This is not my blog.

This is my 200th post! While I can't claim the impressive 1500th that JDB recently hit I am still surprised that I've made it this far. It has been very fun writing the blog and it has really released my creative impulses. I thank everyone who has stayed with me or who has come and gone over the last 7 months. Writing for an audience has been the thing that has most shaped the development of my blog voice. It started out slow but gradually I found my way.

One thing that I've been meaning to blog about since the beginning is my strong dislike of the electronic version of urban legends. This will be the first in a series of rants that I'll probably do here and there. It's not the urban legend itself that bothers me, it is the hoax variety of urban legend that rankles my sensibilities. Let me explain. I don't mind that some people like to talk about the dead boy in "Three Men and a Baby", about pop rocks and soda making your head explode, or that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day. Such urban legends are on the level of folklore or benign mythology. What does bother me is the phenomenon of hoaxes that get wrapped up in urban mythmaking.

The difference between an urban legend and a hoax is that the hoax attempts to trick its subject or victim into altering their conduct to make him or her appear foolish or to create discomfort at his or her expense. Such hoaxes used to be the territory of practical jokes or water cooler rumors. With the advent of email these hoaxes were given a much broader range of targets. When fax machines first became popular there was a tendency to believe anything that came across them as being true because they commanded a certain sense of authority. Junk faxes invaded just as spam and hoax emails eventually infiltrated our collective inboxes. Unlike fax machines email is used by far more people far more frequently. With increasing numbers of people going on-line email has become more prominent in the lives of more people.

Every seasoned email user has seen certain emails enough to recognize by sight that they are hoax or false emails. Yet there are still people who continue to forward every fake email that they get out of some sense of obligation or hopeful belief that they are doing a good deed. The passing around of glurge or even chain email is annoying but mostly harmless. Then there are the emails that demand that users pass them along because someone needs help (ie. Penny Brown), to warn someone of a false danger (ie. Febreeze killing pets), or to share good fortune (ie. free money for forwarding email).

Sometimes these email stories start out as something that is true but because dates get dropped out of the original email (or because they were never there in the first place) the email continues to get circulated long after the matter is resolved. Take the case of British 9 year old Craig Shergold who was actually dieing of a terminal brain tumor in 1989 when he sought to set a record for collecting the largest number of greeting cards. The original chain letter was not an email but it found its way there, but not before Shergold had first set a record at 16 million and caught the attention of a billionaire who arranged for the removal of the tumor in 1991. Like the brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice the cards kept coming, and coming, and coming until more than 33 million had arrived by the end of 1991. The family went on television to plead for the cards to stop but they continued. The family was so besieged that they eventually had to move and England had to issue a separate postal code for their former home. To date more than 350 million cards have arrived and the Guinness Book of World Records decided to forever discontinue this sort of record. Because of other such campaigns, both real and hoaxed, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has issued a standing plea that they do not endorse such campaigns and discourage them. Nevertheless, a few years ago I received an email plea (followed by a letter) from a very well respected attorney who is partner of a prestigious firm in Akron pleading for much of the Akron Bar's membership to send along cards to little 9 year old Craig Shergold on behalf of the Make-A-Wish foundation. Someone must have gotten to him before I did because a shamefaced recall email came across my screen while I was writing my warning.

If this was the worst that could come from hoax emails that would be one thing. What bothers me most is that we now live in a culture of fear and political rumor mongering where people craft email that is intentionally designed to evoke fear responses or even moral outrage and boycotts based upon false information. False emails, probably smear campaigns designed by political wonks, have been used in attacks against John Kerry, the Clintons, and even dubya himself. Some hoax emails are meant to cause people to embarrass themselves by passing them on (ie. internet cleanup day) or are meant to cause people to alter their computers (ie. virus hoaxes) or to believe impossible or false things through fauxtography. Then there are the malicious emails that are phishing for your personal information or that seek to trick you by means of fraud.

For these reasons (and I've linked to various examples above) I offer this initial post and offer the following resources in my urging of anyone who reads this to check these sources before passing along a bogus email. Break the chain! The following places are my favorite sources for verifying information. I use them whenever I see a suspicious email and my favorite is snopes.com which seems to have the best overall site for this purpose (and I've written to the author a few times ... a very nice lady).

Verifying Hoaxes:
- snopes.com (with e-newsletter)
- David Embry (with e-newsletter)
- Hoaxbusters
- BreakTheChain.org

Verifying Virus Hoaxes:
- Symantec
- f-secure
- McAfee
- Vmyths

Real Virus Warnings:
- Symantec
- f-secure
- McAfee

Here are a few additional resources that I tend to recommend to people who are easily duped by fake emails or who don't want to be duped in the future.

- Snopes: recent additions
- Snopes: hottest 25 urban legends of the moment
- Embry: how to spot an email hoax
- Embry: Urban Legend and Folklore FAQ
- Snopes: why e-petitions don't work
- The Annals of Improbable Research

In the future I'll probably post about some specific examples of ULs that I get in my inbox (I get them all the time) but I'll try to save my ranting for the most heinous examples. Until then, thanks for reading and getting me to my 200th post!