Now, the thing about this charming piece by Kurt Vonnegut is that it wasn't written by Kurt Vonnegut.It was written by a newspaper columnist in Chicago, called Mary Schmich.Some unknown person had posted it on the Internet saying it was written by Kurt Vonnegutand it spread all around the world in hours with his name attached to it.Schmich said, "It went to Italy and France, to Israel and Brazil, to places I didn't know had electricity."And she said, "Even Mr. Vonnegut's wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, received it,emailed it to several friends and then asked her husband, 'Why didn't you tell me you spoke at MIT?'And he said, 'Because I didn't.'"Somebody said it was the most widely distributed piece of email in the history of the Internet.But after only a few hours of bouncing around the world, it was identified as a hoax,and in a flash, the Internet was flooded with retractions.By the end of one extraordinary day, vast numbers of people had accepted and then rejected a worldwide hoax,and that's what makes this Internet event a great image for the age we live in now.
