Saturday, May 14, 2005

Trivia: Urban legends on the Internet

The Internet is a vast collection of information, but also a storehouse of sociological behavior. Why do people send along all these urban legends via the Internet? Because they sound plausible and answer questions we want to see answered; so unless we know better, we share them with all the close personal friends in our email address book. I have received hundreds of these urban legends over the past 20 years which, on checking, proved false; in that time, I have sent on two without verifying them, and they proved to be false too. (Remember the observation-deck photo of the plane poised to hit the World Trade Center?) Speaking as a journalist, I advise others to verify all such legends on snopes.com, or simply trust others to learn these things through more authoritative channels than tag-team Internet mail. For example, this morning I checked a report that women stranded in their cars can reach non-emergency highway patrol by dialing *677. Turns out this one is 1% true: *677 (or *OPP) works only in Ontario, Canada (http://www.snopes.com/horrors/mayhem/fakecop.asp).

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