Urban Legends and the Internet

A dire warning.
A bump in the night.
The sweet and morbid pleasure of watching the errant fall to their just punishment.

In a culture growing increasingly more dependent on research and technology, folklore and fable may seem like an antiquated concept; mythology a quaint relic of the past. Yet in the onslaught of our speeding, manufactured, global culture, one folk form swells, feeding off of our frenzy, our fame, and our fear. Like kudzu choking the breath out of a sleeping child, nothing thrills and chills us like the urban legend. And in the great unknown of our mechanized world, the urban legend has taken a firm root. Along with our knowledge and our nonsense, our fears made a home in the internet.

The internet is hailed by some as the downfall of intimate civilization and its savior by others, but none can deny the broad and complex effects it has brought to our lives. Perhaps the most fundamental and meaningful change has been to the very nature of our communication: whereas children of the past may have no one to talk to but their family and classmates, today's youth can reach an unlimited audience with minimal effort. For good or ill, the ways of communication have changing, and thus folk changes with it.

Unlike most folk narrative, urban legends have long had an intimacy with the written word. Like a virus leaps from host to host to spread infection, an urban legend often lies dormant in a printed source, waiting for willing hosts to come and read it. The text is distributed, the tale devoured, and the readers in turn transmit the tale to others orally. Indeed, the very term "urban legend" was coined by the columnist and folklorist Jan Brunvand in his popular column on legends. But what happens when the printed source becomes the oration? What happens when the legend need not lie dormant, but can spread to countless hosts in seconds?

The internet teems with urban legends, transmissions compounding exponentially in a matter of milliseconds. These new mediums are breeding grounds for urban legends; one simply cannot escape the presence of the urban legend online. There is a symbiosis at work.

Urban Legends and Liminality
This symbiotic encouragement is due to the fact that the internet is an extremely liminal place. Legends are traditionally told in extremely liminal spaces: camps, locker rooms, dorms, late at night, when the lights are low... there is an aura of mystery, and a sense of the unknown. The participants are usually highly susceptible to superstition, and may not know each other well.
The internet increases this sense of the unknown, the unknowable: You can be whoever you want online; there is no assurance of the identity of the speaker. All identifying characteristics melt away: Age, sex, appearance, and class are impossible to determine. (Perhaps the only marker left is education, as witnessed through someone's writing level.) In this way, the internet is the supreme liminal place, removing all identifiers and leaving only thought. In this great void of the unknown, anyone -- if phrased correctly -- can be an authority.
This liminal structure immensely encourages urban legends: legends are almost insanely prolific online. I suggest this may has to do with the influence the internet has had over our lives, the changes it has created among us -- and people's feelings about those things. The method of a legend transmission might be through liminality, but the motivator is much more sinister: Fear. The internet is emotionally charged with society's fears.
Legends are all about fear -- fear of being bad, fear of society and societal punishment, fear of death; urban legends reflect our deepest fears in a way that makes them easy to grasp and handle. They reassure us that we are good, and safe from these punishments. If the girl in the legend died because she was promiscuous and making out in a car, the good, non-promiscuous girl has nothing to fear. The promiscuous girl is punished and society is safe; evil thwarted with a warning to stay good. Especially in times of great change and turmoil, legends are needed reiterate cultural values and mores, to mete out punishment to the wicked and justify the behavior of the normal.

As legends reflect some of our deepest fears, the more shocking a legend, the more effective it can be. An example is a popular legend that warns against being too literal with small children: A mother, frustrated by her young son's reluctance to potty train, tells him "If you pee in your pants one more time, I'll cut it off." A while later, she hears a scream, to find that the elder daughter has cut her little brother's penis off, as he wet himself. "I was just doing what you said," the daughter says. There are variants that continue with the mother running over the daughter in her haste to get the son to the hospital, and both children die, further punishing the mother for her societal sins. Grotesque, yes, but it serves a subtle lesson that is not soon forgotten.


Personal/Impersonal

Along with the need for liminality, there seems to be a need for legends to be told personally and impersonally at the same time. Much as we know the other children at camp but do not know them personally or really trust them, we tend to find legends in places on the internet that seem to be personal, but in reality are not, such as email forwards. This may have a lot to do with false authority syndrome -- we have to know a source well enough to trust it (or assume trust through the manner of transmission) yet we are disinclined to hear legends from those very close to us. This may be that, if the teller is too intimate with us, we may fear his/her condemnation through the moral of the legend; if they are too personal, the warning is not to society, but to us specifically -- and that is too scary to handle. Therefore, we trust relative strangers: advice columnists, newsgroup members, email acquaintances to provide us with the cultural morality that our friends cannot.
In the same way that it helps reinforce cultural mores, the shroud of impersonality also protects the teller of the legend; if the legend is found later to be a hoax, the teller does not seem stupid, for it is a culturally accepted story. He was not "tricked" nor was he tricking the audience -- for even if false, the urban legend still imparts a powerful cultural lesson, or the "moral" of the legend.

