ashes and wildly misinterpreted events.The solution to these threats according to Crawford (1994: 29) is to "inculcate caution and healthy skepticism among users of the Internet and other immediate resources: to make them understand that being on-line and apparently up-to date confers no authority or even probability of correctness on the information they see." Ya whatever. Crawford's comments should strike you as remarkably uninformed and paternal. Of course, the type of "crank reporting" that he is referring to goes on all the time in the real world of network journalism not to mention the tabloid newspapers and news programs that now inundate the airwaves. And propaganda? His concerns about neo-marxist cranks seem rather misplaced coming from someone who lives in a country where life is saturated with commercial and political propaganda designed to trap and anesthetize the unwary consumer (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1992). And just how stupid and unthinking does he think people are that they would accept an updated periodical table just because it appears on the Internet?(40)Others (Harnad, 1995) have written more specifically about the quality of academic discussions and publication on the internet. He himself however is not concerned about the potential quality of discussions. Indeed, he seems to spend much of his time trying to convince fellow academics that high quality scholarly publication is possible in the context of an anarchic internet if we only transport the traditional mechanisms of quality control, i.e., peer review, into the electronic realm. As he notes, the problems of credibility and quality often have less to do with the actual quality of the electronic journal, since the editorial and peer review functions of paper based journals can be duplicated more efficiently electronically, and more to do with the cautious streak of most academics, the limitations of computer interfaces, the limited intellectual level of discuss...
