Throwing the flag on FWD: progress

Am I tired? My head is woozy, my body is wavering, and my eyelids are gaining weight. Yet there are certain things that are compelling me to write at this late hour. So I am foregoing sleep at the moment to transmit a minor gripe I have with a few people who email me.

Let me preface by saying I **LOVE** getting emails from all my friends/readers/admirers/etc. I enjoy staying in touch with people and being updated on their progress. This is IMO the genius of Facebook, as it's a up-to-the-minute ticker of what people you know are up to. Yeah, a lot of times it's mundane and pointless -- like most of my Facebook posts, heh -- but it's a valid slice of someone's life they are nice enough to share with you and the dozens of other people they befriend. With this in mind, getting a personal email written and directed for you is a treat that I relish. Sadly, instead of emails I tend to stockpile forwards.

Forwards are the worst of both worlds: they have the appeal and time-sucking properties of stamped junk mail, but they're sent to you by people who supposedly like and care about you. (Fun trivia: the wide, wide majority of the worthless forwards I get nowadays eminate from one source -- my folks, which means my dad, as my mom doesn't get computers and internet and doesn't want to.) It's like getting snail mail, and noticing the return address as one you know by heart, and you open up the envelope -- and it's one of those Publisher's Clearinghouse envelopes with Ed McMahon's grinning mug on it. Uh, thanks?

Now, I've been receiving email for almost two decades, so I'm well aware of the usual cast of characters that populate the forwards that litter the web. The guy from Africa who needs to transfer money out of his country and will give you a cut, the transscripts from old Paul Harvey broadcasts from when I was in high school, the "OMG OBAMA IS A MUSLIM/SOCIALIST/CHECK HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE" all-in-caps memes, the [name of popular chain store] is giving away $25 gift certificates if you forward the email, etc etc. Chances are you know them, too. (Hey, if I don't, I'll foward em to ya! Haw haw!) After you get the same email with the same premise for the umpteenth time, from someone whose opinion you like and respect, it's more than a little disquieting.

I am far from an Ann Landers type, but I feel there should really be some sort of etiquette for dealing with this. As it stands, if I get a forward and it's something I've never heard of before that sounds even slightly suspicious, I do not pass go, do not collect $200 and go directly to snopes.com and decipher how on the level the forward is, and 99.9% of the time, it's so far off the level it's like that one negative mystery world on Super Mario Bros. where all you do is swim and collect coins. (WARNING: if you're never been to Snopes, you could easily spend an afternoon rifling through all the hundreds of urban legends they ran into and define the "truthiness"of each, if any. Don't say I didn't warn ya.)

After this, I used to reply back to the sender with a quick note to always check the validity of the forward, include the Snopes link, and be on my merry way. But I realized one day that such an act is akin to emailing all the kids you know and telling them what you know about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Sometimes people are happy with the truth they perceive. (The one that prompted this rant detailed a poor child who allegedly had a limb-compromising accident, and with each forward, the email provider will donate money towards her cause. It's the kind of benign, feel-good gesture to take part of forward every person you know so this girl can get the treatment she needs. Except that the accident never happened, the girl doesn't exist, and the email providers tend to not throw money around just by people sending out forwards.)

But still, am I the only person who gets annoyed by this? I suppose it rankles me a tad more just because I'm a journalism major and it's good journalistic sense not to take things at face value, esp. on the net. It's amazing that as more and more information seems to be spreading through the web, the less and less people feel like taking a few extra keystrokes and doing that research. Now this is NOT something I'm grabbing the pitchfork for and hunting people down. (After all, as I said above, my number one offender is my pops!) Truth be told, there are still a lot of forwards I send here and there (not so oddly enough, the lion's share come from my wife -- what can I say, she knows my humor!) But it's just something I noticed and have actually been ruminating on for the better part of a year, and am finally taking the time to write about it at length.