 

Fear of Anonymity

Yet again, fears arise because of this impersonal medium. The very medium is both reassuring and frightening: Despite the intimacy that one may experience with other people online, there is no real way of knowing just who is on the other end of the connection: criminals and children, parents and priests are all given an equal share in this highly anonymous field. It is a strange and exciting new medium: a place where one can truly be judged on one's intellectual character, free from the biases of age, race, gender and background. Yet like all new and empowering advances, it is also terrifying. Much like women's liberation or racial integration, the world-wide integration of the internet threatens existing social standards and forms. This fear is manifested more tangibly in the possibility of connecting -- intellectually -- with someone completely inappropriate physically. This is exemplified in an internet-variant of an old "mistaken identity" legend: A young woman repeatedly engages in cyber-sex with a man online, though they never reveal their true names to each other. Over the course of a year, their relationship grows so intimate that they fall in love decide to meet; upon renting a hotel room and fumbling around in the dark, the woman is horrified to discover that her mystery lover is, in fact, her own father.

This legend plays to our worst fears and suspicions about the internet: that even unknowingly, this open, anonymous medium will hurt us if we embrace it. What may seem to be wonderful and healthy, such as a new love, may be as sick and corrupted as incest.
The very anonymity that allows us to impart legends also frightens us, and motivates our desire to do so. It becomes a cyclical enouragement: Liminality is both the means and the method of legend transmission.

Fear of Technology

There are a number of internet-specific legends: that is, legends that get transmitted online, but rarely in another text medium or orally. Most of these sorts of legends are transmitted via email forwards -- a seemingly personal medium, so that one might be inclined to trust the legend-teller, and therefore, the legend. These are usually just variants of older legends, but mutated in such a way to assuage our fears about the new medium. Society is nervous about all these rapid changes: although the internet has allowed us to connect with others far away, and offered new forms of communication, it also carries with it fears. The Big Tech Crash at the end of the 1990s made the average Internet user cynical about the future. [Like the depression? Parallel?] Questions loom in everyone's minds: Will the new globalization destroy individual's identity? Will we lose all of our privacy? Will the government and big businesses run our lives? People look to legends to comfort themselves against these speculated villains, and against general worries about society. Urban legends reinforce cultural values, and give people something to reassure themselves as they look to an uncertain future. The following show the cultural usage of internet-specific legends and their parallels among non-internet legend types.


Fear: Virii and Hoaxes

The virus warning is one of the more persistent internet legends. They read very much like biological virus legends -- AIDS Mary, pinprick attacks, etc. -- in that they manifest the fears that arise out of a nervous public. They reflect a general anxiety towards society and the unknown which lurks in it. As legitimate viruses are often made by computer users who consider themselves "better" than the average person (or simply bored hackers), creating hoax virus warnings might be a way of expressing fears. The public fears that "Someone Is Going To Get You," and by creating the hoax, they "fight back" against these nameless, faceless boogeymen. Those who spread hoaxes simply cannot distinguish between real dangers and imaginary ones, choosing to mistrust everything, as our easily frightening, danger-conscious society often teaches. Computers have become an extension of ourselves and our lives; we rely on them for many commonplace but highly important daily tasks. We are just as afraid to take something "into" our computers as we are to take something "into" our bodies. Compare this AIDS Needle legend with a virus hoax legend:

PLEASE CHECK YOUR CHAIRS WHEN GOING TO THE MOVIE THEATRES!!!!

An incident occurred when a friend's co-worker went to sit in a chair and something was poking her. She then got up and found that it was a needle with a little note at the end. It said, "Welcome to the real world, you're "HIV POSITIVE".

Doctors tested the needle and it was HIV POSITIVE. We don't know which theatre this happened at, but it happened in Hawaii.

"BE CAUTIOUS WHEN GOING TO THE MOVIES!"
IF YOU MUST GO TO THE MOVIES, PLEASE, PLEASE CHECK!!!!! One of the safest way is NOT sticking your hands between the seats, but moving the seat part way up and down a few times and REALLY LOOK!!!!!!! Most of us just plop down into the seats.

