It Works On So Many Levels

These days anyone who has an e-mail account and is not a complete social cipher likely receives scores of forwarded e-mails from friends, relatives, acquaintances, and coworkers with funny stories, jokes, pictures of cute animals, appeals to join various causes, and an array of other bizarre and unusual items of interest. The speed at which information passes through these networks is staggering and instead of six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, everyone in the networked world is now linked at some point to everyone else by a chain of e-mail.

It's not often that you get to see this process unfold from the genesis. However, I was recently fortunate enough to get an inside view of the way information spreads (whether it was intended to or not) and is interpreted (and often distorted) in the cyber space age.

I imagine many of you have already seen these images of a young child with a fork implanted in his nose. If you Google "fork in nose" the first nine results link to it and if you Google "kid fork in nose" at least sixteen of the first twenty results do as well. Here are just a couple of the variety of sites that have mentioned it.

In this case, the kid in question happens to be the son of a long-time friend of mine. Back in July, shortly after the incident took place, he sent me (and others obviously) an e-mail with the pictures. I forwarded it to my wife and JB. Both assure me that our particular chain stopped there.

A week later, JB sent me an e-mail that he had received at work with the pics. The person who sent it to him had no connection to my friend. Clearly it had gone viral.

This week, I received an e-mail from a coworker with the pics. Again no connection to my friend or to the chain that JB was part of. I e-mailed my friend to advise him that his son was making the rounds and he replied:

It has been a surreal experience to watch this unfold. It was pretty funny reading the commentary at some of these websites. My two favorites are the one about my son having Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (I am pretty sure that is not the case as my wife really cut back on the hard stuff). The second was a comment on my classy nature, demonstrated by my decision to take a picture before treating my son's injury.

I am not sure what to think of this. On one hand, I am a little bummed out it got out, on the other hand, I would find the pictures pretty damn funny if someone sent them to me. Overall, it has been interesting to see how far the Internet spreads, how fast, and how inaccurately.

Just to be clear, these pictures are not fake, although it's easy to see why conspiracy theories are so popular when you read some of the comments. It you don't believe me, the good folks at Snopes have verified it.

And while my friend is many things, he is not an uncaring jerk. The picture was taken while they were waiting for medical attention.

Remember, don't believe everything you read on the Internet.