Good Morning Uncle: meet Rajat Sharma (name changed). His nephews and nieces (they live in a joint family) wake up every morning to a photograph of flowers, WASP babies, puppies, kittens sent on WhatsApp. “We live in the same house. Nothing I say will convince him to stop and you can’t quarrel with a family elder. Half the Wi-Fi quota is used up downloading the same video or picture each morning that he’s forwarded to the whole family” says political science teacher Manika Sharma.
Rakhi Agrawal’s friends have mostly ended blocking her email address. “She would send one nonsensical e-mail every day. Either it said that some major hospital has issued a warning about AIIDS infected cola bottles, or plastic content in Kurkure, or how reversing your pin number at an ATM would alert bank authorities that you are being held hostage,” said Atula Gupta of her BFF.
“It takes one minute exactly to Google a key phrase from the content, and check it on hoax-busters or urban legends or Snopes (all three are websites which host services to verify if something is a hoax). But, No! She won’t do that. She will simply dump e-garbage because people are too polite to tell her off. She’s my oldest friend and I have told her to stop but she won’t. So I simply block all mail from her. If there’s an emergency, I assume she will call,” said Gupta.
Sangeeta Kumar is an electronic Good Samaritan on Facebook. That, however, is not the issue. The problem is she wants all her FB friends to follow suit. “Her brain seems to have gone into hibernation. She just doesn’t see that these messages are obviously faked. Why would Bill Gates or Steve Jobs donate a dollar per share? Why would Apple give away the latest iPhone to each person who shares XYZ message? Honestly! And why tag your friends every time you find a picture of a sick baby stuck with tubes and an oxygen mask?” asks her exasperated friend.
SP Dutta diligently forwards mail and WhatsApp to friends on issues of the day. About fake Rs 2000 notes bleeding colour, about a well-known journalist’s pro-Pak leanings, about demonetisation, and GST. “The problem is these ‘articles’ quote some real or nonexistent senior government officer such as a former finance secretary, or refer to some imaginary article by a respected columnist and so on, and are full of very official sounding statistics. Interspersed between some real stuff that the person may have said or written is some propaganda. These are examples of cleverly using quotes or information out of context. But the person forwarding them has never actually verified the content personally”, explains Aditya Subramanian, who works in a Chennai based think tank.
Subramanian and Dutta have a common friend and have never actually met each other. “Since he was sending loads of these mails, one time I replied and told him that what he had forwarded was incorrect because I deal with the subject. After that, everything he sends of this nature contains a rider at the end – ‘forwarded as received’- as if that is the perfect defence for spreading misinformation.”And this is now a thing – adding “forwarded as received” at the end of all forwarded content.
Harish Patel’s office colleagues delete everything he sends on the office WhatsApp group without opening the file. “A couple of months back, he sent an obituary message about a former colleague and no one saw it. Why? Because the guy sends at least 10 videos daily. Videos on women being flogged in UAE, funny videos, sad videos about children being beaten by policemen, lifehack videos, how to jump start a car… you name it, he has a video for it,” rues another group member. “He doesn’t seem to get that an office group is an extension of the office and appropriate behaviour needs to be observed. “No one wants this roller coaster of emotion at work looking at tortured animals, weeping women, and then slapstick comedy. Gentle hints have not done the trick. No one wants to get into a scrap with a person you have to meet daily at the office. These days WhatsApp actually lets you see who actually viewed what you sent. Though he knows almost everyone is deleting everything he sends without opening it, the emotional Atyachaar has been never-ending.”
No God or Guru is spared when 70-year-old Rajender Madan goes online. Purporting to come from Allah to Jesus to the 33 crore-odd pantheon of Hindu deities there’s a blessing and a threat, floating around on Social Media for each one. He forwards everything,” says son Surender, who tells angry friends and neighbours that his dad is senile. The messages usually comprise a photograph of said God or a Guru or sect leader and a message. “The basic requirement is that you MUST, IMMEDIATELY, forward the message to a stated number of people (usually 19 or 10 or the like) and then wait for the promised good fortune. Some messages carry small anecdotes about people who got rich instantly or won lotteries. And some include a scary story about the person who didn’t forward it and the calamities that befell him subsequently”, says Madan Junior who is seriously “not amused”.
All the types of people mentioned above have actually contributed in their own way to spawning new content. People have started using status messages like “No forwards please”, “No videos please”, “running low on data”, “my children use this phone” (meaning nothing adult to be sent), “no pics or vids”.
So much so, that many comedians have included in their repertoire an item where they parody a person’s online or social media behaviour by depicting how that would appear in real life. Says Akanksha Bali, ‘In Mumbai, I saw a stand-up act where the comedian did a walk in the park and told total strangers extremely detailed stories about his personal life (all fake of course), and insisted that passersby see videos he found interesting. The best was when he went to a soft-drinks kiosk and told the story about the cola containing the AIDS virus. Everyone laughed.