Mindless Forwarding

With the advent of Facebook and WhatsApp, we all seem to have become instantly more knowledgeable as we receive a high dosage of information on our mobile phones, from a variety of sources, which includes so many text messages and multimedia messages. Call it forwarding, tagging or sharing, there is such an overload of information that we hardly find the time to go through all these forwards. However, this is the trend and we need to learn to cope with it.

As I was trying to figure out why people are so keen on sharing, I realised that all of us have innate need to keep in touch with our friends and most of us find these Medias helpful to serve the purpose. Every time we send out a message to a group, a list or an individual person, our name appears on their mobile screen and we find it as a way of reassuring our friends that we remember them.

No doubt many of the forwards we receive are interesting. Some are humorous, some are serious, some are informative, some are brain teasers, some are pranks, and some are sentimental stories and so many other genres of messages.

All these are perfectly OK. What worries me is the number of hoax messages that gets mindlessly forwarded. Every technology could be used for a good purpose or a bad purpose. So naturally we find that there are people who use these technologies for wrong purpose. They use it to propagate false information, pet ideologies and sometimes to manipulate the receiver to believe in some information which may not be true.

Sometimes, we receive some alarming message, such as a bomb threat, a virus outbreak or a disaster warning.  When we receive such messages, we instantly tend to forward it to our friends or groups, as a way of saying we care. But most often these messages are hoax and it just triggers a panic button, causing more harm than good.

Sometimes we receive some messages, which seem to be beneficial to the society and we tend to forward these messages with a good intention that the information will be of use to our friends and relatives, but again the fact is most of these are misleading.

Few months back, I received a forward stating that, “If you have left over food, after any marriage functions or party, you can dial a particular number and inform them about the excess food. They will come and collect the food and pass it on to the poor people who are hungry for food”. I felt that it was a good cause and I wanted to forward it to my circle of friends. But before that, I thought let me call the number and check out more details about this. So, I called this number. To my shock the phone call was attend by one police personnel. It was a police hotline number. When I asked the person him about this, he was not aware and he became suspicious about my call and started pondering me for more details. After, I explained everything clearly he understood the context and warned me not to believe in such hoax messages and not to mindlessly forward such messages. It was a good learning for me.

So irrespective of either it is a good message or a bad message, please take caution before forwarding. People can easily manipulate the truth, by creating false evidence. Half-baked knowledge is more dangerous than lies. Don’t believe any messages, on the face of it. Do some research on the internet and find the truth.

Let us make sure we do not engage in mindless forwarding.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Sep 2014