-

PLEASE, SEND THIS INFORMATION TO EVERY PERSON IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK. IF YOU RECEIVE AN E-MAIL THAT READS "UPGRADE INTERNET2" DO NOT OPEN IT, AS IT CONTAINS AN EXECUTABLE NAMED "PERRI.EXE" IT WILL ERASE ALL THE DATA IN YOUR HARD DRIVE AND IT WILL STAY IN MEMORY.

EVERY TIME THAT YOU UPLOAD ANY DATA, IT WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY ERASED AND YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE YOUR COMPUTER AGAIN. THIS INFORMATION WAS PUBLISHED LAST THURSDAY, 10 AUGUST 2000 IN THE CNN WEB SITE. THIS IS A VERY DANGEROUS VIRUS. TO THIS DATE, THERE IS NO KNOWN ANTIVIRUS PROGRAM FOR THIS PARTICULAR VIRUS.

PLEASE, FORWARD THIS INFORMATION TO YOUR FRIENDS, SO THAT THEY WILL BE ON THE ALERT. ALSO CHECK THE LIST BELOW, SENT BY IBM, WITH THE NAMES OF SOME E-MAILS THAT, IF RECEIVED, SHOULD NOT BE OPENED AND MUST BE DELETED IMMEDIATELY, BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN ATTACHED VIRUSES. THIS WAY YOUR COMPUTER WILL BE SAVED.
THE TITLES ARE: [deleted]

ONCE AGAIN DO NOT OPEN THESE E-MAILS AND PASS THIS INFORMATION ON TO YOUR FRIENDS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Both legends caution against a probable (if not highly likely) danger: an attack from an anonymous villain, which destroys the unsuspecting innocent. These are anxious times, with lives being made and broken over technological issues, many of which the common person does not understand. In the 1980s, when the AIDS legends were the most popular, the common man didn't really understand the technical aspects of the AIDS virus and how it was transmitted, or that it was a virus in the first place -- they merely knew something Bad was happening. There is a tangible fear of invasion in these tales: AIDS invaded the body and destroyed it, without chance for reprieve. As computers become more integrated into the home-life of people, they become an extension of the body itself: increasingly, our society relies on computers for every function of daily life. A computer virus is feared to have the power to not only corrupt a computer, but completely destroy lives, much like AIDS. Bad Things are out there, that the common man cannot describe or truly put a face upon; he fears them, and fears their invasion into his life.
People want to defend themselves from the Bad Things, and feel like their small attacks make a difference; transmitting urban legends give them a chance to feel strong, and in control of the situation, merely by telling a story and giving a warning.


Greed: Something for Nothing


Besides fear, nothing stirs the human emotions like greed. And the something-for-nothing legends are therefore incredibly popular, a close second to the charity legends. The first form still have to do with anger directed against society (and Big Corporations) and manifests itself in an online version of a popular old legend: the Neiman-Markus Cookie:

My daughter & I had just finished a salad at Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas & decided to have a small dessert. Because our family are such cookie lovers, we decided to try the "Neiman-Marcus Cookie". It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe and they said with a small frown, "I'm afraid not." Well, I said, would you let me buy the recipe? With a cute smile, she said, "Yes." I asked how much, and she responded, "Two fifty." I said with approval, just add it to my tab.

Thirty days later, I received my VISA statement from Neiman-Marcus and it was $285.00. I looked again and I remembered I had only spent $9.95 for two salads and about $20.00 for a scarf. As I glanced at the bottom of the statement, it said, "Cookie Recipe - $250.00." Boy, was I upset!! I called Neiman's Accounting Dept. and told them the waitress said it was "two fifty," and I did not realize she meant $250.00 for a cookie recipe.

The legend then goes on to detail how the woman "then gave the recipe to all her friends, hoping they would get some pleasure from it," and reprints a chocolate chip cookie recipe. In older variants, it would often be posted on physical bulletin boards and newsletters; it became a newsgroup-posted legend, and is nowadays transmitted mostly by email forwarding. Indeed, this legend is incredibly old, having been told about $25 Fudge Cakes, Red Velvet Cake at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Mrs. Fields' cookie recipe, it persists even now. The legend urges you to continue distributing the recipe, as a revenge for the unwary consumer; her misfortune is turned into a legendary dish best served cold.

It enables the little guy, the common man, to attack Big Business; since Corporations are feared to prey upon society, here is a way to get even. (Meanwhile reinforcing the moral that if a woman eats out, instead of making her own desserts, she will be punished for it.) It evokes feelings that the average person can cause the downfall of the rich, and can combat authority -- especially relevant on the internet, which can be feared to be a control of authority. The Big Businesses are feared to have taken control over what goes into the body, such simple food, to the point that they may control the unwitting housewife. The legend serves to help "reclaim" food for the individual's body, and encourages others to do so.

