Sunday, July 10, 2011

THE PROBLEM WITH FORWARDS

As any cellphone user and internet user with an e mail account will tell you, it is rather difficult to keep an inbox clean with the amount of rubbish that floods in every day in the form of unwanted mails. While one can sift through the chaff and consign the usual offers for credit cards and bargains to the trash bin, there are also a large number of mails sent by known people in the form of ‘forwards’. Usually, these over-zealous people trying so hard to be friendly, fail to appreciate the nuisance value of these mails. As a member of an e-group comprising a large number of members, I am privileged to receive various forwards, sent by one or the other member, however it has to be said in all fairness that it is only a few who have cultivated the habit of sending forwards into a fine art.

While it can be argued that this is one way of keeping in touch, the base issue here is that senders of forwards invariably fail to appreciate the attendant problems. The headaches start when people send forwards without thinking. “Forward bombing” is perhaps a close description of what happens when you receive a deluge of mails in your in-box all from the same sender. Senders fail to realize that when the recipient finds too many e mails from the same person, all of them forwards and completely irrelevant, the sender’s credibility takes a beating, something like another person talking too much whenever you come across them. Makes you want to avoid them.

Most forwards have gone around so many times that they are like the same stale jokes rehearsed and trotted out by the wannabe life of the party. You smile politely and even try to cough out a light laugh, while inwardly you groan at the inflicted punishment. Let me run through some of the commonly observed nuisance perpetrated by forwards.

Hoaxes. So many forwards are pure hoaxes which can be ascertained in a jiffy if the sender would only take the trouble. A few days ago I received photos of a Flying Hotel, the Hotelicopter. All that it took to see through the hoax, was to open another tab and google hotelicopter. The same photos that my friend had sent me, appeared along with the words Hoax. How come there’s no site for online booking of suites for a weekend stay in the flying hotel. Did it not occur to the sender that a helicopter can’t fly very far and has to come down to earth every hour or so. Some stories like those of exploding cellphones have been doing the rounds for years. Despite the myth having been exploded publicly, people still try to circulate photos of milk guzzling Ganeshas. There was even an alarming message that did the rounds recently and was circulated on mobile phones through SMSes that the Sea Link had developed cracks. Fortunately that hoax was exposed quickly. On another occasion I received a message advising me not to travel to Mahim as riots had broken out in that area.


Unverified Information. Another favorite is to send info without bothering to verify the authenticity. A few days ago I received a forwarded mail with some remarks ascribed to Chester Nimitz, the great American wartime Admiral. A quick search of Nimitz’s quotations revealed that he had never made such remarks and it was probably someone trying to create a newsworthy story. The story had done its rounds and was available for anyone on the net to “Copy & paste”. Shortly after the 2G scam had been exposed and the minister of telecom A Raja was arrested, stories of his amassed wealth began to circulate. I received a mail with photos of Raja’s fabulously luxurious villa reportedly built on the outskirts of Hyderabad. While I had no doubt that Raja could easily afford a house as expensive as that shown, somehow I could not link the style, the elegance, aesthetics and taste, so evident in those photos, with Shri A Raja. That house just wasn’t him. Sure enough, I came across those photos again but this time in an interiors magazine, in a photo shoot credited to a house in Montecito, California.

Repeated To Death. While once I sincerely read the presentations on self improvement forwarded by friends, but over a period of time I find myself reading the same thing over and over again. By now I must have viewed the series of photographs titled “Inside The Tube” a half dozen times along with so many other “Simple Joys of Life”, “The Beauty of Nature”, “Earth at Her Best”, “Wonders Of The World”, “Temple Made Of Bottles”, “Sculpted Garden”, “Lifelike Advertisements”, “Amazing Bridges” and so on. I would love to download some of these beautiful pictures to use in my presentations, but they are invariably in ‘.pps’ format and one can do nothing but gaze at them vacantly. Naughty pictures too, like the one of ‘Eye Catching T Shirt Slogans’ and other eye candies, have also been circulated ad nauseum and now seem juvenile. Well certainly no one’s getting any younger so perhaps they really are kiddish now.

I made the mistake of mildly suggesting to a regular sender of forwards in my e group, that he could consider sending more ‘real’ photos one could relate to, like pics taken during our training days, places served, important occasions etc rather than those taken of unknown places by professionals. I was ticked off rather stuffily that of the more than 300 members of our group, many had appreciated his forwards and that I was free to press the ‘Delete’ button if I didn’t like them, but don’t dare suggest that these forwards were anything but the best. Wow, what a mouthful! What part of the delete button didn’t I know about? I don’t think my reply, “Ok, cool” went down too well.

Jokes that once seemed priceless now appear silly, having read them so many times over. No doubt the limitless expanse of the net is a fertile field for jokes and I do marvel at the ingenuity of people who can come up with such priceless gems guaranteed to make you crack up. But still, everything must run its full circle. In this case the circle of life goes around many times.
Senders of forwards would do well, at the very least, to delete names and details of earlier senders and recipients, lest their e mail ids be trawled by marketing companies trying to push everything from low cost holidays to credit cards. I have seen mails with complete details of earlier senders, their names, addresses and telephone numbers, including some addresses from the defence services. Placing such details in an unrestricted environment is not the wisest thing to do. You never know when someone may use those details for malafide activities like phishing.

Surely all internet users must be aware of the problems of virus, cookies, spyware, worms and other creepy crawlies that abound the net. No prudent internet user would open an attachment unless sure of the sender and the contents of the attachment. If not, its time to wake up and smell the coffee, the net is not as safe a place as one might imagine. Nor is the information one reads on the net as authentic as one would like it to be. It is not the purpose of this article to do down those who send forwards in good faith, rather to make them aware that like in any other interaction, there is a measure of etiquette involved and one must be aware of the nuisance it causes when one breaches that fine line crossing over into the realm of boorishness.

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