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May 13, 2005
Googling Friday 13 & Learning about Paraskevidekatriaphobia
I had never Googled "Friday 13" before, so I tried it today. The results? Some 77,800,000 links, a search that took less than a second (0.28 seconds to be exact). With that kind of speed and result, is it any wonder that we feel overwhelmed at times by all of the research yet to be done?
Colleagues of mine (fellow college professors) often tell me that these google results are mainly weak sources, too opinionated or so alien to fit into real scholarship. One of the major shifts in academe since 9/11 and the War in Iraq began in 2003 is the distrust of television media coverage. In fact many colleges and universities ban the use of television news or transcripts as credible sources for research projects.
This brings us back to "Friday 13." The first full link on the Google search is a link to www.about.com, a link that comes up a lot lately and leads one to suspect that this website is doing something special to be Googled so easily. Is this website, for instance, connected to Google somehow?
The interesting thing about this link for "Friday 13" is that it focuses on the urban legend of this day. The title of the link is "Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky: Paraskevidekatriaphobia: Fear of Friday the 13th." For those of you who are wondering about that long Greek/Slavic looking word, here's the scoop from the website: Paraskevidekatriaphobics — people afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th — are no doubt pricking up their ears just now, buoyed by evidence that their terror may not be so irrational after all. But it's unwise to take solace in a single scientific study (the only one of its kind, so far as I know), especially one so peculiar. I suspect it has more to teach us about human psychology than it does about any particular date on the calendar. . . . How many Americans at the turn of the millennium still suffer from this condition? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of phobias and coiner of the term "paraskevidekatriaphobia," the figure may be as high as 21 million. If he's right, eight percent of Americans are still in the grips of a very old superstition.
I'll let the rest of you deal with the other 77,799,999.
Posted by wjbailes at May 13, 2005 11:06 AM
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