A Tool or a Weapon


Wherein Our Heroine has Some Practical Advice.
Any e-mail header that starts with FW: Fw: FW: FW: Fw: worries me deeply. Often, my worry is unfounded - another photo montage of kittens or a tasteless but harmless joke has passed from the virtual water cooler to my home. Then there are the e-mails that are worth the worry: deadly spiders hiding in the toilet, shampoo that has apparently been insidiously causing cancer for years, and the latest kidnap, murder or rape of a woman going about her normal daily business.

I'm not worried about the practical aspects of these warnings. I am not spending a moment concerning myself with spiders gnawing on my nether regions, my inevitable demise from cranial cancer or shopping-mall violence. Each and every one of them is an urban legend. When the Internet was still the ARPANET and urban legends had less efficient means of transport through society, we had only our credulousness (or lack thereof) to navigate with. Back then, we relied on clues to tell us if a story was made-up or true. The usual signs of an urban legend were: "It happened to my cousin's friend," (distancing the tale from the tale-teller); anything involving a bizarre gang ritual; or any story ending with, "...and she had been DEAD for twelve years..." These stories might have the power to make your flesh creep, but fireside ghost stories don't actually harm anyone.

The real worry is that these e-mails get passed around because people think they are true. They also think Congress doesn't pay into Social Security, Target stores don't support U.S. Troops, and that using your cell phone near a gas pump will get you blown up. The e-mails perpetuating these stories practically vibrate with suppressed rage, enhanced by every FW: in the subject line. They are filled with enough pieces of data - incidents with names and locations attached - to make them seem credible. But they are also untrue. And now that they are being written out and passed along, they seem to have an additional mantle of credibility thrown over them by the magic of the written word. Some may just mutate harmlessly - a screed from a discussion thread gets altered a bit, a quote gets added, and bingo - it's attributed to the celebrity who originally penned the quote. But others are far more insidious - deliberate falsehoods designed to make people angry or afraid. Somebody actually sat down, thought up and wrote this piece of garbage, and it wasn't for entertainment purposes. We used to have a name for people with axes to grind who hid behind falsehoods: cowards. If you don't have the facts or the intelligence to marshal them, you probably don't have an argument.

The Internet, which enables such chicanery to be widely disseminated, also gives us a weapon to fight back. Research is laughably easy these days, and there are plenty of tools to do it with. When in doubt, anything beginning with "PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO ALL YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS" is probably as suspect as anything ending with, "...and she had been DEAD for twelve years..." Being female is perilous enough without worrying about crazed kidnappers with perfume bottles: keep your head up, your eyes open, and if something looks suspicious, call 911 and keep driving.

And, by the way - dihydrogen monoxide can kill you if you inhale it. But that's more commonly referred to as "drowning."
Posted: Monday - March 15, 2004 at 08:42 AM         | |

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