Fighting the electronic flu bug

As Bloomington fills up with returning and new students this weekend, many of us look forward to making new friends and resuming previous friendships. Lots of new students will share discoveries of Bloomington and our beautiful campus, while many others will send the proprietors of Kilroy's, Nick's and other bars into financial raptures.\nAs we spend time talking, catching up and meeting new people, we'll undoubtedly start accumulating e-mail addresses and taxing the storage space of our friends' e-mail accounts. And, inevitably, a few of the messages we receive will "enlighten" us about the plight of some legless, 5-year-old orphan in Nepal, a political group's evil plot to barbecue baby kittens for fundraisers or something equally asinine.\nIt should surprise no one that most in the academic and business communities view chain mail as an informational plague. In business circles, for example, the problem is serious enough that organizations such as BreakTheChain.org are now providing sample business letters designed to politely discourage contacts from sending chain letters.\nNearly everyone with opposable thumbs knows that money scams, boycotts and feel-good stories are at best annoying and at worst nauseating. But, as intelligent university students, it's important for us to use the vast free speech rights of the Internet as responsibly as possible. This means we must recognize some of the subtler dangers that chain letters present.\nOne important danger involves deliberate misinformation campaigns. Recently, I got an e-mail which contained a political rant against the evils of godless, teary-eyed liberalism. Fair enough, I guess, but problems arose when authorship was attributed to Andy Rooney, the popular "60 Minutes" pundit. A quick Google search debunked that myth.\nOccurrences like this should alert us to the fact that when we forward this type of message, we're participating in a propaganda campaign, willingly or not. Everyone has a right to hold political opinions, but trying to persuade others by attaching a false star to those opinions makes people less likely to critically examine the ideas involved. In a sense, it's like passing on an informational STD.\nAnother subtle problem occurs when chain letters are recycled. About a month ago, I got an Internet petition asking me to help a Nigerian woman who has been sentenced to a gruesome death because of infidelity. The petition, which carried Amnesty International's name, had actually been recycled and was now dated enough that it was hurting current legal efforts, not helping raise awareness.\nMost of us just don't have time to check the facts regarding every sob story we read. But, we have to be aware that forwarding even the most well-intentioned letters is like fighting an electronic flu bug. Over time, information changes and passing on faulty information could actually hurt rather than help.\nAs a future librarian, I guess I'm running the risk of reinforcing the stereotype that librarians like to "shush" people, and now they're trying to shush the Internet as well. But, as BreakTheChain.org suggests, chain mail's actual effect is to make us less accurately informed, not more.\nIn this sense, chain letters act as a sort of electronic Alzheimer's disease. I usually feel stupider after reading a chain letter than I did before reading it. Since I'm not overly bright to begin with, I can't afford to get much dumber, even in an effort to entertain. I'll leave that job to Fox and reality TV. With that in mind, we should do our friends a favor by deleting chain mail and resorting to a quaint method of writing: using our own words, not those of others.