"Hi my name is Amy Bruce, I am 7yrs old and I have a large tumor on my brain and severe lung cancer. The doctors say I will die soon if this isn't fixed, and my family can't pay the bill's. The Make A Wish Foundation has agreed to donate $7 for every time this message is sent on. For those of you who send this along, I Thank You so much. But for those who don't send it, I will pray for you. Please put this as your status for an hour"
-repeated countless times on my Facebook newsfeed this evening
Are you kidding me? I read this once and it sounded fishy. Rather than repost a status about this ailing young child who desperately needs my help, I googled the name Amy Bruce. I figured if she was real, ABC or some news network would have snatched this story up and made a heartfelt Sunday night special out of it. However, the first link that came up under the search was to a website that debunked the message as spam. It originally went around via email in the 1990's. Now, it has reappeared via new media (Facebook).
In the first 10 pages of Barlow's "An Introduction to the Blogs", he outlines the public sphere in terms of the blog. One of his essential points is that a blog brings power back to the people or the bloggers about what their main topics will be. This power is taken from the media who would otherwise report about what they want the public to talk about. Now, the public has gained control on what will become buzz.
Here's my question. What if the buzz is completely worthless? Some of this is a waste of time, time I don't have to be wasting away. Spam occurs on blogs too. As does sudden yet short-lived trends on topics most people could care less about. What about when posts are made and they are somewhat idiotic? There was literally no factual basis in the above quote. Yet people took it as true and passed it on. Blogs are a place for us to learn from one another. But what happens when what we're teaching others isn't even true? I don't know. I guess we'll find out.
All I know is I hate spam with an intense passion.
I saw this same post on my news feed (or whatever it's called now) about 10 times last night. The ones who copied and pasted it didn't even bother to correct the grammatical errors in the message before sloppily copying it to their own profiles. I am proud to say that I have never participated in the weird world of spam re-posts and have not yet died, had my heart broken 10 times in one next year, or been haunted by any spirits. Keep blogging!
ReplyDeleteIf I can say anything, it's definately that you're REALLY pissed off! :D Chill out a bit. Why should you waste your time and energy to get angry at some attention seeking teen?
ReplyDeleteThere will always be fakery and liars in a free public sphere, alas.
ReplyDeleteI can totally agree with you, spam statuses are one of the reason why I hate Facebook. With constant chain statuses, it makes you wonder if people are actually reading what they post or rather they're just part of the group and they post because they deem it as "cool" or whatever.
ReplyDelete