Social helpfulness

A while ago one of my friends posted this on her Facebook status:

If you can’t read the caption, it claims that Facebook (or its representatives, management, board, employees or something) will “give $1.20 Dollars [sic] on each share!” to the girl in the picture, who is allegedly suffering from cancer.

Despite having been raised in Brooklyn and Connecticut, having worked for several global corporations and having been a social worker in a couple of prisons, my friend has a remarkably naïve grasp of what might or might not be a hoax.

Since she’s created a FB presence, she has reduced the number of emails urging recipients to forward to seven new recipients within 16 minutes of receipt and be prepared for a major wish to be fulfilled, or promising that Bill Gates is using this email to test the effectiveness of [Hotmail, Windows, the whole flipping Internet], so he’s going to give $5 to everyone who forwards it to their entire addressbook.

(I did have to quit sending her the Snopes debunking stories I pulled up because she got sniffy about me being such a party pooper. Well, fair enough—but why you’d expect me not to look that stuff up, I don’t know. Would a Jack Russell Terrier pass up an opportunity to bounce repeatedly off your cocktail party guests’ $3500 Nino Cerruti trouser legs?)

What I don’t get is the total dismemberment of any form of critical thinking from people who post these things. Leaving aside the issue of how a Higher Power keeps track of the number of people to whom you forward an email (or the question of what constitutes “time of receipt”—is it when it appeared in your queue? When you saw it in your queue but didn’t open it because you know what “This really works!!!!” in the title bar means? When you actually opened it? Or when you finished reading 15 screenloads of multi-font text attesting to the veracity of the offer?), why does no one seem to stop to inquire about the logistics of receiving $5 with nothing to go on but an email address?

I’ve learned my lesson with this particular friend—I keep my Snopes to myself and let her feel good that she’s just helped a cancer patient winkle $1.20 out of Internet zillionaires. (But what’s up with $1.20, anyhow? Why not $1.50? Why not $5.00—is Zuckerberg cheaper than Gates?) I myself always clap for Tinkerbelle, so who am I to police the Marche des naïfs?

BTW—if you were in any doubt, this FB thing is a total hoax.