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Apparently, gullible isn’t in the cyber-dictionary
BY DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD
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I think I’m supposed to find the e-mail I just opened enticing. An enthusiastic friend is passing on this amazing deal: if I just send this same e-mail to nine other people, I will get a $50 gift certificate to Applebee’s. Free food just nine mouse clicks away — how can I refuse, right? All I have to do is spam my own friends. Pardon me for a moment while I gather myself. What do I find worse: that someone who knows me thinks I would mistake Applebee’s for dining? That someone I love sent me what is actually just a chain letter without the curse? That my witty, intelligent friend is every bit as gullible as this obvious hoax’s original creator expected recipients to be? Or that this is the third time I have received this same piece of crap disguised as an Applebee’s offer, not to mention the T.G.I. Friday’s and Arby’s versions I began receiving four years ago? (Dear God, what do people think I eat?) What my friend will soon learn is that I suffer from Forward Intolerance — as in, forwarded e-mails make me violently ill (or at least violent). There are exceptions: I can handle emergency forwards about, say, the poor health of a friend or loved one. In very small doses, I can even handle truly immediate political-action alerts. In either of these cases, the likelihood is that someone who knows me has chosen to send me something he or she believes is personally relevant. But forward me something lame like a too-good-to-be-true offer or a too-hysterical-to-be-plausible public-safety warning, and it’s clear you aren’t thinking of me at all. You’re thinking of you, and of what you supposedly get for passing on the news: a bonus prize in one case, the role of prophet in the other. Often, I get forwards because the real motivation is sloth: it’s simply much easier to e-mail your whole address book at once than to select recipients with care — easier, that is, until you send one of these things to me. Unfortunately for my friends and loved ones, Forward Intolerance is a complex psycho-physiological condition in which the brain chemically heats up until it is visibly smoking, causing the sufferer to completely lose the ability to self-censor, verbally or in writing. (I’m not making this up. There’s a medical term for it and everything: post-forward-stress disorder, or PFSD.) When it happens to me, it’s like I’m the Incredible Hulk — mild manners be damned, the monster in me comes out to play. Case in point: yesterday, I received a "Cell Phone Explosion!!!" forward. I was on a list of 30 people who received my uncle’s dire warning about a rash of people bursting into flame at gas pumps because their cell phones were turned on. I smelled a hoax immediately, finding it remarkable that a rash of sudden human combustion hadn’t made more headlines. Deep in the e-mail, the forward included a link to a gas-company site, intended to prove the story. When I visited that page, the company had posted a beleaguered plea for people not to believe this story, with which it had nothing to do, and for which it had found no evidence. So not only was the forward impersonal, it was self-debunking. Before I could stop myself, Forward Intolerance began working me into a muscular green fugue state as I typed my roaring reply. I suggested that someone my uncle’s age should be slightly more discerning, and that if he was going to send people threats, he really ought to check out the claim before wasting people’s time. (Here, I helpfully provided links to hoax-busting sites.) Hell, I added, he might even want to read the stuff he sends out, just for giggles. Come to think of it, hadn’t he learned anything from my howl of protest last year when he sent me the T.G.I. Friday’s e-mail? Rant finished, I hit "send," got my normal color back, felt the Forward Intolerance subside, and went to bed. This morning, I got a new e-mail from my uncle. I’ll spare you the angry details, but let’s just say it was more personal than the first. I might feel a little more repentant about the tone I used with my uncle, except that now I have my friend’s Applebee’s-hoax forward in front of me, and I feel my brain heating up again. The woman who sent it has her own weblog and e-groups, so it’s not like she isn’t a savvy person. Surely she has encountered Internet hoaxes before. What convinced her that this one wasn’t junk? Has she even once met a single person who got a $50 gift certificate this way? No, of course she hasn’t, because it’s a lie. I know what you’re thinking: it’s a small lie, so why get worked up over it? Because we’re actively fostering the Age of Lies, an era when people think of dishonesty among employers, politicians, and the media as the norm. We’ve gotten used to swallowing even easily disproved falsehoods because it spares us confrontation. When you accept an incredible claim and then spread its dubious gospel with an uncritical eye, you foster a culture that allows CEOs to spend employees’ pensions and a president to lie in his State of the Union address. Routine forwarders reinforce the notion that if you tell a whopper with a straight face, there will always be enough suckers to keep the deception alive. No one says we have to play along: don’t be an ignorant huckster to me and I won’t be one to you. If we’re careful, we might even start a radical trend toward, um, thinking. But if that’s too much effort, if you’d rather just hit the forward button every time a quasi-plausible offer comes your way, be prepared: Forward Intolerance is a ugly condition, and I’m not cured yet. David Valdes Greenwood does not want to be forwarded at mambobean@hotmail.com
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