The baby boomer generation can be forgiven for their gaucherie at handling e-mails and surfing the web in general. Now obviously, there are the exceptional few from that day and age who are far more adroit than my beer drinking pal from college at choosing the message they pass around in cyberspace. Without singling out any particular person or meaning offense to anyone, I’d like to take a step back and say that seeing my inbox flooded with forwards isn’t really something I enjoy. I might open and check a few; but if all eleven are from the same sender, you know where they’re going: to the trash can.
But more than the volume of forwards that can piss people off, it’s their content that’s a bigger turn off. Look at it this way. I get a forward this morning saying that a ten year old boy contacted AIDS when he ate a pineapple from the street vendor. The forward says things like the pineapple seller was a victim of AIDS, and while cutting the fruit blood stains from his fingers remained on the pulp which in turn affected the boy when he ate it. If I’m not a student of science, or my general awareness is not remarkably high, my first reaction would be to believe the content in the forward. And since I caught my teenage cousin buying mangoes from the street vendor last week, I’m keen to let him know how dangerous that can be. So I forward this mail to him. Now, he respects me and looks up to me, and so coming from a trust worthy source, the lad is going to believe that buying fruits from stalls on the street can cause AIDS. He’s going to go and educate his friends about it the next time; or worse still he’ll forward it to his friends.
But truth remains that there was no ten year old that got AIDS by eating pineapple. As an adult, by sending out unverified information, I’m responsible for teaching wrong stuff to people. Sure, I didn’t come up with the content in the forward. But sending it out without verification doesn’t excuse me either. So how do i verify forwards?
Snopes.com is a great website that validates popular forwards that we receive. The website is maintained by a couple in their late 40’s and their story was featured in Reader’s Digest in 2009. The website tells you whether a post is "true," "false," or "undetermined”. Every one of these verdicts is backed by thorough research and a full text explanation and references.
So how do I work through snopes.com? Simple; follow these steps:
1) Google snopes + title of the forward or a portion of the text from the forward.
2) Hit Enter.
3) The first link in the search results should usually take you to the page that gives you a call on whether what you just received is true or otherwise.
Have a fun time browsing through snopes.com. And by the way, here’s the link to the pineapple story: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/pineapple.asp
Use e-mail responsibly.
3 comments:
This was good, you should have mentioned those person dies/god sends a message/love your father type mails as well.
Its ironical that educated people are sending such mails :-|
I used to do the same crap forwarding mail about once how some girl got affected by AIDS by a needle in a theatre long back before a doctor friend of mine told me the real story. Saved me the embarrassment :P Wonder if that mail is still doing the rounds. Now a days i only open forwards if they have beautiful women in them. :D
Haha... The mail I got had bhel puri and not pineapple, and the vendor's blood was mixed with the chopped onions.
Anyway, thanks for the cool link (that I am yet to click :D). I also got the mail that said eating mentos and drinking coke could kill you and that kurkure is made of plastic and other such stuff, maybe now I can find out if any of it is true.
Though I have already eaten enough of kurkure during BTech to get some kind of mutant super power.
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