Day 212 -- is it true? or is it false?

Today I received a forwarded e-mail from an older relative. She wanted me to look through the message she'd received from a friend and tell me if it was true or not. This was one of those nasty spammy e-mails filled with bizarre, fear-mongering comments about some consumer product or other. The ones that people ask me about most often deal with food and nutrition based on my professional background.

Whenever I get one of these in my e-mail or social media, I think of some research articles I read a few years ago. Science knowledge of the average Canadian or American is not great, even though the majority of people studied had at least a high school education. This revelation led me into another article that also looked at science knowledge. This one determined that many people see science as mystery and magic. If we don't understand something, like science, as humans we go with what seems the best conclusion. I don't understand it, no one can explain it so I do understand it, so it must by something mystical. This is where conspiracy theory thrives. Seems that this is alive and well in electronic communications and not left behind in high school's rumour filled hallways <smile>.

There is another aspect of this that makes me stop and shake my head. Someone somewhere wanted this message to get out to the world -- for whatever reason. Rather than sending it through a SPAM program to millions of unknown people, all they did was send it to a small group of people they knew and those people told their friends and the number of people receiving the message grew geometrically. The time it takes for some messages to travel the world can be almost instantaneous. So -- what gives me pause is the fact that someone is getting all these others in the world to do their bidding to spread the message. Crowd-sourcing, if you will. Also, these messages never die. They continually make the rounds in e-mail or social media so that even if there were a kernel of truth once upon a time, the world has changed and that bit of truth is now a falsehood.

Oh, yes -- we all have the power to determine if a message is true or not before sending it along and inadvertently upsetting someone (like the frightened person who sent the message to me today). There are a number of places on the Web that debunk the internet rumour mill. My favourite is snopes.com.  It takes a couple minutes tops to type in the subject line of the message in question and read the true or false button. Further information is there for people who want to read the specifics.

So, where do I net out for a song to fit this? I kept hearing "believe half of what you see and none of what you hear" so that settled it for me <smile>  Enjoy!

I Heard it through the Grapevine -- Marvin Gaye