All these emotional catharses are well and good, but the legend ends up damaging the victim corporations. Debbi Fields signed a statement that the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe was never sold (although she now sells her entire cookbook for about $10 on her website) and the Neiman-Markus company has had to combat the negative feelings born from the slander. In response to the legend, they formulated a cookie to sell in their restaurants, yet distribute the recipe for free!

 

Greed: Free Money

The second sort of something-for-nothing legends are the "free money" legends. Although companies do often run promotions for free items, coupons, and giveaways, these legends promise incredibly huge rewards for doing nothing: simply forwarding an email is almost always the action requested. In real promotions, a consumer must generally visit a store, make a minimal purchase, or register for the company's mailing list. These legends require nothing of the participant, save to spread the legend. Bill Gates/Microsoft is the most frequent subject of these legends:

Hello everybody,

My name is Bill Gates. I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. I am experimenting with this and I need your help. Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people everyone on the list will receive $1000 at my expense.
Enjoy.

Your friend,
Bill Gates

While this is the most widely spread legend, others have arisen about various clothing manufacturers (The Gap/Abercrombie & Fitch) promising free clothes, computer companies (IBM) promising free computers, candy companies with pounds of chocolate, and other major retailers; they only tend to arise about companies that are felt to be incredibly wealthy. Most of the business targeted are Fortune 500 companies, obvious symbols of wealth. The purpose of these sorts of legends, these pots of fairy gold, are to help reconcile the consumer's feelings about said companies. These legends make it seem like the big corporations are not the bad guys: they must want to give you free stuff, since they have so much extra money lying around. The morality implies that it is fine to "rob" these companies, to take something for nothing, since they already have taken so much from our culture. They de-villainize the giants by making them benevolent dictators. Interestingly enough, although the people who transmit these legends might be yearning for comfort from authority, the end result of the legends is to stick a thorn in the side of these companies: to force them to spend revenue combating the urban legends.

 

Glory: Charity Legends

Feeding off of the public's desire to paint major corporations as benevolent and cling to notions of goodwill are the insidious charity legends. These both help foster the illusion that all of society is benign and helpful, and help the participants to a share of this glory: They can be desktop heroes.

Charity legends, much like warning legends, arise out of a similar desire to control the fear of the times. Yet even though they have positive intentions, they result in negative outcomes. The charitable intent ends up being malicious: from simply spamming inboxes and wasting people's time, to causing real charity organizations to waste time and funding by combating them. Certain legends have end results of making a charity organization (such as the American Cancer Society) seem negative because it cannot fulfill the impossible promises of the legend, such as donating a dollar for every email sent. Hospitals and charities waste money combating them, families have had to move because of the constant attention. They victimize certain individuals for the sake of that "good feeling" the legend participants feel.

One of the most widely circulated charity legends is that of the sick/dying child with a request for cards. These are merely new, digital variants of an old urban legend, that would circulate through columns, church bulletins, office bulletin boards, and other semi-personal text mediums. In 1989, Craig Shergold, a boy battling cancer, did indeed try to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most greeting cards received -- and he succeeded, in 1990, a scant year later. Since then, he has fully recovered and is a healthy college student, and Guinness has retired that category -- yet the legend persists. And persists.

The family was swamped by well-wishing cards for years, and would continue to be, had they not had to move. There continues to be such a volume of mail that the former Shergold home was granted the British equivalent of its own postal code! Not only has the family been bothered by the influence of the legend, but many variants attach the Make-A-Wish Foundation to Shergold, an organization that he (or any of the other variant children) never contacted. The Make-A-Wish foundation is so beset by requests for information about Shergold and variants that they have both set up an 800 number for people to call, as well as a webpage detailing their lack of involvement with Craig Shergold, Amy Bruce, or any other supposedly sick children.

Another sort of sick child legend does not originate with any true card-desiring child, but provides a similar "feel-good" reward for its transmission, and involves major corporations. A typical one of these legends read like the "Jessica Mydek" variant:

Cancer research money, guys . . . not much effort.

LITTLE JESSICA MYDEK IS SEVEN YEARS OLD AND IS SUFFERING FROM AN ACUTE AND VERY RARE CASE OF CEREBRAL CARCINOMA. THIS CONDITION CAUSES SEVERE MALIGNANT BRAIN TUMORS AND IS A TERMINAL ILLNESS. THE DOCTORS HAVE GIVEN HER SIX MONTHS TO LIVE.

