I'm gonna be rich! Thanks, Bill!!!

I'm forwarding a forwarded message...read on, it it works you may get $$ from Microsoft. Certainly Bill has enough to share-maybe today we'll be blessed financially!

I am forwarding this because the person who sent it to me is a good friend and does not send me junk. Microsoft is the largest Internet company and in an effort make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft is running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $5.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $3.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $1.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my e-mail and within days, I received a check for $800.00.

I get this email, or a version of it, every few months - sometimes from friends who should know better and sometimes from spammers who could care less. I usually just quickly delete it, but the last time it popped up in my inbox from a friend, I wondered why she would pass it on, so I emailed her back asking if she thought it was real. She IM'd me back, saying that she thought so, but either way, it couldn't hurt.

I reread the message again in disbelief. Now, I can be gullible at times too, especially when I first came to the United States because of the cultural differences, but this one is soooo hard to swallow. After all, there just is no way that this could work - it is technically impossible. Emails just don't work that way.

Even if it were possible, think about how awful that would be. I know in the Facebook age, we often give up a bunch of our privacy without thinking about it, but if companies had the ability to find out who we sent emails to and so on, it'd be even scarier. It's bad enough that Google scans our gMails so it can insert relevant ads. (Of course, the US government can do more - it reads our emails and faxes and texts and Tweets - and that too is scary, but a point for a different time.)

Of course, it's easy enough to prove that the Microsoft email is a hoax - you can Google it or go to Snopes.com to find out. It made me think of Cantril's account of the War of the Worlds broadcast, where he analyzed why so many people couldn't figure out that the broadcast wasn't real (The Invasion of Mars). He found that some people just don't have a 'critical faculty' (13). These people either were religious or undereducated (and have a context into which the invasion fit), weren't sure of how to interpret the supposed invasion, or didn't have any existing standards of judgment to interpret the broadcast.

In the case of the email, my friend who passed it on in the expectation of getting money (or at least doing no harm) used technology without understanding it at all. She knew how to Tweet before anybody else I knew, but couldn't explain how it worked even if she were paid to come up with an answer and could use the internet for research! She just doesn't have a critical faculty and really has no existing standards of judgment as to how to interpret the email, much less any other technology.

In a way, she reminds me of some of my religious friends who use Pascal's Wager to justify their belief in their religion. The Wager is - if you believe in God and he exists, you can go to heaven. If you don't believe in God and he exists, you go to Hell. And if you believe in God but he doesn't exist, no harm done. In much the same way, when I pressed her on it, my friend just gave me Pascal's Wager for the email, not thinking about the harm that comes to the internet's speed when millions of technologically undereducated people clog up the net with emails like this one.

Come to think of it, given her lack of critical faculties, I should have told her that Google has a new marketing scheme meant to cripple Microsoft - it counts how many of those Microsoft emails you don't forward and pays you $2000 for every one you delete instead. Somehow, I think Orson Welles would approve. :)