andamu

All generalizations are dangerous, including this one.

Most people old enough to remember life without email will remember the standard chain letter. The dire predictions of the woes that will befall you if you dare break the chain; the rewards you will reap if you promptly send it off to the specified number of people.

Some of these included a money-making scam, requiring you to send some cash to the previous five people on the list or whatever, but mostly it was purely and simply about ego: how many people can you get to comply and how far can your letter spread.

Now the Internet has become the medium of choice for these egomaniacs (some even megalomaniacs). Email is the obvious choice, being the direct counterpart of snail mail, and so we have seen a proliferation of true chain mail with the originators keeping score and trading accomplishments with their rivals.

Rather more nastily is the malicious side of this: most of the rationale behind spreading various viruses (viri?), worms and trojan horses is not about the precise damage that is done, but the extent to which they spread.

Since many people are too sceptical to fall for chain letters and email potentially harboring harmful code anymore, a different tack in this race of the egos started, the Forwarding Game.
The strategy is simple: Copy a nice urban legend (c.f. The Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe or the 57 cents and the Temple Baptist Church) or compile a packet of slides with wonderful sunsets or sleeping puppies ("cho chweet!"), or paste a few ancient computer cartoons together, and send it to a few hundred people. Sit back and wait while most of them cannot resist forwarding it to their friends, who in turn forward it to .... You get the idea.

"Aah, but," you say. "We are intelligent, internet and information technology savvy people of discerning taste, and we would never fall for those kinds of things. And to prove just how tuned to the web we are, check our blogs."

Enter the Meme. (1) Catchy material, hooking you into doing it. (2) Asking you to get three or five of your friends to do the same, and for them to ask their friends to do the same....

Hey, what do you know? This looks surprisingly much like yet another version of the old chain letter. And what's even better from the manipulators' viewpoint is that here no one has to guess and estimate how many people have been hooked, how wide it has spread; the suckers (including me) are displaying their gullibility plainly on their blogs, a mere search from google away to let the originators tally their spoils, and see who has been the most successful in their quest.

No doubt there are "innocent" memes out there, started by individuals who had an idea, and wanted to see what others thought. But by far the majority are the type that stroke someone's already inflated sense of self-worth, and I for one strongly dislike being manipulated.

In closing, the Ultimate Catch-22.
Getting off my soapbox, I am posting a link to a different soapbox telling you about chain mail. The problem is that it is so funny, so good and so true that you want to forward it to everyone you know. Enjoy!