AS PART OF HER DYING WISH, SHE WANTED TO START A CHAIN LETTER TO INFORM PEOPLE OF THIS CONDITION AND TO SEND PEOPLE THE MESSAGE TO LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST AND ENJOY EVERY MOMENT, A CHANCE THAT SHE WILL NEVER HAVE.

FURTHERMORE, THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY AND SEVERAL CORPORATE SPONSORS HAVE AGREED TO DONATE THREE CENTS TOWARD CONTINUING CANCER RESEARCH FOR EVERY NEW PERSON THAT GETS FORWARDED THIS MESSAGE. PLEASE GIVE JESSICA AND ALL CANCER VICTIMS A CHANCE.

SEND A COPY OF THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW AND ONE TO THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY AT
ACS@AOL.COM

The seemingly "official" bulletin, plus a "hand-written" admonishment tagged on, to both trigger feelings of false authority and personality, and the promise of the "donation" cause one to feel good for doing, really, nothing. There is a plethora of variants of this, including a Tamara Martin version that includes a personal statement from famous musician, Dave Matthews:

HI! This is Dave Matthews from The Dave Matthews Band (duh). I got America Online just a little while ago and my screenname will be sent to you if you pass this on. I get a list of the people who send this to at least another 5 people online and my secratary will send all of you my screenname.

I go online at least once a week. The reason I am doing this is because this little girl needs our help and I thought that I could use my fame to help out this sick little girl.

Sadly, the American Cancer Society (and other organizations that are named in variants) have wasted resources dealing with these legends, much like the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Thousands of people waste their time and bandwidth by outpouring sympathy for a fictitious child, instead of actually working to support the causes of cancer research. They are "armchair heroes" in their minds. They want to stand up against the big Bad Things, and although these legends are ultimately pointless (or outright destructive) they continue, since they soothe the conscience of the masses.

Online petitions are another way for people to feel good doing essentially nothing; paper petitions are rarely effective, no matter how well organized, and e-petitions -- easily forged and usually badly-written -- aren't worth the bandwidth it takes to distribute them. Why, then, do people pour so much emotion and effort into something worthless? It's another form of catharsis; people can feel good, express their fears and anger, and feel like they're striking a blow against the Bad Things... all with minimal effort. The inherent tragedy of these legends and letters is that while they may be effective emotional relief, they do nothing to combat the problem. They are an outlet for the symptoms of fear, not a fight to cure it. Even worse, some legitimate charities, such as The Hunger Site and its affiliates are discounted as legends, when they actually do make a difference.

Conclusion

Urban legends have taken on a new life the internet, as the use of the internet has become widespread. The cultural implications of the internet, as well as technical considerations encourage the transmission of legends: the internet is an extremely liminal place, with many forms of communication that are both intimate and easy-to-use, yet removed enough to be impersonal. Legends are the manifestations of our fears about society: fears about morality changing as technology changes, fears about identity, fears about the body, fears about Bad Things, fears about death. The very anonymity of the internet, which helps the legends to spread, scares us.

The freedom itself scares us: our culture is not yet certain how it will react and adapt to this new social form. We fear invasion of the body and community; we fear control by those more powerful than us. By transmitting urban legends, we can relieve our emotions, though often at the expense of others; legends can make the average person feel like they have power and control over something in the midst of an uncertain world. Legends can attack the Bad Guys, comfort the sick, reward the righteous, and punish the wicked -- all of it imaginary, but effective emotional catharsis nonetheless. Urban legends are the triumph of traditional morality, even in the newest mediums.

 

Resources:

AFU & Urban Legends Archive:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/

alt.folklore.urban FAQ:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/afu.faq/index.html

Brunvand, Jan Harold:
The Vanishing Hitchhiker, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981
The Mexican Pet, New York: W. W. Norton, 1986
Curses! Broiled Again, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989

American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org/docroot/med/content/med_6_1_chain_e-mail.asp

Guinness Book of World Records: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/faqs/FAQ_Answer.asp?ID=13

Make-A-Wish Foundation:
http://www.wish.org/home/chainletters.htm

Mrs. Fields:
http://www.mrsfields.com/gifts/?idx=10

Nieman-Markus:
http://www.neimanmarcus.com/store/service/nmAbout.jhtml#cookie

The Hunger Site:
http://www.thehungersite.com

The Seven Basic Types of Chain-Letters: http://www.arachnophiliac.com/hoax/7_Types.htm

Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com

Symantec:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/upgrade.internet.2.hoax.html

Urban Legend Zeitgeist:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/

back