Email is almost too easy. Or maybe it's just that some people are too lazy. It's gotten to the point where I can't believe anything I get via email anymore. It's a great tool, but like anything else, it gets abused a lot. It's so easy for most people to use, that many people find it all too easy to fire off an email to tens or hundreds of people before checking those pesky facts first, or taking time to actually read and think about what's on the screen.
What's really remarkable is how dynamic the whole thing can be. A message can somehow get forwarded through a dozen people or more, a process which requires no additional typing on the part of the sender, yet somehow the content gets changed and altered. Remember the operator game? Everyone gets in a circle or a line, and someone whispers something to the first person in line, and by the time the last person gets the message, it's been completely changed by each successive person in the line. Email is going to create more urban legends in the next five years than all the urban legends popularized in the past century or so.
And the funny thing about urban legends is that we all have at least one friend who really believes some of them. They'll insist "no, that's totally true! That really happened to my mom's friend's daughter!" Hey, that's why they call them "friend-of-a-friend" stories, ok? Unless I see some proof, then I'm probably not buying it.
There are countless emails out there about the origins of things (how the phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bath water", etc), and some of these sound so preposterous that I'm left screaming for proof, but there's none to be found. Basically, I look at them as good stories (except that baby and bath water one, that one is just plain stupid), but they're just that: stories.
(copyright 1999 by mdl)