Slate.com has an interesting article examining the way internet chain emails  and web content work.

Writer Chris Wilson focuses particularly on the ‘25 Things About Me’ meme in Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook, providing some in-depth analysis of the way chain content spreads across the Facebook network, and likening its progression to the same way a disease operates when infecting new hosts.

While this may seem a little dramatic, Wilson is by no means the first to draw a comparison between chain emails and other web content to the way viruses work in evolutionary biology.

In fact, the field of Memetics is devoted to exploring the way informal information spreads among groups of people, modelling this spread along evolutionary lines.

Much as Chris Wilson writes, in Memetics a new idea, custom or belief  — a meme — must be transmissible to a large group of people or it will be unlikely to survive. The implication isn’t that the meme itself wants to survive, but that the people who accept or participate in it want it to survive to varying degrees. In this way a meme can be thought of to work exactly in the way a virus might – to survive, the meme must spread, often mutating [1] in the process to become more adaptable to other hosts.

Some memes are much more efficient at ‘infecting’ new hosts than others. For example, chain content that is both alarming and at least a little believable [2] can often spread across huge groups of people, working on the ‘just in case’ principle. Other memes might work simply by being appealing in some way to a wide number of hosts, while still others operate on an implied obligation and reward basis.

Why this is interesting in the study of Urban Legends and folklore is that it helps us understand the very human process of wanting or feeling obligated to be ‘involved’. The motivations of each individual who forwards or changes a chain email might be different from person to person, but across groups of people we can begin to see that memes communicate because they are suitable in some way to each individual who participates.

To read the original article, visit: Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook

Footnotes:

1.	I.E. developing new details or attributes, as a virus might, as people refine the meme before sharing it on with others.
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2.	Though often not true!
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When I first wrote about the Perfumed Bandits email hoax we were living in a different century. It was November 1999, and the same email that has gone on to cause so much concern and alarm around the world was making its way into unsuspecting email inboxes for the very first time.

And this email didn’t mess about. It went straight for the psychologic jugular and didn’t let go, delivering its payload of anxiety and alarm to a host audience that was still trying to adapt to the idea that not everything you receive in your inbox is true or real. Even if it claims otherwise in very big letters…

So, seriously, how alarming is the idea of sinister people lurking in carparks, drugging and robbing victims in broad daylight? Certainly alarming enough that the email above flashed all over the world like wildfire, and in the dying months of 1999 you were a lucky person indeed if you were connected to the internet and hadn’t received a copy of this warning multiple times.

But of course, it simply wasn’t true. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, there is no widespread conspiracy to systematically assault and rob unsuspecting victims using ether disguised as perfume.

And yet, just when you thought it was safe to start sniffing perfume samples from random strangers lurking in your local mall’s carpark, there is one story that just might have been the inspiration for the original email.

The Truth Behind The Lie?

Meet Bertha Johnson. In 1999 she was aged 54, and she was a resident of Mobile, Alabama. Bertha made the news in November of 1999 by claiming that she was robbed of $800 after sniffing a perfume or cologne sample offered to her by a stranger while she was on the way to a bank.

While it seems very likely that this is the story on which the popular hoax was based, it bears mentioning that the Mobile Police Department never followed up on Ms Johnson’s allegations by issuing further press releases, nor is there any material in the public domain to suggest that the events that day truly unfolded the way Ms Johnson described them.

Either way, even if the core story is true, it doesn’t stop the email from being an Urban Legend or a hoax.

The thing to understand here is that Urban Legends can definitely be based on true stories. What makes a story an Urban Legend isn’t whether or not it ever happened, it’s whether or not it happens the way the person or email claims it happens [1]. That having been said, the great adventure of Urban Legend research has always been the question, “Where did this story come from?”

So, we can definitely be forgiven for getting a little excited about this press release:

WOMAN DAZED AFTER BEING ASKED TO SMELL UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE

November 8, 1999

File Number: 99-11-1543

On Monday, November 8, 1999, at approximately 2:30 p.m. Officers from the Third Precinct responded to the World of Wicker, at 3055 Dauphin Street. When the Officers arrived the victim, 54-year-old Bertha Johnson of the 2400 block of St. Stephens Road, advised she was rendered unconscious after smelling an unknown substance. Johnson was approached by an unknown black female, who was described as follows: slim build, 120-130 pounds, 5 feet 7 inches tall and was last seen wearing a Leopard print wrap on her head and large gold loop earrings. The victim told Investigators the incident occurred at the Amsouth Bank at 2326 Saint Stephens Road. After the victim-regained consciousness she discovered her property missing from her purse and her vehicle. The MOBILE POLICE DEPARTMENT is advising the public to be on alert for this type of activity.

Corporal Paul Soulier is currently investigating this case anyone with additional information regarding this case is asked to contact the Mobile Police Department at (334) 208-7211 or (334) 208-1770.

Officer DaVon Grey
Public Information Officer

Source: Mobile Police Department Press Release (archive.org)

Wait a minute! That sounds like this story is true!

Okay, let’s take a break from our impromptu celebration and talk a little bit about why we would still think this Urban Legend is false, even though we found an example in which it looks very much like it was true.

To do that, we should compare the two pieces of information we have, the email and the press release, against each other to see what falls out.

Straight away you can see that the email doesn’t mention where the event took place, while the press release is very specific with these details. Let’s say you lived in Mobile, Alabama, and you sent that email to a friend a couple of towns away. That sounds reasonable, right? After all, maybe they should be concerned too? But your friend, wanting to help, sends the email onto a relative who lives in a neighbouring state. Still probably not too far away for the information to have lost its usefulness. But that person forwards the email to a dozen other people, some of whom live in Denver, or Seattle, or San Francisco, or El Paso and so on. Pretty soon, people in Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa – all over the globe! — are opening an email that is warning them about the danger of accepting an invitation from a stranger to test some cheap perfumes.

That’s a good reason to think of the email as an Urban Legend – because instead of communicating to a specific group of people, it shares alarming information in a very generalised way and relies upon the very human tendency to share information ‘just in case’.

Back to the present…

Almost 10 years have passed since this email was first seen in the wild, and incredibly it’s still floating around in email inboxes to this very day.

In fact, I was prompted to write this post because my partner received an updated version of it in her inbox at work just a few days ago!

I’ll post this newer version of the email over the next couple of days, but for now I’m going to wrap up this post by inviting you to leave comments below, and also if you encounter other versions of this email please send them in via the Submit an Urban Legend link and I’ll post them up as well.

Further reading…

Okay, well maybe I’ll add one more bit. There is some excellent reading to be found on the internet that examines this hoax from every possible direction including sideways.

To point out just a few:

• Parking Lot Perfume Robbers from the always amazing Snopes.com
• The Knockout Perfume from the incredible David Emery at About.com

That should keep you busy until the next time I have something to post to ULBlog! See you then!

Murray By Moonlight

Photograph by Melody

Footnotes:

1.	There are some other factors that need to be present before you can definitively say you’re dealing with an Urban Legend, but I’ll talk about them about at greater length in other posts.
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