Friday 23 July 2010

Diet AND rabbit NOT pellets

The very, very, very strange thing about this result http://www.hopperhome.com/rabbit_food.htm is the use of Mr Potato Head bits and bobs for the pictures. It's a funny and frankly, a bit freaky too.

This is one of many semi-amatuer rabbit sites that offers links, a blog and various items of interest and information about rabbits as well as a whole big dollop of personal experience. It's a good exemplar, I think, of that halfway house the Net offers between professional knowledge and vernacular. If you warp the Laswellian Two-Step Flow model and apply it here, you have not just one opinion leader to understand, filter and disseminate media messages (in this case about bunnies) but a vast mesh of similarly informed opinion leaders.

There are two questions (at least) here. First, where is the info is coming from? While individual experiences obviously vary in many cases, it's perfectly possible to imagine that the same "official" information/knowledge circulates like an endless game of Chinese Whispers, passed on from one semi-official site to another and mixed with a liberal dash of on-the-ground experience. On the other hand, there are often contradictions. This sets up the next question then: how is one to decide which of the many sites to take as reliable? For academic purposes, it's fairly easy to decide what site to use, but when looking after animals (or for that matter mending the car) it's not. You want a bit of personal experience in there, certainly - one likes to think that the site has been put together by an experienced bunny keeper. But what about the situation where (as with this site) where one type of food is recommended but on another it's claimed to be dangerous? I call this the parsnip-lettuce problem.

Anyhow, it's a bit of a fun site with some nice pics, although a little thin on textual design . For this search I took Dave's advice and altered the order of things so that rabbit wasn't first. My next search will be Domesticated AND Rabbit

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