SLM 521

Stacia Linz

Hoaxes and Myths—elective#4

When I was in high school, I was a page at the regional library—Harold Brunvand’s first (and then, second) book of Urban Legends was one of the most frequent titles I re-shelved and was asked to locate by high school students. In college (20 years ago), I took a course which included an examination of Urban Legends—and again, we used Brunvand’s work as a primary source. These were the classic stories and questions we wrestled with in mock horror: did someone really find a breaded rat at McDonald’s? Is Jamie Lee Curtis really an hermaphrodite? Is there really a man with a hook at kissing point?

This was dizzying “fun”—and basically harmless, save a devastation of the appetite or a teenage tryst thwarted. Today, Internet hoaxes and Netlore are anything but “fun.” These e-mails which perpetuate rumors or urban legends or Internet myths have taken on a new meaning in my life, now that I am the mother of small children, and am gearing up to head back to the classroom—this time to teach the naïve (?!) secondary students I once was myself.

We are inundated with information—we all rely so heavily on the Internet as our primary information and news source. Like those susceptible to any plague (women, children and the elderly…) it seems we have to do find a way to authenticate these hoaxes in our inboxes, lest we live in a complete state of hysteria (the microwaving plastics myth—still unproven—has continued to throw my Baltimore Moms’ Group into a list serv panic for almost six years, on and off).

We, and our students, have learned to become fearful of Internet viruses (which are usually not attached or implied by hoax e-mails, but was true in the case of the “Obama Acceptance Speech” email and attachement), but are often FAR less cautious with the ”safety” of our peace of mind/emotions these hoaxes upset—when people panic and hit the forward button!

We have to be schooled in hoax savviness, so we can model for our students—how do we do that? Earmarks of the Internet hoax are that they come as forwards (fwd:), that they ask us to forward the information along for goodness sakes (even if they are not recognizably chain letters),and that they usually have an urgent, panicky-sounding subject line, often with all or many CAPS.

They (like original urban legends) are often partially true, or contain facts, figures and a nugget of recognizable or indisputable truth—that is why we often accept it. They appear to arise organically and under some air of mystery, and come from someone we “know”—or via the infamous tip-off, the FOAF (Friend of a Friend).

I do think it’s odd we have to rely on a fact-checking/debunking sites like snopes.com to help us weed through this information. Snopes has been around for years, but like any authentication resource…it only works if people use it. I have a personal policy not to ever forward a forward—even from family members—and I intend to pass that along to my students. I will be sad to share that I know people who still send that Eid stamp-boycotting e-mail around. Sometimes, I engage people and send the debunking link to the story they have sent, sometimes I don’t.

How we navigate information is a very personal subject we have to discuss with our students. Our culture, once a personal and oral tradition, has become impersonal, lightning-fast and less accountable with the WWW—a place where we can’t trust everything (or much of anything, without authentication) we see in print.

We also have to discuss the nuances of information transmission and understanding partial truth:

The Mayo Clinic employee’s relative’s memo from information from an actual staff meeting, which perpetuated hysteria over an expected pandemic of swine flu, turns out to have been sent by an actual employee, who misstated statistics and hypotheticals from an actual meeting. It is much more dangerous to spread partial truths with some component of fact, authenticity, then to perpetuate outright untruths. It’s really grey area with some of these hoaxes, which we can use, as educators, as a springboard to discuss the nature of truth and verifying information, in general.

There are many sites to check for veracity of these stories—snopes is the classic, but I really, really enjoyed the Urban Legend Archive at http://tafkac.org/ulz/ ! A new favorite.