what the point is except
is how gullible people are on the Internet."

Schmich, who received about 250 e-mails from around the world Tuesday, had
a similar response.

"I've heard from a couple of cyberlovers out there excoriating me for
damaging the Internet," she said.  "But this is just one of those stories
that reminds you of the lawlessness of cyberspace."

"Until this moment, I thought it was just one of the curiosities of
cyberspace," she added. "But having been roped into it in a very personal
way, it suddenly seems less merely interesting and more dangerous."

She said she felt the column struck something "true," and the sentiments
seemed stamped with gold institution no less vaunted than MIT. There was
something about it that made people with e-mail pass it along.

"I have to say that I tend to get rid of those kinds of things really
fast," said Barbara Reiss, a 32-year-old psychotherapist in Manhattan, who
received it Thursday. "In this particular case, I thought it was poignant
enough to forward it to, I don't know, a whole lot of friends whom I
believed would appreciate it."

Copyright New York Times Online
By IAN FISHER
August 6, 1997

Actual NYT article at:
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb?getdoc+site+site+6903+1+w
AAA+%28vonnegut%29%26OR%26%28%29%26OR%26%28%29