The Surgery

What is it, I wonder, that drives ordinarily intelligent, sane, clear-thinking people to do stupid things?

If you’re wondering what’s inspired me to blog about dumb people, press CTRL-F4 on your keyboard now and something amazing will happen.

Did you press CTRL-F4? No? Good.

If you did, then I’m sorry to say that this post’s about you.

On Tech Talk Radio I have often lamented the demise of our international email system. Spam statistics vary widely from country to country, but most reputable organisations agree that the voume of email traffic which constitutes spam is around 90% or higher. This is a huge amount and is increasing every year. My honest belief is that email, as a communication medium, will soon outlive its usefulness. We have already seen this happen with newsgroups, most of which are completely unusable owing to the number of “robots” that generate unsolicited traffic. Email is headed the same way.

But something will replace email. It will be a system that’s global, free, platform independent and an open-standard that’s universally agreed upon. Proprietary messaging systems like Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Facebook’s messaging and “wall”-style applications are the sort of thing I’m thinking of. For now, these are all proprietary systems so unless their manufacturers create an open interface to other systems, they won’t be the Holy Grail of internet messaging. But they’re on the way. I think this is where it’s headed.

Now what makes me angry about clear-thinking people who behave all stoopid-like is the proliferation of “spam” messages in these new communication systems. I refer specifically to the Facebook “wall” application, and the 3rd-party FunWall and Super Wall applications. These are plug-ins which let you share media-rich content with other Facebook users.

(RockYou, the company behind the Super Wall application, believes its free plug-in is now worth in excess of US$10 million: if interested, read Mashable’s story on the Super Wall.)

Sure, it’s funny to send people videos of New Year’s Eve fireworks, photos of suspicious-looking Santas with captions like “rub nose for good luck”, and Channel 10 newsreader Mal Walden trying to pronounce the word “phenomenon”. That’s what these messaging systems are for.

But every day without fail, people forward stuff like this:

“OMG, hit FORWARD if you want to see who looks at your profile the most. All you have to do is Forward the message and hit Ctrl F4.”

“click forward see what happens…”

“This is amazing, it really works, forward to everyone and press ALT-F4 and see what happens next, you will be amazed.”

Arrrgghhhh!!! We are only just getting people out of the habit of forwarding emails that say “forward this to everyone in your address book”. What do people think is going to happen if they click “forward”. OH MY GOD the message actually forwarded to other people! And what was the effect of this? Only to congest the messaging system and perpetuate meaningless internet traffic.

“I see dumb people…

…they’re everywhere…

…they walk around like everyone else…

…and they don’t even know that they’re dumb…”

Am I expecting too much of my fellow Facebook users? Maybe. Am I taking the whole thing too seriously? Probably. But new messaging systems won’t stand a chance if people don’t use their brains and stop forwarding garbage.

What’s more, this garbage isn’t being propagated by “bots”, machines and spam applications. Actual real-live human beings are perpetuating the problem in this case.

If you received a text message on your mobile which said “forward this to everyone in your address book and turn your phone off and then on again, and something amazing will happen”, would you be stupid enough to do this?

Social networking sites are no different. Think before you click. Please.