I read an article on yahoo titled "Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks". It is an interesting read though repetitive at places because it is highly unlikely that being on internet you have not seen one of such emails already. These hoaxes range from 'last picture taken before WTC collapse' to 'someone being terminally ill' email. Infact, I thought some of these mails to be true (though I never forwarded them) before I looked at this article, specially the ones that showed extraordinary pictures (like the iceberg one or the Africa one). These are just 25 and there are heck more that lot of us would have received and fortunately or unfortunately which are not as popular so that they make it to PC World's top 25 list :).
I remember when I used to receive such mails in India, they always used to end with some superstition advice. That leads me to the question whether the content of a web hoax exhibit some geographic locality? And by that, I mean: are the kind of hoaxes you receive in India different from the ones in United States? Yeah I agree some of them are global and have nothing to do with a particular location. But, it makes sort of intuitive sense that since the main reason behind sending such mails is to reach as many inboxes as possible, so exploiting the local culture (or beliefs) is the first (and easy) step towards accomplishing this goal. For example: in India, given the enormous belief in superstitions, you most likely would have seen something like the following at the end of the mail:
"If you send this now to 40 people, good luck will come to you now,
if you send it to 20 people, good luck will come to you tomorrow"
or some such stuff. Now this might not be happening in India alone, but I am just writing a personal experience.
Another surprising bit to this saga is that generally these mails are not from unknown users i.e. someone in your friend-list forwards them to you. So, although the content is spam but because of the ignorance of the sender, it doesn’t count as one. Even more surprising is the fact that young and educated people who look at these messages believe them enough to send it to their other 'n' friends, mostly without giving a thought about magnanimous amount of 'useless' network traffic these messages can generate. Strange Enough!!
A simple practice that can help curb such messages: even if the email content looks oh so real, the first thing to do before forwarding it to other people is to confirm the veracity of the message. This can be done by simple googling or better still checking at the Urban legends website, and if the mail is indeed a hoax (and you have truck loads of time) possibly replying the sender back. Lets be responsible on internet.....
I remember when I used to receive such mails in India, they always used to end with some superstition advice. That leads me to the question whether the content of a web hoax exhibit some geographic locality? And by that, I mean: are the kind of hoaxes you receive in India different from the ones in United States? Yeah I agree some of them are global and have nothing to do with a particular location. But, it makes sort of intuitive sense that since the main reason behind sending such mails is to reach as many inboxes as possible, so exploiting the local culture (or beliefs) is the first (and easy) step towards accomplishing this goal. For example: in India, given the enormous belief in superstitions, you most likely would have seen something like the following at the end of the mail:
"If you send this now to 40 people, good luck will come to you now,
if you send it to 20 people, good luck will come to you tomorrow"
or some such stuff. Now this might not be happening in India alone, but I am just writing a personal experience.
Another surprising bit to this saga is that generally these mails are not from unknown users i.e. someone in your friend-list forwards them to you. So, although the content is spam but because of the ignorance of the sender, it doesn’t count as one. Even more surprising is the fact that young and educated people who look at these messages believe them enough to send it to their other 'n' friends, mostly without giving a thought about magnanimous amount of 'useless' network traffic these messages can generate. Strange Enough!!
A simple practice that can help curb such messages: even if the email content looks oh so real, the first thing to do before forwarding it to other people is to confirm the veracity of the message. This can be done by simple googling or better still checking at the Urban legends website, and if the mail is indeed a hoax (and you have truck loads of time) possibly replying the sender back. Lets be responsible on internet.....
3 comments:
hehe :-) nice post again, wats wrong with u! yeah, i broadly look at this friends-initiated-spam from 2 different points of view:
1) In general, some people like to forward emails. I was a major forward-er of messages to start with :D be it jokes or just about anything under the sun... to the extent that I might have been partially responsible to many of our IPC shutdowns! of course, over the years, i have got this spam habit to zuk... don't remember when i last forwarded a message myself...
anyways, so in this first class of spammers, there is no real background motivation or any fear driving the forwarding process... its just some sorta 'in' thing to do...
2) The second type, as you have just described is the scary one... where you forward messages expecting luck to turn good, or out of fear of things going bad... we are often forced to such acts outside the email world as well, with no real logic behind such things...
The main problem here is that:
1) there is no cost involved with sending messages
2) the speed of the network is almost independent of my incremental bulky spam messages, 'coz there are a millions world over doing the same
I dunno, but if sending an email costed us say $.10 cents or Rs. 1, I am very sure that the number of spam messages would reduce to less than 1% of what they stand today... shoudln't good luck matter to us more than $.1 or Rs 1? The fact is when you force people to think, they tend to become rational!
nice post.. :).. I was about to comment on the superstition issue but then u said "it was from your perspective"..:D.. anyways here goes.. the concept of these mails lies in chain letters which is a totally western concept.. ppl in the west r just as superstitious and with emails its even easier to get the chain letter to a broader audience at a "0" cost..
Thanks for the comments, Anupam and Filarial.
Yep I agree with both the comments, when something doesn't cost a penny, people take it for granted and end up mis-using it, some knowingly and some un-knowingly.
If sending an email costed as little as a penny, our networks wouldn't have been clogged, but on the other hand, internet wouldn't have been popular either :)
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