The life cycle of an urban legend.


I'm sure that someone has done research on this, but I haven't come across it yet, and I have to admit that I haven't devoted much effort to actively finding it. Be that as it may, urban legends seem to have a life of their own, surfacing and resurfacing at unexpected times. Perhaps they're in some way connected to cycles of internet use - new users, just now discovering the wonders of e-mail, pass on everything remotely funny (or seemingly important) that comes their way, and their mailing lists inevitably contain the addresses of people who long ago stopped passing on these same stories. Perhaps they're connected to sunspots, or the el Ninio cycle.

I'm on the mailing list of two or three sources of stories of this sort - stories that are too good not to be true, even if they can rather readily be proven to be false. Even after I take the approximately ten minutes required in order to find convincing refutations, and then mail the URLs of those refutations back to my sources, I continue to receive them. After all, it may take only ten minutes to actually verify the authenticity of these stories (or lack of it), but clicking on Forward and then on Send only takes a few seconds.



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