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NSF Research Reveals Chain Letter Travel Patterns
alphadogg writes to tell us that the NSF is researching chain letters and how they travel. The results aren't quite what one might expect, showing a pattern of more selective and circuitous travel. "One surprising finding was that messages often took meandering routes between people who knew each other, often through as many as 100 intermediaries. Many email users also received copies from multiple social groups. The researchers concluded that because messages come from many directions, there's ample opportunity for the messages to be edited along the way."
Course, if it's something more scientific in nature, you might have to go to a major research university website... Oh, wait, half of those are technically government websites, too. Hmm.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Someone stole one of your articles.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I used to get those from one particular friend until I started sending point-by-point responses with links to government websites that actually gave the real facts behind the conservative hype.
And liberal hype?
To the extent it's meaningful or productive, I could categorise myself as leaning left, but I won't. Idealogues of any type are embarrassing, even when you sympathise with some of their views.
In the past I've had a number of seemingly intelligent, well-mannered, and good-intentioned friends include me in their distribution lists, thinking I'd be receptive to their advocacy-message-of-the-day. I tolerated it with an occasional chuckle for a while until I discovered my name was being add to the distributions lists of other seemingly intelligent, well-mannered and good-intentioned people, people who were complete strangers.
The situation wasn't unlike sending a mail to subscriber-only mailing lists and have someone reply using an attribution style that includes the full name and mail address of the person they're quoting. Now the concept of the routinely putting everyone's name and email address in the body of an email may not cause any lightbulbs to turn on for the average person, but correlating having one's email address published all over the web with an increased level of SPAM, should. At least one would hope so.
To make a long story short, I did eventually (after much effort) get my name removed from all these bulk mailings, but not before I was deluged with SPAM and forced into abandoning my email account. Now I think twice before giving anyone my email address, seemingly intelligent, good-intentioned friends especially. It's a shame, really. What gets passed around by email by groups of people may not be interesting in itself, but seeing what people are doing with their spare time can be a hoot.