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Forwards Could Hurt You

Written back when memes were spread primarily via email, this also applies to social networks. Retired people are definitely not the only meme-addicts, sites like Kik and Quotev are havens for meme-addicted high school and college students. Youtube is full of dumb comments from all ages spreading memes, especially the one or two-line stale joke variety.

Edits will reflect this.

 

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Forwards Could Hurt You

 

forwards could hurt you

Kevin Cowherd

December 14, 2007

Baltimore Sun

 

Here's the message I'm trying to get out to friends and acquaintances these days: Don't send or share any more stupid Internet jokes that everyone else has already shared to infinity. For every person who may still be new to the net and thinking they are crazy hilarious, there are a billion others who've seen them a zillion times and are sick up to here with them, and of those billion, 99% are just too timid to speak their minds and call out "STOP ALREADY!"

 

Don't share any more videos with the subject line "YOU GOTTA SEE THIS!" that show a frightened deer leaping across six lanes of interstate traffic or a cute 5-year-old landing a 600-pound shark on his dad's fishing boat.

 

Don't share another "HEALTH ALERT!" about the latest killer staph infection or another "COMPUTER ALERT!" about the latest virus that's going to wipe out my hard drive, or panic message screeching that some free platform like Facebook or Twitter are going to start charging for their use, or shutting down due to overpopulation of inactive users.

 

Don't share another "BRAIN TEASER!" that asks me to jot down how many times a week I'd like to dine out in a restaurant, then add, multiply and subtract certain other figures to somehow arrive at - ta-daa! - my age.

 

This is not quite as amusing as you think it is.

 

Plus I get freaked out by having to do all that math.

 

What else don't I want you to share?

 

OK, don't share anything tagged "THIS IS IMPORTANT!" about how next Monday, everyone's cell phone number will suddenly become available to telemarketers. These always turn out to be a crock and people get all worked up for nothing.

 

Don't share anything titled "A FRIEND IS ..." or "YOU KNOW YOU'RE A BALTIMORON IF ..." followed by a long list of qualities or traits that friends or, um, Baltimorons supposedly possess.

 

And don't ever, ever share one of those gooey inspirational memes where I'm supposed to read it and send it off to 10 other people within five minutes in order to have fortune smile upon us. Because I will hunt you down and make you pay, if not in the literal sense, it will be done in the literary sense. Do you really want to be a character who gets a terrible demise in a piece of fiction I write?

 

In fact, let's sum up all of the above by saying this: Don't share anything ever again if it's from a friend of a friend, because that always adds up to being a meme AKa chain letter.

 

No matter how cute, clever, important or uplifting you think it is, don't share it, OK?

 

I say this because my internet experience is causing my nerves to reach the breaking point with this stuff.

 

Every day I have to wade through dozens of these dopey e-mails just to get to the e-mails I actually need to read. Every day my friends make their profiles and timelines look exactly the same with all this meaningless content they saw shared on their friends' social networks.

 

And that's not counting all the other junk mail I have to wade through: the one from the swell guy in Sierra Leone who wants to give me $5 mil to move his inheritance into this country; the one from the Ukrainian woman who saw my profile online and wants to meet me (trust me, hon, you'll be disappointed); the one announcing I've won the grand prize (800,000 euros!) in the big Netherlands lottery.

 

So your jokes, videos, brain-teasers, etc. are just adding to the clutter. And my head's about to explode.

 

All I do for hours every day is waste time by looking at these dopey meme re-shares and hitting the delete key on my email or scrolling through friends profiles, hoping to find even one thing worth while.

 

I hit the delete or scroll key so much I now have some kind of tendonitis in that finger.

 

The finger is swollen to, I don't know, 10 times the size of my other fingers. It throbs constantly.

 

Is there even a name for that sort of injury? Computer finger? I'm not trying to make more of this than it is, but "computer finger" really doesn't get at the essence of the injury.

 

Friends, first of all, let me say this: I'm glad you're enjoying your youth or retirement.

 

And it's really great to hear from you - just not every five minutes in the form of some re-share.

 

Finally, I'm happy you got that new computer from Dell or phone from Verizon or wherever, and it sure does work well, though unfortunately, especially the function that lets you re-share pseudo-interesting things from the Internet.

 

But the fact is, some of the people you send this stuff to are occupied with other things, off and online.

 

And between work, family commitments, and online activities that are actually useful productive and sometimes fun , these people still lead rather busy lives.

 

Which means they just don't have the time or energy to, you know, read all those jokes and look at all those videos and study all those brain-teasers you have so kindly been sharing.

 

So maybe you teens, college students, and retired folks might want to lighten up a great deal on the volume of friend of a friend stuff you re-share, so people don't go completely insane having to cull through it all every day.

 

Maybe you could even think about not sharing anything at all that comes from your friends of friends emails and social networks, and just savoring it yourself.

 

I'm sure this would be fine with your friends, who ... oh, look at that!

 

Even as I write this, the little icon at the bottom of the screen lit up, indicating I have a new e-mail or someone's just posted to a social network I'm on.

 

Well, let's open it up and take a peek, shall we?

 

Uh-oh. It's from a college-age/middle-aged friend.

 

"HAVE FUN WITH THIS QUIZ (BUT NO PEEKING!)" it says.

 

It's multiple-choice. The first question is: "What  builds strong bodies 12 ways?"

 

I'm going to say d) Wonder Bread.

 

Because the other choices are just ridiculous.

 

 

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No, forget that, I'm just going to say scrap it and toss the stupid quiz altogether...!

 

 

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