Ding.
And there it appears on the screen with a subtle chime – that peculiar cultural phenomenon brought to us courtesy of good ol' reliable dad/sister-in-law/co-worker/next-door-neighbor.
"FW:OMG! U will sooooo love these hilarious pix!!!"
"FW:FW: Female drivers …"
"FW:FW:FW: Proof that Courtney killed Kurt. NOT A HOAX!"
The forwarded e-mail is the modern populist media of mass gossiping.
The forward reaffirms our belief that the world is against us and that karmatic justice will prevail through the power of a mouse click.
It ignites the da Vinci Code inside us, bamboozling us to believe that on May 5 we mustn't allow our tires to touch the white intersection line at the traffic light, lest gang members shoot us as part of a nationwide initiation ritual.
With each ding! it renders the art of joke-telling obsolete. We no longer need concern ourselves with the delicate blend of pacing, memory and exaggeration required to deliver a successful punchline at the dinner table.
It misleads us at the Photoshopped sight of a Great White shark lunging toward a rescue worker aboard a helicopter, leaving us skeptical about what is actually real, like the NASA photograph of the Helix Nebula that depicts the "Eye of God."
We are both honored and annoyed – more one than the other depending on our mood that day – to be on the list of 120 friends, pseudo-friends and vague acquaintances.
We love our habitual forwarders like Fred loved Barney, like Cramden loved Norton.
They are the unabashed people-persons we aren't, the ones who before finding empowerment with a keystroke were intimidated enough by technology to swear that they just weren't one of those "computer people."
Scroll. Giggle. Send.
Congratulations, you are now in on the joke.
Scroll. Gasp! Send.
You must be outraged, and you must forward this prayer to 10 people to ensure good luck and to save yourself from sure eternal damnation.
Yes, the serial forwarders: Join them or not; it doesn't matter. They have your e-mail address.
Confessions of a forwarder
The profile of the forwarder is simple, really: We are them and they are us.
We all do it – even if just once – whether we admit to it or not (and we like some of what we receive).
Within us all is a degree of self-centeredness that convinces us that if we think something's interesting, others certainly must, too.
The serial forwarder is an entirely different curiousity.
Shannon Schmutzok is your everyday habitual forwarder: curious, skeptical but generally trustful, and ready to share just about whatever might pop onto the computer screen.
She admits to her habit with a self-deprecating awareness, like a grown man who might admit that he reads "Superman" comic books.
Her forwarding ritual manifests itself at work, where about 10 people, give or take, engage in a conversation of forwards that helps add a little levity/inspiration/outrage to the monotony of a work day spent on the other side of a computer screen.
"I don't really have time to sit down and type out a long e-mail saying, 'Hey, how are you doing? How's your morning?" says Schmutzok, 33, of Taylors. "I know when they get something interesting, they'll e-mail it to me. It's a way to communicate, but not on a personal level."
That might go over well at work in a network of the willing, but not with her friend Richard.
Richard is that friend.
You know, the guy who takes a little too much pride in his disdain for a forwarded e-mail. The guy who lives an hour away who wonders why you don't just come see him or at least send him something only for him. The guy who not only bursts your urban-legend bubble with a little Internet research, but sends the rebuttal to all 120 on the forward list.
Richard has requested to be taken off the list. Schmutzok says she fully understands where he's coming from, and something about his indignation is endearing. But like other serial forwarders, she is blithely convinced that she has the ability to filter out the sappy and the suspect so that her forwarding habits aren't that annoying to others.
She knows the picture of the tsunami wave isn't real, but she'll send it on anyway, if only because she thinks it would be so interesting if it were true.
"I try not to forward too much junk to my friends, because they get a little frustrated with me," says Schmutzok, 33, of Taylors. "They're like, 'I don't have time to read all this crap!' I understand. My father-in-law sends me all kinds of stuff."
All kinds of stuff. There's always a more prolific forwarder.
Like when her father-in-law sent her an e-mail — forwarded five times from its original source — that implored her (and everyone else) to "delete this if we aren't friends."
"A lot of times when I receive stuff, I wonder what behavior I display that would make someone think I would enjoy that and send it to me," she says. "It's a bunch of sappy stuff. Of course I'm going to delete it, but it doesn't mean I don't like you. It's just that it's crap."
