On October 15 the world was captivated briefly by the strangest of news: A young boy trapped in a home-made weather balloon, floating aimlessly through the air without any safe way of being brought to the ground.
The story being told by the boy’s parents was that their son, Falcon, had climbed into the balloon and it eventually became untethered. Once in the air, the balloon reached an altitude of 7,000 feet above the ground.
A few hours later the balloon landed without the boy inside. Panic ensued, with some new outlets suggesting the boy had fallen out. Screen grabs of an unidentified dark object repelling from the balloon were shown to the world.
Fast forward a few hours and it’s revealed to be a giant hoax perpetrated by the boy’s parents, who sought to parlay sudden fame into a reality television show. But before that officially leaked out, internet users were already hard at work digging into the backgrounds of everyone involved.
Thousands of internet users found evidence that the two parents were lovers of reality television and had twice appeared on shows. Then it was discovered they’d been shopping a reality show about their family to studios, which had been roundly rejected.
Each of these revelations were posted on Twitter by thousands of users. The “Balloon Boy” hoax was uncovered, explored and debunked essentially as the event was unfolding.
A week later, “Balloon Boy” remains a top Trending Topic on Twitter, with more than 100 people updating about it every five minutes.
By the time the family made it to the now-infamous Wolf Blitzer interview, where the “Balloon Boy” himself mentioned that he thought the entire thing was ‘for the show’, all it did was confirm was many had already believed to be the case. Criminal charges against the boy’s parents are now pending.
When so many people are conned into being genuinely concerned for the well-being of a child thought to be in serious harm, only to find out it was a giant hoax, it causes people to approach the world with a greater skepticism. In today’s Wall Street Journal, this subject is discussed:
With fakery everywhere—some of it amusing, some of it not funny—people’s ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything. And there is a lot to process: 9/11 deniers, Iranian Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers. Lily Tomlin provided the epigraph for our age: “I try to be cynical, but it’s hard to keep up.”
In the corporate world, this makes a hard-sell even harder. People retreat to skepticism, or hide behind the mantra of it’s-too-good-t0-be-true.
The internet poses a new challenge to those wishing to create publicity for themselves through an event. Internet users are naturally curious people. With an endless supply of information available and search algorithms getting more sophisticated, even the most inane or old fact about you is easily found. Real-time web applications such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed mean this information can be published and spread instantly and globally.
Transparency in business has never been more important than it is today. This “Balloon Boy” incident cements that fact. Being open and honest about your aims and processes leaves you less open to criticisms and accusations of dishonesty. If the “Balloon Boy” parents had thought of that, perhaps they wouldn’t have found themselves in this mess