The first was the Tommy Hilfiger/Oprah rumor…this thing had almost 100 people on the forward lists. Supposedly, Hilfiger went on the Oprah show and said blacks, Asians and Hispanics should not wear his clothes as they looked bad on them and they were designed for white people. Oprah told him to leave the stage and he did. The email called for a boycott of all Hilfiger clothes.
OK. Now think about this. You don’t think this might possibly have made national news? You don’t think that maybe Hilfiger stock might have dipped a bit? How can a sane person think this was true?! It only took a minute to search this on Snopes.com, or simply type Hilfiger Oprah rumor on Google. Yet, apparently, almost 100 people got this tidbit and were going to boycot the Hilfiger company. I was the only one who bothered to check to see if there was any basis of fact. When you read the facts, Oprah herself has announced on her show that it is bogus.
And to top the day off, a woman at work who I thought had a brain sent one of those “if you forward this email on, Bill Gates will send you $25. I am an attorney and this is real…”
The sad part of this story is SHE AND I BOTH WORK WITH ATTORNEYS…
I believe it was PT Barnum who said there was a sucker born every minute (feel free to check that out on Snopes.com) but geez Louise…now I know how those late night infomercials sold so many cans of instant hair.
Why do people fall for such crap? Why doesn’t anyone think a minute before they forward these messages on?
It’s usually attributed to him, but PT Barnum never said “There’s a sucker born every minute.” It was actually a competitor of his who coined that famous phrase.
I got one from a slightly ditzy, but nonetheless well-educated friend a while back that promised that Honda would give me a car if I forwarded it to enough people. Right there in the e-mail was a link saying, “You can check it out at honda.com!!!” (Gotta have the exclamation points.) I clicked the link, and right there on the homepage was a link saying something like “Click to learn about the Internet hoax; we are not giving away cars.”
The link was RIGHT THERE in the e-mail, and apparently no one had bothered to check it out. At least no one in the chain of people leading to my friend and thence to me. Astonishing.
Nah, I don’t think that it’s stupid for someone to believe Barnum said that. Really, why would anyone have reason to doubt it, especially since it was so in line with what the man did? It just so happens that he didn’t say it. No big deal.
OTOH, believing that Bill Gates would send $25 to every person who forwarded an email is just plain idiotic no matter how you look at it.
Either I’ve trained my coworkers to check snopes first or they’ve just quit forwarding to me because I’m such a party-pooper. No matter - I no longer get the idiotic stuff as much as I used to. Now if I can just stop the one guy always sending the stupid jokes…
The last one I got was the Madelyn Murray O’Hair/“Touched by an Angel” thing. I did a reply to all with links to about 10,000 Snopes/Urbanlegends type rebuttals, the FCC’s site regarding this UL and countless news articles regarding O’Hair’s death. I think everyone took me off their glurge distributions after that.
I work in a science museum. You’d think my co-workers would be logical and rational, but NOOO! I get so many damned “Make an wish and send this to 10 of your closest friends or you will die” e-mails that I want to run around screaming “Fools! fools!” all over the building.
A woman recently e-mailed EVERYONE in the building that your driver’s license has a secret number on the back that get you a FREE tow truck. A quick peek at snopes told me that is definitely NOT TRUE. I e-mailed her the link, and she e-mailed everyone back to let them know she was a gullible doofus.
The internet makes it so easy to spread rumors and hoaxes, yet it also makes it very easy to search for the truth behind the rumors. Why don’t more people bother to find out the truth for themselves?
I stopped wasting my time trying to explain to forwarders how every single one of them is a hoax. I would explain this to their faces. Tell them about snopes, the alt.folklore.urban FAQ, etc.
Then they’d send me more. I ask them if they remember telling them that they are all fakes. “Maybe. But this is different it says ‘not a hoax’ right there in it…”
So I just try to get them to stop forwarding me anything at all.
A certain percentage of people have always been gullible. Before this mass communication thingie we call the Internet, the same stories were passed by word of mouth (the phone, over the back fence, around the water cooler, etc.), written down in notes and letters, etc. You get the picture.
The communication system was much slower and more personal. You heard the story from someone you knew (and probably trusted). You passed it along, too. But since the communication system was slower and pretty much one-to-one (well, OK, five to one around the water cooler) the story took time to spread, as well as be embellished – probably because everyone added and subtracted to it cuz everyone never remembered the story exactly the same way it was told to them.
Yadda, yadda.
Now with the Internet, those stories move not just faster, but greater distances and with more people all at once. Add to it the perceived notion the Internet is a credible source in its own right (un huh).
You can see where this is going.
What hasn’t changed are average folks. They’re still average. More gullible people hearing and reading stories enmass at an ever-increasing rate. When you hear the same story (or close to it) from different places in approximately the same time frame, just the sheer numbers, coupled with the story coming from so many people you “think” you know, you conclude the story must be true. Forget the little clues often found in the stories which contradict themselves. Forget checking the veracity of the stories on your own.
Just look at the gossip magazines and gossip TV shows out there. Gossip is news and news is gossip. Come on. We all like juicy gossip. It’s that extra piece of chocolate we know we shouldn’t eat but we do.
Maybe someone should write up a hoax that claims that the major nework backbone providers have done a study that shows that mass-forwardings of email are going to make the internet crash.
Roadwalker, I got the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe from a friend of mine who would probably believe that ‘gullible’ is in the dictionary twice. It wasn’t long after I blew it off that I happened to be reading an article in a Texas Monthly magazine about this very rumor. A spokesperson for the corporation disputed the validity of the rumor by saying something like, “…besides, the email says that the woman’s Visa bill showed a charge for $250. Everyone knows that Neiman Marcus only accepts American Express.”
I laughed out loud…partly because I knew the woman who forwarded that crap to me probably would still believe it even if she read the article, and partly because how snobby the Neiman Marcus corporation really is.