Better to give
Central to the vitality of the forwarded e-mail is trust in your friend Bill, says Barbara Mikkelson, who with her husband, Dave, runs Snopes.com, considered the foremost authority on urban legends in the cyberworld.
Bill is the arbitor of what is and what isn't true or funny or galling (because, you know, we trust Bill, and he's a lawyer and all).
But, Mikkelson says, what happens if Bill's wrong?
"Bill could be honestly mistaken," says Mikkelson, who started Snopes back in 1995. It was a hobby then; now it's become a nearly full-time job. "Folks always think their friends are going to be 100 percent trustworthy, but the same reliance of trust they place upon their friends, their friends have placed upon others."
The site has blossomed into a worldwide database where people both submit questionable e-mails for scrutiny or act as resources to help debunk myth or confirm odd reality. It takes less than a minute to load Snopes, type the key words of an e-mail in the search engine and almost always find a piece the Mikkelsons have addressed.
For each piece of research posted on their Web site, the Mikkelsons provide a copy of the e-mail in question, assign a value to its truthfulness and write an explanation with links referencing how they reached their conclusions.
"Otherwise, we'd be putting people in the same position as they started," Mikkelson says, "which is going from trusting the unsigned, reckless e-mails that arrive in their inboxes to trusting what we have to say about them."
There's something natural, within all of us, that wants the ordinary to be fantastic, to possess unique information that will change the world.
Even if you're the Snopes party poopers.
When they first started researching urban legends, Mikkelson says, her husband believed half of what he heard and she believed all of it.
"These are either expressions of our fears, our concerns, that which is troubling us, or they are confirmation of how the world should be run if I were running it," Mikkelson says. "Because these stories resonate so deeply with people, they don't look at them as critically."
Over time, she says, she learned, after extensive research, how many stories simply aren't true … and how sappy even the most cynical friends can be.
A virtual community
A particular favorite for her is the e-mail forwarding behavior she refers to as "slacktivsm."
"It's the joy of feeling that you've done good in the world and struck a blow for right," Mikkelson says, "without having moved your rump off the chair."
Slacktivism manifests itself in the delusion that sending an overwrought inspirational prayer/poem/completely made-up story — a "glurge," it's called — will convince someone to swear off his vices and live a life of pure spiritual perfectness.
The reality is, you might just be disconnecting yourself even further from the real world, becoming a victim of information overload and victimizing others, says Barry Markovsky, a University of South Carolina sociology professor.
"Having all this information so available sort of devalues it," he says. "In parallel with real society, you have a virtual society going on. It's far too easy to sit at home alone and participate in a virtual community without any real human contact."
Urban legends aren't a phenomenon born of the Internet. They're as old as mankind's ability to speak — and write on papyrus, orate in the temple, talk on the telephone, use a fax machine or send an e-mail.
Even if they know it isn't true, the age-old fascination with wanting the unbelievable to be believable compels people to spread urban legend, says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University pop culture expert.
The only difference between now and, say, more than a decade ago is that word travels almost instantaneously, Thompson says.
"The Internet has become an absolute bonanza for the urban legend," he says. "The Internet doesn't have any editorial control, so everything can just go circulate around. Virtually everybody who's got an e-mail account has at least one or two people who, the minute they see it in their inbox, they know what it's going to be."
This is what happens when you become old, predictable Bill: People can't bring themselves to tell you to take them off the list, because, hey, you sent them the "forward-this-to-your-five-best-friends" e-mail.
Predictability can be lovable, but it also can be a problem.
"The more people make their messages seem worthless, the more they're going to be impacted by things like spam filters and people who deprioritize these messages," says Chris Williams, an analyst with San Francisco-based Ferris Research, which regularly studies how e-mail behavior affects businesses and consumers.
A recent Ferris study found that workers spend an average of three minutes of interruption per e-mail message.
Time to attend to e-mail is steadily dwindling, Williams says, as about 80 percent of work e-mail these days is spam.
And while the forwarded e-mail might get through the filter, it doesn't take long before the "FW:" begins to resemble a spam alert in the eyes of the recipient, he says.
Add to that how long it takes to figure out who the five best friends are who must receive this message to ensure eternal life, Williams says, and that all-important change in company policy might get overlooked because of a prolific forwarding history.
"You might not go all the way to, 'Well, I'm going to delete everything they send,'" Williams says, "but certainly you could adjust it in your priority — like read it at the end of the day."
