Where Do We Go Next

In conclusion, this chapter first ties together these disparate activities in the period since 1990: urban legend debunking, political fact-checking, public service sites intended to protect people against computer viruses, academic study of contemporary legends, grade B horror movies, and truth-or-fiction television programming. The chapter then identifies six ways to build on this study: first, other topics involving scrutiny in the United States in the period 1990–2015, such as consumer protection in a world dominated by advertising; second, extension of coverage to events outside the United States, such as urban legends or political fact-checking in other countries; third, extending the coverage back in time prior to 1990, such as scrutiny during the early twentieth century in connection with Progressivism; fourth, a deeper analysis of the concept of authenticity, which so far has been most studied in the context of art forgery and is otherwise relatively unstudied; fifth, connecting this study to the emerging field of information history, for this study has close ties to two main topics of information history – misinformation and overabundance of information; and finally, sixth, tying this work more closely to computing history, both by examining the use of computing technologies and not the technologies themselves, and by examining the pre-history of the Internet more closely by examining bulletin boards, Usenet, and online service providers that predate the public Internet.