Susan Boyle and Swine flu are global celebrities.

One story speaks to the speed with which the world laps up facts; the other to the credibility of the facts.

Ms. Boyle is homely, in the fall of her forties, and overweight. The crowd at “Britain’s Got Talent” met her with cordial, condescending contempt.

She belted out “I Dreamed a dream” and made believers of them all.

The audience gave her a standing ovation. Judge Amanda Holden summed up: “I am so thrilled because I know that everybody was against you. I honestly think that we were all being very cynical and I think that’s the biggest wakeup call ever. And I just want to say that it was a complete privilege listening to that.”

America loves it when Small Town wows Big City. Maybe the Small Town walk is slow and deliberate because it’s meditating Proust and solving quadratic equations; maybe those loose overalls are just biding their time, housing the next master of Dancing with the Stars.

The moral is not new, but it is never old: judge not the contents by its cover. Most of us, when we walk into a room, do not turn heads, and maybe that’s a good thing. Movie stars carry a burden knowing they are always on stage and always being summed up. But neither should the weather-worn baseball cap with the trailing shirttail be dismissed: a literary lion may lurk there. Says Ms. Boyle: “Modern society is too quick to judge people on their appearances. There is not much you can do about it; it is the way they think; it is the way they are. But maybe this could teach them a lesson, or set an example.”

She is now famous. Frumpy frocks from Fred’s are out. She’s had a hairdo redo and her ‘never been kissed’ claim tossed to the waste bin.

How she came to this notoriety is the other and ultimately more insightful part of the story.

Her performance was broadcast on April 11. Within hours video-streaming YouTube had twenty million hits, and within the week sixty-six million. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, had five hundred thousand visits to Susan Boyle’s page (World Book and Britannica are easily disadvantaged).

The real engine to her popularity, though, is the online community: Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. These online chatfests spread the word: ‘Susan Boyle is a hit.’ Online cities talked to one another in an instant. This cultural phenomenon is as bold today as television was fifty years ago and radio seventy years ago.

It’s a social café. It’s never too late or too early to just talk, sometimes glib and sometimes deeply personal. It’s a faceless face to whom one speaks, and you say something just once and it gets beamed to an entire online family of your choosing. Even world leaders Twitter. Politicians from the obscure to the overblown are known to rant or philosophize online. Business, of course, has discovered its intimacies.

The swiftness of it is stunning. The consequences severe, not in a bad way.

News in times past waited for Walter Cronkite and the five thirty CBS Evening News.

The latest interpretation of the law was hostage to hard-copy delivery of the Harvard Review.

The fact that tight glucose control in type two diabetics may harbor disadvantages lingered in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine, jammed in a U.S. Mail delivery van, rubber-banded with The New Yorker.

None of this is now true. Information is now delivered instantaneously.

Ms. Boyle is a creature of this age.

Swine flu came to town last week. The buzz was on.

News reporters camped across the street from the hospital even before the diagnosis had been confirmed.

Facts flew: “hospital quarantined” and “third shift nurses told to stay home” and “emergency room in lockdown.”

These facts, however, were devoid of the essence of the definition: none of them were true. The hospital was never quarantined, third shift nurses were never told to stay home, and the emergency room never closed.

Information is easy to get, but since Walter Cronkite retired there is no guarantee of credibility.

It’s a big problem.

Online information must be vetted.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 80 percent of America goes online for information about health care; only 25 percent check for the source and date of the information.

The hurdle now is not getting the facts, but deciding whether the facts are really facts.

(Richard Ingram is a writer with the LaGrange Writers Group.)