Reflection on "Valentine's Day Challenge"

I found this task to be relatively painless. Because the New York Times recently removed subscription requirements for its "Times Select" section, original image newspaper archives are fully downloadable in PDF format.

I chose to utilize the New York Times, because in general, I don't trust pages that are posted by amateur historians, so-called "history buffs" and corporate sites designed to promote a commercial holiday such as Valentine's Day. So, I turned to the Times, which despite its journalistic biases, presented a coherent, well-written account of the holiday's history in 1908, arguably prior to the age (or at least at the very beginning) of rampant mass-commercialism. Even though the New York Times didn't publish its sources, it is safe to say that there was editorial oversight and at least some nominal vetting of the article's contents, a claim that cannot be made by many authors of less credible websites.

There are a collection of websites that might be considered credible, which contain information on the history of Valentine's Day - the History Channel website included. However, upon reading most of those accounts, it is clear that their writing has been influenced by greeting card companies and other corporate entities whose job it is to promote Valentine's Day as a commercial juggernaut. The History Channel's site cited the Greeting Card association, which in my mind, immediately discredits it as a viable source for objective (or at least reasonably objective) information. The fact that most children doing research on the history of Valentine's Day will come across this very powerful, brilliantly-colored, well-laid out website before any others (it comes up first in a Google search for "Valentine's Day history) sends chills up my spine. This is a great example of how the internet enables corporate and cultural hegemony, while at the same time, de-emphasizes the quest for vetted knowledge. The internet is encouraging anti-intellectualism and sound bite culture, a dangerous prospect for liberty in an age of seemingly limitless technology. Perhaps a Luddite response is necessary to counteract it.