Best gift you can give this Holiday Season

The true seductiveness of the idiocy that has infested electronic communication came home to me in a disturbingly personal way just the other day. My sister - a Cambridge-educated chemical engineer and all-round smart cookie - sent me an email that contained a piece of writing labeled as "Maya Angelou's Best Poem Ever." It was a list of things "every woman should have" - including a black lace bra and a cordless drill (check) -  and "every woman should know" - such as that her childhood may not have been perfect but it's over (yeah, thanks). My sister said it made her think of me, which was, of course, very sweet. I was tempted to ignore the fact that it wasn't a very good poem at all, and that it didn't seem to read like Maya Angelou, whose work I know imperfectly, and instead just accept the sentiment. But the miserable Web-policing pedant in me was definitively snapped into action by a line in this version that didn't make grammatical sense ("Every woman should have... how to fall in love without losing herself.").

Sure enough, the most cursory Google search turned up a blog on the Huffington Post by a rather bemused and annoyed writer called Pamela Redmond Satran, who did actually write the original poem, back in 1997 in Glamour magazine. Satran doesn't comment on the fact that poem, which has been forwarded a gazillion times, mostly by well-meaning women to other women, has become completely corrupted. Neither does she blame Maya Angelou, who can hardly be held responsible, just as Kurt Vonnegut can't be held responsible for being credited with that excellent "sunscreen" speech, or John Cleese for the "Letter to the American People" that threatens a reabsorption of the US into England.

What's really depressing is that Satran refers to people who bother to check the true provenance of this piece of work as "diligent souls" - as if it were out of the general realm of human consideration for our fellow humans to bother to figure out if something we were sending to a friend or family member was not a spurious piece of plagiarized crap.

As you may have gathered, I have strong feelings about this. Suppose a friend called you on the telephone, or wrote you an actual piece of physical mail (remember those?) that urged you to read something amazing they'd enjoyed themselves, or that would give you cash for forwarding an email, or urged you (gawd help us, will it never die?) to defend the National Endowment for the Arts, or to intervene in the oppression of Afghan women (Hello? We invaded 8 years ago.). You'd be pretty annoyed to find out the poem was misattributed (and corrupted), the money was a fiction, the petition long since delivered, and the women of Afghanistan facing the new problems brought by living in a country under US invasion. Wouldn't you? I'm not making this up. So why is it okay if it's "just" an email?

Okay, that was a rhetorical question, obviously. I've urged you in this blog before to be super-vigilant when it comes to vetting the information you find online. Sadly, the same level of caution applies even to emails from trusted sources. Here are a few tips for spotting the specious:

• If it sounds too good to be true, don't be dazzled by the "wonder of the Internet" aspect. Bill Gates is not going to give you money for sending emails, and he can't track the ones you do send.
• If there's no date on a forwarded mail, it's automatically suspect. It might have been completely legitimate and relevant - 12 years ago.
• If there's a grammatical or factual error in the email, that should raise your suspicions. Even if it started life as a genuine missive, it's probably been added to or edited by someone with minimal brain power.
• Obviously, anything that urges you to "send this to X friends" in order to get good luck, or get untold riches, or avoid being mown down by AK47-wielding terrorists, is offensive and quite likely illegal too. 

So, here's what I want for Christmas, and it's a gift that all of you can give to everyone you love, admire, or are simply related to. Before you send me ANYTHING you didn't actually write yourself, take the 30 friggin' seconds it will require to check that it's timely, accurate, and correctly attributed. Is that so much to ask?

In any case, I wish you all a happy and factually accurate New Year. May 2010 bring useful and appropriate communications to all of you. When you read this, I'll be in Varanasi, India, touting copies of DC Velocity by the side of the Ganges during a well-earned vacation. Catch you later.