urban legends and the truth

it's really very difficult to find the truth about chain letters circulating via e-mail. the so-called urban legends or at least their modernised version.

whether these are about a baby with cancer that you can help support by forwarding the e-mail (seriously speaking i doubt there is a system that can track the e-mail over the internet and charge 2c. for every time it has been sent to a bank account) or tommy hilfiger's supposed racist comments on oprah's show. this also happens to be the most recent one i received.

the truth is that noone really has the time to check out whether these things are really true or not. this time i just did a google search for this one and found to my surprise that there are quite a few sites mentioning that the story about tomy hilfiger is untrue. i found no relative link on oprah's website (i guess there are all sorts of things related to oprah circulating on the web so is she would make a statement about each of them she would end up not having time for much more than that). in any case it seems that this story is not a real one, although you cannot know for sure.

the real fact is that everyone keeps forwarding most of the crap that arrives in their mailbox regardless of its credibility or not. and the interesting fact is how someone will never seize to exploit the human tendency to spread rumours around, for various motives, especially in the era of digital communication when spreading a rumour is really a piece of cake and hard to crosscheck how close to reality it is.

my message to everyone is to be a little bit more suspicious on all this. it might improve our lives a bit and save us from unnecessary information and discussions.