The AFU and Urban Legend Archive AFU Media afu sf chronicle Select a topic - - - - - - - - Home Searches AFU FAQ - - - - - - - - AFU Animals Books Celebrities Classic Collegiate Death Disney Drugs Food GIF Language Legal Medical Misc Movies Politics Products Religion Science Sex Songs TV - - - - - - - - Other sites

The woman on Usenet had a simple question. "I read in the Encyclopedia Britannica that the British burned the Library of Congress in 1814," she wrote. "Is this true?"

Someone responded, "No. The Britannica is wrong."

"Thanks!" she said.

Now, something is wrong here. On the one hand we have the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been a basic reference work for more than two centuries. On the other we have anyonesomewhere.com. Look who gets believed.

There's a homegrown, anti-authoritarian culture online. It's a culture that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps and is proud of it. So while there's no end to the horror stories about people wreaking mischief on one another online, there remains a tendency to grant someone credence just because he or she is a member of the tribe. The online world is fertile ground for rumors. Not only is the net a powerful system for communicating ideas around the world in seconds, but if your story is any good people will pick it up without worrying too much about whether or not it's true.

And so we get things like the "Good Times virus" scare. Surely you heard this one. If you received an e-mail message with the subject "Good Times," you were supposed to throw it away without reading it, as reading it would infect your computer with a virus.

This struck a chord in thousands of people mystified by their computers, frightened of viruses, and eager to help one another, and so the warnings circulated everywhere online.

Some rumors, like nightmares, seem to recur over and over again. There is the Modem Tax rumor, popping up for at least a decade, which says that the FCC is about to enact huge, crushing taxes on people who use modems, which will destroy the online world and so on and so forth. And there's poor Craig Shergold, the sick little boy who has asked people from around the world to send him postcards. Every so often someone reposts an announcement of Shergold's plight, found God knows where, imploring us all to please, help fulfill a dying boy's last wish. I happen to know that Shergold got better a long, long time ago, and is now more properly described as a healthy young man.

Actually, I don't know that. I read it on Usenet. It may not be true. All I know for sure is that these days, whenever someone posts the Craig Shergold rumor, the general response is "AIEEEE, not THAT again!"

Fortunately, what the online world can bunk, it can also debunk. A lot of net-spread misinformation and tall tales find their way into alt.folklore.urban, the Usenet newsgroup dedicated to the human urge to pass along likely stories without checking them out first.

The Good Times virus story, for instance, was shown to have originated as a prank in the chat rooms of America Online. There was indeed a Good Times virus. It was the story itself. The processors that it infected were the ones between the ears of the people that compulsively passed on the idea. Recent postings in the group address spontaneous human combustion, a recent (fictitious) cattle manure sniffing craze among Colorado teens, and an analysis of the internal clues suggesting that the article in the April issue of Discover magazine about the "hotheaded naked ice borers of Antarctica" is an April Fool's joke.

People can, and do, post misinformation just as easily here as they can anywhere else. But it's a good place to see the kind of skepticism we need in action.

One other thing about this newsgroup: Its FAQ (frequently asked questions) is a must-read. It gets posted to the newsgroup regularly, or you can get it via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu; the filenames are /pub/usenet/news.answers/folklore-faq/part1 through part5.