Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
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What are you doing, sitting there at your computer, when you have a free trip to Disney World waiting for you. At least, you would have, if you had received this e-mail, as I recently did (right). Now, help me a minute. What is that old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true…." Unfortunately, as appealing as this offer may sound, it just ain’t true. (When a former English teacher uses "ain’t," you know it’s serious business.) I have only two things to say about this. First, Walt Disney never had a son, and second, this particular letter has been pretty well picked apart in a funny, informative article. |
Hello Disney fans,
Thank you for signing
up for Bill Gates' Beta Email Tracking. My name is Walt Disney Jr. Here at
Disney we are working with Microsoft which has just compiled an e-mail tracing
program that tracks everyone whom this message is forwarded to. It does this
through a unique Internet protocol address logbook database.
We are experimenting
with this and need your help. Forward this to everyone you know; if it reaches
13,000 people, 1,300 of the people on the list will receive $5,000, and the rest
will receive a free trip for two to Disney World for one week at our expense.
Your friends,
Walt Disney Jr., Bill Gates, & The Microsoft Development Team. |
By the way, there is a similar letter about getting free clothes from The Gap, and it has a similar validity. These are examples of "urban legends," stories which take on a life of their own and appear simultaneously in various locations.
Obviously, the Internet is a medium ideally suited to such things, so much so that there is now a special category of urban legends known as Internet hoaxes. Read on for another (right). Again, I have nothing to add to what someone else, in this instance, the United States Postal Service, has already said—except to emphasize that there is no Congressman Tony Schnell. These urban legends and hoaxes are harmless, but some involve dreadful allegations about celebrities and companies. One e-mail alert suggests that we not buy the products of a certain designer who supposedly appeared on, of all venues, Oprah Winfrey’s show, to make racist remarks. Of course, there is the now famous, ongoing, and simply false rumor about the trademark of a certain company symbolizing Satanic beliefs. |
Dear Internet
Subscriber:
The Government of the
United States is attempting to push through legislation to affect your use of
the Internet. Bill 602P will permit the Federal Government to charge five cents
for every email delivered, by billing Internet Service Providers. The consumer
would then be billed in turn by the ISP. The U.S. Postal Service claims lost
revenue due to the proliferation of email costs $230 million in revenue yearly.
The whole point of
the Internet is democracy and non-interference. If the federal government is
permitted to tamper with our liberties by adding a surcharge to email, who knows
where it will end. You are already paying an exorbitant price for snail mail
because of bureaucratic efficiency. It currently takes up to five days for a
letter to be delivered from New York City to Buffalo. If the U.S. Postal Service
is allowed to tinker with email, it will mark the end of the "free"
Internet in the United States. One congressman, Tony Schnell has even suggested
a "twenty to forty dollar per month surcharge on all Internet service"
above the government's proposed email charges. |
There is another consideration, and most simply, it could be expressed as a variation of the Golden Rule: Don’t send any e-mail that you would not want to receive yourself. There is a lot of junk cluttering up e-mail nowadays that is neither necessary nor amusing nor informative.
Another problem is one of privacy. One of the times when I received the Disney letter, it came with some four hundred names and e-mail addresses of people who had received and sent it. I must admit, I was tempted to send all these good folks a message about some great movie reviews offered by a certain Georgia free-net, but I resisted the temptation. What if I were involved with a triple-x site, and I wanted to spread the word?
Most of all, however, these hoaxes are a bother and a bore. If you would like to explore many, many other such hoaxes and legends, here are four sites that cover just about every hoax that has yet been concocted and probably a few that haven’t even appeared yet. Be warned that once you link to these sites, you are leaving the warm, cozy, family-friendly neighborhood of Peanut.org and may be surfing on the wild side:
Surprisingly, although the free Disney World trip and free Gap clothing are hoaxes, there are many freebies on the web. Two sites that guide you to such offers are:
If you need some reading material and are short on cash, you can find the texts of books available without charge at Black Mask. You can find more online newspapers than you can possibly read at one of my favorite sites.
Here are two that I have not tried but which sound intriguing. The first site offers you the chance to "turn your spam into steaks" by offering discount coupons for the purchase of steaks if you send them any "spam"—unsolicited, unwanted e-mail which you receive. The second offers you a free chance to get recognized not just in the history of the world but in the records of the universe by using your computer to search for extraterrestrial intelligence: Spam Recycle and SETI.
As you continue your exploration of cyberspace and your travels in the other real world (whether or not Bill Gates pays for them), keep your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts. This week, I would like to close with two additional bits of wisdom.
I used to tell my students, "Don’t believe something just because you see it in a book," even though most manuscripts go through various kinds of evaluation and review before they are published. It’s more important not to believe something just because you see it on the Internet, even in (perhaps especially in) my columns. Finally, this is a maxim or mantra that I repeat every time I log onto the Internet, and I commend it to my dry-footed, noble-hearted readers (or reader): Just because your computer is online is no reason to let your mind go offline.